OpenWatch History

[Karl]

Has anybody heard of the cell phone app OpenWatch?

It used to run at https://www.openwatch.net/ and let anybody upload video
recordings live and secretly from their mobile phone, and publicized them.
Page archives show it came out of Boston and San Francisco.

Since it was focused on monitoring of authorities, it makes sense it would
have struggled as this could spread power in ways that are harder for
authorities to control, making their various tasks more difficult, and
possibly pitting the urgent engine of control of crime against the project.

I don't see any evidence of OpenWatch having planned to discontinue, or
notifying the public they were.  There is nobody on their irc channel, and
their twitter account has been deleted.  Their github has an open
improvement branch that is unmerged, and no following developer activity
since.

Nowadays there are services like https://siasky.net/ and https://bico.media/
and some others, that can connect with reliable decentralized storage
backed by the strength of a blockchain.  As blockchains rise it is becoming
easier to support apps like OpenWatch in ways that won't disappear very
readily.  bico.media may go down some day, but the data uploaded is still
stored permanently on the blockchain behind it, and the app that stores
that data could be stored on that blockchain as well.

I was wondering if anybody knew the story of what happened to OpenWatch, or
if anybody was interested in resurrecting OpenWatch's work with a little
motion towards migrating onto a blockchain.
https://github.com/OpenWatch/OpenWatch-Android

Maybe planning for disruption a little could make project development ideas
that last longer.  Like clear instructions for newcomers to rebuild after
developers disperse.
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