Little Brother is a camera application that hides the material and moves it away from the phone. This way it protects the person shooting the pictures and videos, as well as protecting the material itself. In a world where soon everyone will have a smart phone in their pocket, our application makes recording and spreading the information from threatening situations safer and easier for activists and journalists alike.
Little Brother is about an year old. Before it we had been developing – together and separately – different ideas with varying success. When we finally ended up sketching the first concept for Little Brother, we collectively felt the sensation that so many innovation hunters have felt before us.
”This is it! It’s so simple and self evident, why hasn’t any one done this before?”
And as it turned out, no one really hadn’t done this before. So we started to work on the idea and created the first version of the application. This work also brought our team to the Uutisraivaaja finals.
Now, we are extremely grateful for the support and interest we’ve received so far. We’ve gotten help offers from journalists, developers and NGO’s. For more discussions and contacting, we organized a movie night on March. More than 30 Little Brother enthusiasts gathered with us to see Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden. We met interesting and influencial people and had very eye opening discussions, not to mention that Citizenfour is a must see movie for everyone interested in civil rights.
In search of real benefit for the users
Now we’ll be facing the most difficult phases of developing the service. We are namely planning to spend the coming months questioning our idea and our application. And naturally developing it further as we learn more. Our plan is to test the app with real users in real life situations. Our main questions are: Is the service useful to the users? Will activists use it? What could stop them from using the app?
We are not developing the app for ourselves; instead we aim to make it as useful as possible for future users. Only after testing will we be confident that Little Brother is able to make citizen activism safer; and the world a little better place to live.
We have a nicely sized group on voluntary test users and we are planning to start the first test round this week. In a developing session in May we’ll take the app further based on the understanding from the test.
We’ll let you know about the results of our user testing in this blog during May. Meanwhile, stay in touch by following us on Facebook or by joining our mailing list at www.littlebrotherapp.com.
Little brothers: James, Jukka, Matti and Timo