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.

I looked into this for Rose City Copwatch who wanted a brandable mobile device copwatching application that could be used as part of an outreach campaign. The nice thing about Qik is that it does almost exactly all of what we want for securely offloading video to a remote server and their development team has versions for ALL major mobile devices. The only downsides that I came across is that the application is close source, meaning the only way to get features added is by requesting them and hoping they get added. Also the app can not be branded, we can not control which backend server we use, we can not make sure that it gets sent across a secure connection, nor can we seamlessly integrate it into other tools that we would like to package. The features used by Qik are the same that were seen at a March 19 anti war demo with live video streaming from a phones to justin.tv.

Another Hare chimes in, " I would not worry about integrating it with the rest of software since it will be pretty much its own self-contained thing between the sentinels and guides. We would not want anything automatically uploaded or read in any way I can forsee without the guide selecting it and even that will be pretty rare I imagine. It really is to allow a second set of eyes and give the guide a greater feel for the chaos or lack thereof going on with the scout to better navigate them and keep them safe. I can not imagine we would need much customization and in fact can't think of anything we might want at the moment (and doubt we would be able get them to do it unless it was a killer usability function) but like I said I don't think thats much of an issue. It not being secured is a slightly bigger drawback but one that is not a deal breaker. If sentinel and guide know that I expect it will be alright and they will take precautions that won't destroy the main usability for the program. The fact it exists and is available on all platforms are two huge pluses that should not be underestimated. Since we have a very limited number of programmers (1 by my count)and the video up-link is just one aspect of the new scouting procedure (and not the most important one) and we have so much other software programming to do I think this is a very good option for us."

Great points here. The pros outweigh the cons here. Actual field tests will need to be done.

Copwatch was hoping to build a campaign around the branding of an application like this, they were hoping for it to be a tool for cop watch but primarily something that could be part of a set of propaganda that would get people thinking about cop watching and challenging the police state. As such it does not meet their requirements. In talking with them we came up with a bunch of other ideas for different applications that can be really useful to us like the "deadman's switch" and "proximity alerts for actions" (which I think already exists to some extent with different tools).