"Become a Bike Vigilante"

Boston Bikes is an initiative by the City of Boston, MA to streamline the stolen -bike-recovery system. The utilize Facebook and twitter to use the populace of Boston in Bike Recovery Efforts.

It works this way. A Boston Biker registers their bike with the city. If there bike is stolen, they can log onto the websites and report the theft. An alert is sent to police, bike shops, school securities, and hospitals. In addition, the alert goes out to their Facebook page (402 fans) and their Twitter feed (317 follower). This accounts for hundreds of additional eyes across the city looking for your bike.

On their website, there is a "Follow Us" link. The heading on this page encourages users to become a "Bike Vigilante": engaging citizens to become more active citizens by utilizing citizen media. This blog is partly focused on finding pragmatic uses of social media. The problem with stolen bikes is that there is no system of consilidation. There are not many cities with an underground stolen bike ring with a mob like organization. Incidents are frequent but solitary. And the entity charged with finding that bike, the police, can't spend a week on finding a stolen bike. Or stopping everyone they see with a bike that looks similar to one reported. By using Facebook and Twitter, bike vigilantes are already deployed throughout the city. Tax dollars are not being used to find a needle in the haystack since vigilantes tend to work pro bono. In addition, Facebook and Twitter accounts are free, and the city already pays for someone to work on the city website along with server space.

However, that does not mean they didn't pay for the idea. They could easily have hired or were approached by a consultant who said that they had a low cost way of curbing the stolen bike problems in Boston.