The Rail Tap app: its democracy, philosophy, and online constitution

The campaign “See It. Say It. Sorted.” has successfully combined government and security agency top-down surveillance with citizen-generated bottom-up and peer-to-peer sousveillance. It has used face-to-face interaction and SMS communication to increase customer service, safety, and therefore inevitably security, on the UK rail network over the past couple of years.

It has been a forward-looking and progressive initiative of the UK Department for Transport, with a number of proactive stakeholders such as the British Transport Police (BTP), aimed at encouraging users to communicate feelings of weird, which in their timely communication might help avoid both catastrophic terrorist events as well as hurt to vulnerable passengers and passers-by.

Sousveillance has a long and noble history. Some background now follows.

The below screenshot is taken from Dr Steve Mann’s many writings on the original aims and philosophies of the latter. His daughter, at the age of six, sketched it and observed it thus:

In the light of everything that Edward Snowden revealed, and at the margin of the rights and wrongs of what he did to engineer its revealing, it’s clear that sousveillance has many virtues as a tool of oversight and protection re Peter Levine’s concept of Good Democracy: inclusiveness and efficiency, both.

But it is the increasing position of my studies on the matter, since 2017 when my LJMU Criminal Justice MA dissertation on 21st century democracy and surveillance, and the community duty of care which in my view we all now need to permanently show each other, that sousveillance is not only useful to control government: it should be considered as a positive tool to inform governance.

And when I say governance, I mean governors and governed in equal measure. We all, whether civil servants responsible for the day-to-day operational integrity of a government department, or companies applying for government contracts, or citizens choosing whether to vote in elections, or children just crossing the road sanely and joyfully, or adults being kind to each other, or even to anyone’s children … or everyone seeing young people as our present not our future … or a sheer and simple culture of widespread humanity and gentleness … all of us but all of us – in Levine’s Good Democracy I allude to – are duty-bound to support and show continuing compassion for another’s safety, comfort and sense of security.

The Rail Tap app, designed by myself and configured and further imagineered by Chris Morland of CitrusSuite Ltd and Thomas Gorry of Quanovo Ltd, alongside its associated tagline of “See It. Tap It. Sorted.”, is engineered around such theologies of societal responsibility and democratic stakeholdership.

Governance, good governance, means good citizens and good government acting together: not always agreeing on what to do; rather, agreeing – as Levine – that political activity and process is a purposive dynamic, aimed at solving problems not creating them.

Better Biz Me’s proposed app is not a piece of bald software: it is a fully blown technology – to use Foucault’s definition of the word – in order that the very threads of our beautiful Western liberal democracy be bound thicker and much less tenuously than to date.

It is part of a much bigger project: one that aims to capture, evidence and validate a collaborative human & machine intuition, so that zemiological pressures – not necessarily illegal acts, but societally harmful ones for sure, currently outwith legal jurisdiction – may be reduced and even permanently deactivated in devolved and people-empowering ways.

Simply put: we wish to make it possible for citizens, politicians, children, lovers, and doers to believe that whistleblowing is cool; that hiding the truth is bad; and that mafias need to be eliminated via the actions of all fab and perceptive human beings.

And in particular, by the governance and sacred community-based duty-of-care of everyone, absolutely everyone, who wants to be part of a creating, shaping, and implementing efficiently of a future Good Democracy of better.

The Rail Tap app is NOT just another app. It is a theology of future Good Governance, Good Government, and – ultimately – Good Democracy.

It is that carefully conceptualised.

And it deserves high-powered investment, as soon as we can deliver it.

Because.

We.

Are.

Good.

Democracy.

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