Recently we began conducting research into the use of our various products around the world, assessing impact and use, apparent successes, perceived and critical failures, as well as qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the data collected from each platform deployment.

This report looks at the lessons we’ve learned around three years of assisting with crowdsourced campaigns. Specifically in the areas of: motivating participation, typical challenges faced by deployers, ideas on funding, and dealing with excessive quantities of data.

Lessons Learned
by Sarah George

8 pages. Excerpt. Download the full report.

At the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM) last September Sabina Carlson, an Ushahidi Haiti volunteer and liaison with Haitian diaspora, explained “People don’t speak in terms of data sets. They say ‘I’m Hungry’.” Her point is that the need for translation does not only refer to language but also applies to the need to translate information into action. In the following discussion of crowdsourcing, it’s important to keep this fundamental challenge in mind.

Crowdsourcing is a general concept – and various Ushahidi implementations apply the approach in critically different ways. While crowdsourcing broadly implies information generated by many for the benefit many, there are three distinct audiences or stakeholders for any individual campaign.

The full document is embedded below.

The slides that accompany this report are below.