Join the March Hare Solution - a free, public, map-based, crowd-sourced, broadcasting application that enables you to get and share information about what is happening on the streets. Receive verified reports filtered to your interests by location and category via text message, android or iphone application, from your cel.ly cell, or via the web. Call in reports to a operator at 1 (773) 382-8798, text them to 1 (216) 586-6431, or email them to reports at march-hare.org.

Random Hacks of Kindnesswas attended in Portland, OR by a few of us and was a good experience. We made progress on the Dead man's Switch mobile application. We hope to be able to integrate this work in with the openwatch fork thet is under active development.

The March-Hare Communications Collective was at the 2011 SF Anarchist Bookfair tabling along side a few folk from Hackbloc who were presenting issue #12 of Hack this Zine.

Apologies to all those promised an alpha release of OD today. It has been a day of testing and bug fixes and the project is still not ready for alpha. The code for the project is available on github, and the log of project issues / feature requests is available here. Alpha will likely be ready in the next couple of weeks.

I gave a pre-alpha presentation on the Operator Distribution at the SF Anarchist Bookfair and at Evergreen earlier this week. At both locations people were supportive, and had good feedback and criticism. Check out a recording of the presentation here.

A few of us were interviewed for the February 2011 Episode. The excerpt including only our interview is here and the full program here.

For many people, it's a strange notion that an online service provider would ever care about the privacy or security of their users. Taking a quick look at the top 10 most frequently visited sites in the world[1], nine of them have based their business model off the accumulation of private information for the purposes of targeted advertising or sale. The exception here is Wikipedia and this speaks to the way the ethics and goals of an online service provider play into how they treat their user's privacy.

A slow but interesting week for march-hare development. There was some planning for presentations at the upcoming SF Anarchist Bookfair, and the Bayarea hackmeet, a meeting with Jenka Sodenberg of the IMEMC project, and some random testing of Ushahidi_Android and the Ushahidi fullscreen map plugin.

The Operator Distribution is a tool that we are working on to help deploy and create secure and autonomous environments and networks to communities organizing in hostile environments.

When we say secure we mean that use of each environment and network is resistant to eavesdropping (via openvpn), and resistant to loss of data that could compromise the security of the group and allow for infiltration (via full disk encryption with luks).

The Operator Distribution: explanation and humble begining from March-Hare Collective on Vimeo.

Qik is a tool for collecting and broadcasting, publishing, and archiving video, with a focus on mobile devices as a source, with support for viewer access control, community interaction, and republishing. The March-Hare Communications Collective is looking into evaluating it for our needs.