i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Nick Bilton wrote an interesting post about a service called HasWifi that "helps travelers find internet-connected flights". Obviously, this is yet another instance of an organizing system. What is being organized is information regarding wireless internet access on planes during flights. The scope is limited to seven flight carriers and users can narrow it down by flight numbers as well. While the motivations of such a system may encompass financial ones (this is a business), the post points out that it’s "a way to eliminate some of the uncertainty about your aerial connectedness". Although the amount of organization is limited, there seems to be a mix of organizational and classification principles at play. There are the obvious hierarchical and faceted ones, but the request to travelers to help "make the site’s data more accurate" by verifying wifi existence and connection using a controlled vocabulary (yes/no, success rate of wifi connection) is a form of tagsonomy. This also implies that the organization is happening at run-time (when you search for a flight) and just in case (the verification by travelers). The sites founders are using both formal groups (data provided by airlines) and informal groups (verification by the crowd) to complete the organization, although I suspect there might be some automation going on behind the scenes as well.

For those of us flying over thanksgiving, this is a service that could come in handy!