There is a lot to learn from the events that have been unfolding in England and it will be particularly interesting to see what roles the internet, technology, politics and community will play in this historic event.

Throughout the last few days we have seen a chaotic flood of real-time citizen journalism, reports extending from the hyper-local to the world community at large, all tuned in and sharing information. Social media and mobile technologies have played a big role and we’ve seen examples of these platforms being heavily used to coordinate the flow of information. Whether its been recording and uploading mobile photo, video and audio footage, groups dedicated to organizing clean up efforts, open-data community mapping of incidents, crowd sourced justice groups pointing out self-professed looters and individuals caught on surveillance cameras [CCTV] or identifying people via images using the same facial recognition technology that up until recently was mostly only looked as a social tagging tool.

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