[liberationtech] Fwd: OpenWatch History

[Chris Ballinger]

I know the history! I was one of the co-founders of OpenWatch.

Our main struggle was funding. After a small amount of initial funding by a
private investor, we went through a startup accelerator program in San
Francisco. It was very difficult to reconcile our original mission with the
VC funding model. We realized we built some live broadcasting technology
that was way ahead of its time, and pivoted the company to Kickflip
<https://kickflip.io/> - which provided live broadcasting SDKs with a SaaS
backend. Our hope was that Kickflip would provide us the revenue to go back
and revitalize OpenWatch, but it never took off either. Eventually we all
burned out and had to move on to other things.

It's been interesting watching other companies in this space appear like
Citizen <https://citizen.com/>. Their current product looks very similar to
what we were building for OpenWatch towards the end of the project, but
they were able to raise 60MM to execute their vision.

By the way, if it wasn't obvious, the openwatch.net domain lapsed and is
now owned by a squatter. Here's an archive.org snapshot
<https://web.archive.org/web/20131221111943/https://openwatch.net/> of the
original site if you're interested.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions about the
project!



On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 5:40 AM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, Apr 6, 2020, 5:39 AM
> Subject: OpenWatch History
> To: <cryptoparty_masspirates.org at lists.masspirates.org>, liberationtech <
> liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>, cypherpunks <
> cypherpunks at lists.cpunks.org>
>
>
> Has anybody heard of the cell phone app OpenWatch?
>
> It used to run at https://www.openwatch.net/ and let anybody upload video
> recordings live and secretly from their mobile phone, and publicized them.
> Page archives show it came out of Boston and San Francisco.
>
> Since it was focused on monitoring of authorities, it makes sense it would
> have struggled as this could spread power in ways that are harder for
> authorities to control, making their various tasks more difficult, and
> possibly pitting the urgent engine of control of crime against the project.
>
> I don't see any evidence of OpenWatch having planned to discontinue, or
> notifying the public they were.  There is nobody on their irc channel, and
> their twitter account has been deleted.  Their github has an open
> improvement branch that is unmerged, and no following developer activity
> since.
>
> Nowadays there are services like https://siasky.net/ and
> https://bico.media/ and some others, that can connect with reliable
> decentralized storage backed by the strength of a blockchain.  As
> blockchains rise it is becoming easier to support apps like OpenWatch in
> ways that won't disappear very readily.  bico.media may go down some day,
> but the data uploaded is still stored permanently on the blockchain behind
> it, and the app that stores that data could be stored on that blockchain as
> well.
>
> I was wondering if anybody knew the story of what happened to OpenWatch,
> or if anybody was interested in resurrecting OpenWatch's work with a little
> motion towards migrating onto a blockchain.
> https://github.com/OpenWatch/OpenWatch-Android
>
> Maybe planning for disruption a little could make project development
> ideas that last longer.  Like clear instructions for newcomers to rebuild
> after developers disperse.
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