The Lord Mayor's Show is the oldest, largest and most popular civic procession in the world. It's 3.5 miles long and nearly 800 years old, and attended by half a million people every year.
This app has been designed to help you enjoy the Show. It will guide you to the right place, tell you all about the floats as they pass by, answer all your questions and help you to get home again. It knows the location of every public toilet in the City of London and can guide you to the nearest one, or to a first aider, or a tube station, or back to the processional route. After the Show it will tell you what else is happening and how to get there, or just help you to get home again.
The Show app also helps you to keep in touch. It gathers up twitter feeds from the Show and the City - even the Pageantmaster has promised to tweet from the ceremonial landrover, but we think his sword will get in the way - and for more urgent news and announcements there is a dedicated message channel. You will be the first to know of any change to the timetable or any new developments in the procession. The app can even tell you if the crowd gets too busy in one area: in that case we will guide you around the blockage or off to a quieter spot.
In the unlikely event of a proper emergency, the app will help to keep you safe and out of harm's way. You will receive location-specific warning messages and instructions directly from the Show's organisers and from the emergency services, all of whom have senior officers in the Show's police control room.
This app is produced as part of a research project called Socionical, funded by the European Union. One of the research objectives of Socionical is to study crowd dynamics. Our intention is to make people safer during a disaster, and our first step is to record how people behave in a big crowd. That's where you come in: by running the app, you are helping us to gather data about how crowds move through city streets.
By using the app you are granting permission for anonymous location data to be sent to Socionical's researchers. This happens only during the Show and only in the area where the Show happens, and it is completely anonymous: there is no way to deduce your identity from the data we get. For more information about the project and its top level academic participants, please visit www.socionical.eu.
Socionical respects your privacy and conforms to all ethical rules set by the European Union. Please support this promising research project, which is designed to save lives in a real emergency, by using the app during the 2012 Lord Mayor’s Show.
Please note that the app uses your GPS sensor. This can have a noticeable effect on battery life. We recommend that you charge up your phone before you leave home. Please note that continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.
For more information, please visit www.lordmayorshow.org/app or write to app@lordmayorshow.org.