Nutshell: Who Will Watch the Watchers designs free DIY body cameras to protect protesters via hands-free streaming video
Who Will Watch the Watchers is a participatory collection of speculative yet pragmatic and reproducible technologies intended to leverage democratic image-based tools and processes to defend, empower, and mobilize civic action in public space. One of our greatest evidentiary disadvantages as citizens against governmental power structures is the overwhelmingly unbalanced use of image collection practices: surveillance, traffic cameras, facial recognition, etc. The WWWW Project attempts to shift that scale back in the people’s favor by sharing open-source DIY designs that will transform your smartphone into a streaming, hands-free, body camera.
WWWW designs are conceived to be used at civic actions, protests, and other sites of activism, though you can use them however you like as they are free and open-source.
Every design is comprised of 3 primary components: your smartphone, a portable battery charger, and harness for both that sits on the body so that your hands are free to hold banners, microphones, or whatever else. These designs are intended to be accessible and democratic, which is why there are both Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi designs to choose from. While some designs may leverage technologies like 3d printing and laser cutting, the majority of these designs are decidedly low tech, often using household tools like glue guns, scissors, staplers, sewing thread, etc as well as everyday materials sourced from places like the dollar store. The WWWW Project will use this website as portal to publish instructions for each design it posts. The website will also host user submitted designs! Once you are ready to use your recently created design out in the world, we recommend that you use a streaming service, like facebook live, so that even if your camera is confiscated (more often than not illegally) there will still be a video you can access later on in the cloud that you can use to protect yourself and others in a court of law.