One of my on-going interests are the different ways citizens are reaching out to government to get small, day-to-day things done. A part of that is social media, but these types of interactions aren’t knew. So I was happy to see our good friends @Patcowatchers get some press in the Courier-Post. Here are a few excerpts from that piece:
Bleary-eyed commuters who fiddle with their smart phones each morning while waiting for the next PATCO Hi-Speedline train may be doing more than just killing time.
Some are digital watchdogs who get results.
…
“Back when PATCO Watchers began, the @RidePATCO handle was virtually abandoned,” Joseph Russell, a Collingswood web developer, said in an email.
“It rarely had useful information. PATCO Watchers really served as the pulse of the system, since we weren’t getting information about delays or system problems from the line itself.”
The 30-year-old Russell runs the website Next PATCO (nextpat.co) — a sleek, digital version of PATCO’s train schedules. The project was loosely based on the concept behind nextsepta.com.
…
For Danley, PATCO’s digital community shows that while democracy is often thought of as being about votes, it often comes down to volunteers.
“That’s what you see playing out in crowd sourcing,” the professor said. “It’s a small number of people who are willing to volunteer to get the Next PATCO site running and keep PATCO Watchers going.
“It’s a reframing of how we think about democracy.”
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