S thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan during the Republican National Convention last week, some were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device connected to a distributed information service that provided detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes, street closures and police actions.
The communications device was a common cellphone. The information service, a collection of open-source, Web-based programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone's closet, is called TXTMob.
TXTMob works like an Internet mailing list for cellphones and is the brainchild of a young man who goes by the pseudonym John Henry. He is a member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a group of artists, programmers and others who say their mission is to develop technologies that serve the social and human need for self-determination. (The group was behind iSee, a Web site that has maps of surveillance cameras in Lower Manhattan and calculates routes for those seeking to avoid them.)
He conceals his identity as part of an agreement with other members of the group and out of concern that he might become the target of an effort to force disclosure of TXTMob members' phone numbers, which are kept in a database he maintains.
TXTMob allows people to quickly and easily send text messages from one cellphone to a group of other cellphones. This in itself is nothing new: other mobile networking systems like dodgeball.com and bedno.com already exist.
To sign up for TXTMob, users enter their cellphone numbers into the TXTMob Web site, www.txtmob .com. To thwart spammers, the system uses opt-in registration: a machine-generated authorization code is sent to each registered number and must be re-entered into the Web site to activate the registration. TXTMob is designed to carefully maintain members' privacy, not surprising given why most are using TXTMob.
The software was not intended for everyday mobile socializing. It was created as a tool political activists could use to organize their work, from staff meetings to street protests. Most of the people using it are on the left: of the 142 public groups listed on the TXTMob site, the largest are dedicated to protesting the Bush administration, the Republican Party or the state of the world in general.
When a preliminary version of TXTMob was tested at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in July, about 200 people used it to organize protesters into spontaneous rallies, to warn them about the location of police crackdowns and to direct volunteer medics where they were needed, all in real time.
Based on user feedback afterward, some changes were made - primarily beefing up the system to handle a heavier volume of messages - to increase its usefulness for what were expected to be much larger protests during the Republican National Convention.
TXTMob had its first major New York workout on the evening of Aug. 27, during the Critical Mass, a loosely organized bicycle ride through Manhattan by anti-Republican protesters. From the start of the ride, participants in a TXTMob group called comms_dispatch sent a slew of messages alerting one another to route changes and warning of traffic snarls. As the ride neared its end, comms_dispatch buzzed with reports of arrests from Second Avenue to 10th Avenue, and around St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.
On Aug. 29, two days after she took part in the Critical Mass ride, a woman from San Francisco who identified herself only as Josie sat outside St. Mark's and read text messages on her cellphone. Describing herself as a "voracious" TXTMob reader, she credited the service with helping keep her safe during the ride.
"It told me where the cops were and where I could rest," she said as she thumbed through the TXTMob messages from that day's United for Peace and Justice march that were arriving on her cellphone at the rate of about one per minute. "It brought me here."
