Hövding – a Swedish company best known for its radical airbag cycling helmets (definitely check these out) – is currently crowdsourcing unsafe conditions and cyclist frustration in London.

Working with the London Cyclist Campaign, they distributed 500 yellow handlebar buttons. Cyclists were then instructed to tap these buttons whenever they felt unsafe or frustrated with current cycling conditions. 

Here’s what the button looks like:

Every time the button is hit, the data point gets logged to a public map and an email gets sent to the Mayor of London reminding him of his promises around cycling. Both of these things happen via the rider’s smartphone.

Here’s what the public map looks like at the time of writing this post:

Not only does it tell you pain point locations, but it also seems to suggest the primary cycling routes. I think this is a brilliant initiative because, it’s entirely user-centric. It’s telling you how people feel on the ground.

Supposedly, Hövding is actively looking for other cyclist groups around the world to help them distribute their buttons. So if you’re a group in Toronto or in another city, I would encourage you to reach out to them. The more data the better.

One of the most profound shifts taking place today – because of new technologies – is that of decentralization. I’ve written about this before, but I keep coming back to it because I find it so fascinating.

It’s happening to varying degrees, but as a general trend, I believe it is leading to better data (less information asymmetries), more efficient markets, and the removal of many middle people. In the past, some intermediaries were necessary in order to act as proxies for portions of the market. But I believe that is changing.

So what’s an example of this? Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an example of decentralization because no one entity controls it. It operates through a decentralized public ledger. And because of this, it has the potential to be highly disruptive to the way we think about currencies today.

Put another way, I see decentralization as a way to leverage the wisdom of crowds. I am convinced that large groups of people can be incredibly intelligent when they’re allowed to contribute in the right ways. And I think this could solve many different problems, from the infighting we see within cities to broader market phenomena.

As another example, there’s something new in the venture capital space called DAO – which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Essentially it’s a decentralized VC platform based off of a Bitcoin derivative currency.

But perhaps the most noteworthy and relevant feature is that it allows its large pool of investors to anonymously vote on which investments to pursue. This is in contrast to a more centralized approach where an investment committee would meet behind closed doors in a big boardroom and make a decision. This would be the more typical approach.

If you’re not in the tech space, the above may not seem all that exciting to you. But I see many parallels between venture capital and real estate development, which is one of the reasons I follow the space. So I can’t help but wonder what this trend could ultimately mean for real estate, design, and other city building industries.

I can certainly imagine a world where the forces that shape our cities are more collective and decentralized in nature. It’s already starting to happen through crowdsourcing, social media, ridesharing, and other online platforms.

This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow. 

The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BuildHereNow. The goal was to start to identify properties that could “use a little love" and to encourage city builders who might need a little push to develop a particular property.

I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing information and I love the idea of digitally annotating buildings and spaces. In this case, it’s about pulling together the desires of the community,

Hashtags are a great way to quickly make something like this happen, but I would love to see a purpose-built tech platform do this in a more permanent way. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be about developing. Buildings are rich in information; hopefully so rich that a platform like this could survive.

If you think about it, property titles are already a form of annotating real property. So this isn’t really a new idea. 

But now technology allows us to harvest all kinds of other information – such as what people would like to see built. Imagine the possibilities if we became more effective at collecting, organizing, and leveraging this data at scale.