This is a guest blog post by Jonathan Baldwin showcasing an application that he wrote using Tropo called The People’s Skype. It’s phone-powered, distributed voice and voting system for the #Occupy Movement!

As the Occupy Wall Street movement grew in popularity at Zucotti Park in NYC, and other occupations in North America, Jonathan noticed a problem with the primary method occupiers used to communicate in large groups. The People’s Mic, a method of augmenting a speaker’s voice by having listeners repeat their words, didn’t scale up when huge numbers of people attended rallies and General Assemblies. In these cases, the audience had to repeat the speaker’s words multiple times before it reached the far edges of the crowd – it became gradually harder to understand the original speaker’s words the further you are from the inner circle.

Motivated by this, Jonathan was determined to find a simple solution that anyone had access to. There were similar talks amongst the OWS Tech groups about ways to solve this problem, but those ideas never panned out (they included handheld radios and VoIP systems). He also wanted to address another problem of General Assemblies – hand signals are used to communicate consensus with ideas. In a massive crowd, it is hard to express opinion through visual cues, so he wanted to integrate this problem into a one package solution.

Thus, Jonathan created a one-way conference call solution, called The People’s Skype, through the Tropo phone system. Using PHP, MongoDB and Tropo, he created a simple interface that anyone with any kind of phone, no matter how old, could dial in and create a unique mic with. Upon mic creation, the speaker is given a 4 digit PIN to distribute to others that want to listen in (by holding up a sign or word of mouth). Anyone can call to the original number and listen by typing the unique PIN. Only the speaker is able to talk, while listeners can vote on issues by using their dial-tone, phone keypad (1 for Yes, 0 for No, etc.).

As the Tropo conference call system is able to support hundreds of people, audience members can either turn their speakerphones on to create a distributed PA system, or listen directly on their handsets. Due to the applications flexibility, it could potentially help fragmented occupiers communicate across police barriers or kettled areas.

Try out The People’s Skype yourself: http://www.peoplesskype.org! You can also download a copy of Jonathan’s source code from Github.

©2011 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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Related posts:

  1. How to call your Tropo.com apps *directly* from Skype
  2. Connecting a Skype user name to a Tropo application
  3. How-To: Distinguish PSTN, Skype, iNum, and SIP in your Tropo applications

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