After two, days #CharterNY Internet service is back. Communication wasn't great, but when you got through to people yesterday they offered a month's free service. I think most people would have preferred the service.
The call center is somewhere far away, and that makes it hard to know what's happening and even how wide-spread the outage is. I think there are two lessons to be learned:
NYC is turning to crowdsourcing to augment its 311 telephone reporting system. Visit NYC Severe Weather to report a problem or see what others have reported.
The site is powered by Ushahidi. In their own words,
We are a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.
This interactive map makes a great point: crowdsourcing contest winners are often found in contests. Is it that people in a certain community just like entering the contests? Or is it that to win you have to learn how to compete (scarcely a new idea in any competition).
Check out the map ... and your community. Maybe it's time to get the ball rolling.
