Recently, I just finished the first couple of chapters of Open Government by O’Reilly Media. At the end of the first chapter, there was a powerful story which shows and demonstrates the power of passionate citizens verse the Government. This story was very inspiring and I believe it should be shared with others.

Jim Gray was a technology pioneer, a computer scientist, and in 2007 when he was on a sailing trip off the coast of San Francisco when he had disappeared. Gray was reported missing to the Coast Guard which they initialized a search and rescue mission looking for him. The Coast Guard called off the search with no luck of finding him after three days, but citizens did not.

A group of passionate citizens did not quit and were determined to locate Gray. These citizens had imagery satellites take fresh pictures of a section of sea just outside the San Francisco Bay. If Gray had been out in there, him and his boat would now be on film after these images were taken. These citizens were left with hundreds of pictures that were a size big enough to cover a wall. These images were so big that a handful of citizens could not have reviewed them in time to save Gray. Once others knew this, a team of software developers converted the large images into a lot of smaller ones. These images were then posted to a website where the public could review them. Functionality on the website existed which allowed the public to click on a possible sighting sending a report to a flight crew. Once a report was received by the flight crew, they then searched the area in question. Another team of programmers contributed code once they saw that the photos were blurry. The contributed code sharpened the images which allowed for better visualization.

This entire system was created from scratch in just a few days. The effort was coordinated entirely by citizens without help or assistance from the government. The technology which was used was that which was publicly available.

Though Gray was never found, he had inspired the largest collaborative search party in history. Over twelve thousand citizens reviewed more then half a million images in just a short time.

This story is very inspiring as it shows the power of citizens versus the power of the Government. This however does not mean that we should start self-governing ourselves as we just can’t, but it shows that we – as citizens – are more effective then Government at times.