As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.

The video is from 2010, but it’s still worth seeing:

He suggests that instead of expecting first responders to use the information collected on a crisis map, the data could be fed back to the crowd so that neighbours can help neighbours. He uses the example of snowstorms in Washington D.C. where people used an Ushahidi map to help others out with snow shovels etc.

I think he has point. If enough people were plugged into the system, it could turn into a marketplace for help needed and resources offered which could make a difference.

However, I have three caveats:

• The risk remains that multiple responders would rush to a single incident that catches the imagination (think: babies) while other, more serious cases,  might be neglected. I suppose the likelihood of this happening could be reduced by enabling logged in users to say “I’m taking on this task.”
• The usefulness depends very much on the size of the disaster and that there is a significant portion of the population who are not affected at all or who are affected but still have resources they can spare. So while it would probably work during the floods in Bangkok, it would not help during a mega-disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
• This model works only in societies which have a very advanced technology infrastructure that is accessible to a large part of the population. So, while I’m not surprised that it can work in Washington DC, it will not work in the poorer parts of the world which are also more likely to experience disasters.

With these concerns in mind, I nevertheless think that “crowdfeeding” (though that is a horrible term imho) can be a useful tool to organize people who are willing to help each other at least in the highly developed world – and that is nothing to scoff at, either.

What is your opinion?

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

In total, only 23 reports were submitted to the web platform on election day for all of Liberia. Many of these reports were of dubious news value such as “Not many voters left at Nancy Doe Market” or “Voters have already started arriving @E J Good Ridge High School waiting to cast their vote”. I would say that only seven of the 23 reports had any news value at all – but that might be a matter of personal opinion.

Misleading or fake reports?

The bigger issue is that a large number of reports were automatically posted on 11 October at 00:00 by the Elections Coordinating Committee (see an example here). All of them were marked as “verified” and included lines like: “Did the polling place open on time (08. 00 am): Yes” and “Did the counting start after polling closed: Yes”.

Obviously these reports are wrong: either, they really were published before the polls opened, in which case they are completely fabrications, or the posts were backdated, which is a serious mistake. In either case, it is confusing, hurts the credibility of the whole monitoring exercise and might even give rise to allegations of manipulation. For a project like this, that is a disaster. (Update: See response from Ushahidi in the comments section)

Finally, I noticed at least one report that was shown in a completely wrong location on the map, which ain’t great for a mapping project.

Where are the results?

On October 12, only two reports were posted to the platform. This shows how thin the network of contributors really is. While the results of many polling stations had already been posted on the doors of the local police stations, none of this information made it onto the web platform. Obviously, there were not enough monitors in the field to report that information.

No infrastructure, no crowd, no crowdsourcing

I had been very curious to see, how well the Ushahidi platform would work in a country with as limited an infrastructure as Liberia. Unfortunately the answer is: it doesn’t work.

The success of any crowdsourcing initiative depends on the size of the crowd. As I mentioned before, many Liberians don’t have mobile phones and even those who have one, frequently don’t have credit on the phone or the electricity to charge it, or they are living in one of the many areas which have no mobile phone reception. Of the remaining people, I doubt that many were even aware of the monitoring initiative.

Internet access is even rarer and for many people the concept of a web based monitoring platform must be something terribly abstract and not very relevant to their lives. All of this limits the size of the crowd almost exclusively to the nine partner organizations that were supposed to feed information to the platform. Some of these organizations, like UNMIL, would certainly have been able to contribute something of value. But in the end they didn’t – UNMIL for example did contribute a single report.

Last but not least, the low quality of maps of Liberia certainly posed an additional challenge for Ushahidi. Many villages, and even towns, simply cannot be found on Google Maps and most places, and even districts, can be spelled three or four different ways.

Potential versus reality

Don’t get me wrong: the potential for crowdsourced tools like Ushahidi is enormous. But in order to fulfill that potential, we have to take a critical look at what the problems are. Any database is only as good as the information that you put into it and in Liberia neither the quality nor the quantity were good enough. Admittedly, my perception would probably be slightly different if the polling station reports I mentioned above had been published after the polls closed and not before they even opened. But these things are important and those reports were even published as “verified”. However, none of that shouldn’t stop us from trying to do it better in 2017.

For the time being, let’s enjoy that everything been peaceful and hope that everything will remain calm.

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
2. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap
3. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia

In my opinion a lot of media still take what they read on Twitter or see on YouTube and  republish it without doing their due diligence – and this is not only true for the media but also for other projects and initiatives like Ushahidi that rely on social media for their data.

The BBC has now published elements process for verifying social media content, which makes for an excellent read. What emerges is a process that is more like that of a traditional intelligence agency, than what most people had in mind when joining journalism school. The steps include:

• Referencing locations against maps and existing images from, in particular, geo-located ones.
• Examining weather reports and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time.
• Checking weaponry, vehicles and licence plates against those known for the given country.

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Below you find a presentation I have given on two occasions on that topic. At the bottom of my previous post you can also download the social media staff guidelines.

I decided to use Camtasia this time to create a presentation that includes the audio, which is why it’s embedded as a YouTube video. Of course you can also download it from Slideshare as powerpoint without my explanations.

I hope you find it useful and please tell me what you think.

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From the first I saw the service I really wanted to know how it works. How do they geo-tag the information, how do they work with languages etc. But unfortunately Ushahidi doesn’t explain any of that very well on their own site. Fortunately, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the people working on Ushahidi just posted a set by step explanation on his blog.

So, for everyone who wants to know how Ushahidi manages to do what they do, check out: Ushahidi & The Unprecedented Role of SMS in Disaster Response

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
2. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
3. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure

I have to admit – I never really got the hang of FriendFeed. While I want a service or an application that helps me to aggregate different forms of information streams, I don’t want to have to visit an additional site. But Buzz is integrated into Gmail which I visit a dozen times a day anyhow. And since most people I know check their Gmail or the iGoogle Dashboard regularly, this means you have real chance to create a lively discussion through Buzz.

In a way I think of Buzz as  ”Google Wave light”. Buzz doesn’t have advanced collaboration features like Wave, but it enables interaction and easy sharing of content.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Buzz is based on Wave and maybe that just shows that we shouldn’t think of Wave as a separate product but as a developers platform for applications like Buzz.

Here is what I like and what I dislike about Buzz so far:

The good:

• Conversations: I can see everybody’s replies to a message. One of the things I don’t like about Twitter is that it’s almost impossible to have a discussion with multiple people because @-replies and #-tags are so inconvenient. Granted, this is standard message board functionality. But again, a message board is a different website that you consciously have to decide to visit. Buzz is part of Gmail.
• Integration with Google Reader 1: I can see what blog posts my contacts recommend from within Gmail.
• Integration with Google Reader 2: By sharing my own blog post through Google Reader, I can push them to my Buzz followers.
• Very good photo and video-integration. Again, this reminds me of Google Wave.
• Because all Gmail users are also Buzz users, many of my contacts are instantly connected through this tool.
• Groups: You can chose to only send a message or share content with a group of users.

The bad:

• Twitter integration 1: You can see the Twitter posts of your Buzz contacts but you cannot post to Twitter. That means, that if you reply to a Twitter message your answer can only be seen on Buzz. That’s a lame and very transparent attempt of Google to keep the conversation on their own platform. However that is not in the interest of the user and very short-sighted.
• Twitter integration 2:I think that in addition to the ability to post to Twitter, Buzz should also show all of your own @replies and direct messages. Gmail could then become message-central for all you inbound messages (except for Facebook).
• Non-threaded conversations: Buzz doesn’t allow you to reply to a specific comment, i.e. there are no threaded conversations. Why?
• Privacy issues: initially, everybody can see with whom you are emailing most. See this blog post on how to fix this problem. Update (13 February): http://mashable.com/2010/02/13/google-buzz-changes/

I’m really curious to see how this will play out. I think everything is possible from massive success to dramatic failure. For me one of the main questions: Why wasn’t Google able to roll this out a year ago?

In case you want to follow me on Google Buzz – here is the link to my profile:http://www.google.com/profiles/timo.luege

What is your take on Google Buzz? Leave a comment and let me know!

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