Hi friends!
As some of you know, I recently started working with De Novo Group, a
non-profit composed principally of a bunch of CS researchers out of UC
Berkeley.
One of our core projects is called Rangzen. It's a mobile messaging app
that works over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct to forward messages anonymously
over time. It uses mutual contacts to prioritize messages based on trust
(this is done using crypto to secure the actual identifying information of
mutual contacts).
It's early beta right now and very experimental. The current version of the
app shows you where you've been, and drops pins when it discovers others
using the app nearby. The GPS tracking would be disabled in the final
version of the app - for now, we're using it to study how mobility patterns
affect the exchange of information within the mobile mesh network it
creates.
*Want to help? Download the app here:
http://www.rangzen.io
<http://www.rangzen.io>*
We're batting around ideas for a possible game as a large beta test, like a
scavenger hunt of some sort. The next feature to be rolled out in the
coming week or two is the ability to share and read messages. If you have
any ideas for an adversarial game that could replicate a censorship
scenario, I'd love to hear them!
Happy to answer any questions, receive and forward any feedback!
Jenny
http://jennyryan.net
http://thepyre.org
http://thevirtualcampfire.org
http://technomadic.tumblr.com
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"Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories."
-Laurie Anderson
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
-Hannah Arendt
"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create."
-Stéphane Mallarmé
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