Last month, I sketched out how geotagging could be useful in major emergencies— such as knowing, should your community be ravished by wildfires, when it is safe to move back (under the presumption that your neighbors have been geotagging their own photos). As such catastrophes don’t happen every day, such an idea will take a while to get traction.

When Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, ran for Public Advocate of New York City in 2005, he campaigned on a novel civic idea: the city should create a service that enabled residents to report potholes using their cameraphones. He even set up the website for it.