Live reporting from Madrid Acampadasol protest

Photo By Gail Orenstein/The Web 3.0 Lab/Clima/Madrid

Demonstrating the Clima.me tool for measuring twitter density to the communication tent in acampadasol Madrid. We showed the team how to use high and low density comparisons to guage the scale and activity of protests. These guys have a very international and well educated team of techies right at the heart of the protest. Not surprisingly it was the best place to find competent English speakers.

The communication center is a core part of this protest, but do not think of the Spanish camping protest as a Social Media or Facebook protest. People are very clear that the reacl community building is happening on the ground. Rather social media and computers provide tools for this process. People expressed inspiration from things learned from the Arab Spring, and appreciation for how the Internet has helped organize the protest: but the real event is happening between people or within small groups that gather to discuss issues late in to the Spanish night.

Photo By Gail Orenstein/The Web 3.0 Lab/Clima/Madrid

But just as it is possible to over state the importance of Web 3.0 Internet and mobile technology in the protests in Madrid, it is also just as wrong to understate them. Everything that is happening here is being captured, posted, and shared via a vast army of mobile machines to geo-social networks. The protest in Madrid has to embrace a Open Collaborative media environment carried around by the tens of thousands of ordinary people who pass through the protest every day.

Photo By Gail Orenstein/The Web 3.0 Lab/Clima/Madrid

Social media impacts the acampadasol in a rich matrix of complex relationships. Events take place that are pre-arranged online. During the event people put away their mobile phones and start talking or acting live. People coming to see what is going on will video tap or photograph the event. Many of these people post this video and photos to social media or blogs. From there people regionally and globally have access to the events. Many people around the world are encourage. Some people even fly down to Madrid to see what is happening. This analysis then comes back in to many of the participants in the continual feedback loop with is at the heart of Web 3.0.

In keeping with the recent protests in the Arab world we are seeing extremely high tweeting coming from the site of an evolving protest in Puerta del Sol Madrid.

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Extremely high and concentrated tweets coming from Madrid potest

In keeping with the recent protests in the Arab world we are seeing extremely high tweeting coming from the site of an evolving protest in Puerta del Sol Madrid.

Or use our Facebook App.

Using the High Density check, seen by clicking the High Density button, we see that the very high tweeting in central Madrid is very concentrated in the area around Puerta del Sol. A high density score of 97 is on the same scale of the Royal Wedding site or the WTC site when Bin Laden was killed.

Students are demanding jobs and economic justice. Perhaps most interesting is the demand that banks which have been bailed out after the 2008 crash be made to pay more of the consequences as opposed to austerity.

A new generation is being made to pay the price for the mistake of wealthy people a generation or two older than them. Governments present this as necessary common sense, but protest movements are demanding a rethink of this approach.

This could start a movement against the growing tendency of right wing parties in Europe to put in place cuts on education, social care, and government spending to cover the cost of bank bailouts and the resulting recession.

It will be interesting to see how generation politics plays out in Spain and then the rest of the EU. And it will be interesting to see what impact social media can play. This level of concentrated tweeting is not yet possible in the Arab world. The protesters in Madrid have more access to mobile communication than the students in Tahrir, but will that make any difference.

Update: 19th of May in the early morning and we are still seeing very high and concentrated tweeting from the demo. We are continuing to see the highest local concentration of tweets coming from the protest area using the high density tweeting tool.

This level of concentrated high tweeting is far greater than anything seen in the protests in Cairo and Bahrain. So the Spanish have the technological edge over protests in the Arab World. This will make for an interesting test of the true level of effectiveness that technology is playing in the revolts. Will the Madrid protests be able to change the way the financial crisis is being paid? Will they be able to reverse the trickle down of banking bailouts through the society and the rise of even more free market policies in Europe?

On the 20th of May we continue to see high levels of levels of concentrated tweeting from the protest site.

Update June 3rd: After watching this space for a few weeks we ventured down to Madrid to take a look at the tend city and meet some of the bloggers and tweeps there. What we saw was pretty interesting. During the few weeks of the protest a pretty well developed and organized little community has emerged, with community kitchen, library, meditation center and food store.

It is interesting to see how a real community, with different areas of work and responsibility has emerged out of what was only a computer network a month ago.

June 9, the continued high and concentrated tweeting from this area compared to the rest of Madrid is really amazing. This may be one of the largest web supported event in recent history.