BeWater: Effective Protesters Navigate Watersheds in Street Networks

During social movements, protesters need to gather with limited communication means and limited knowledge other than what they observe in their direct surroundings. We propose BeWater, a fully distributed walking protocol that achieves gathering thanks to city information like street length, number of restaurants, number of lanes, or street names. Even though using only one of these observables performs poorly, we show that combining them in more advanced tactics rapidly leads to groups of significant sizes. To do so, our work leverages OpenStreetMap data to perform experiments on several real-world cities.