Liberia: the power of the crowd

Background: I spent 10 days in Liberia setting the foundation for an early warning and response network that, enshallah, will be a thriving ecosystem in time for the 2011 presidential elections. During my first week in Liberia, I met with NGOs, the Peacebuilding Office, UNMIL - a variety of actors.  Despite their different missions and programs, they all grew silent at the mention of one word: "crowdsourcing."  "Do you know what crowds do here?" One NGO director said to me.  I asked if he meant the police officer who was recently burned alive by an angry mob in the middle of a busy highway, or the crowd in Lofa County that set fire to Christian churches when they got wind that their mosque had been burned (the mosque's burning, it turns out, was a false rumor).

"Let me give you an example," said another NGO staff member, someone who has spent significant time in rural areas.  "My friend, he is a Deputy Minister of Health.  He was driving at night outside of town; one of those motorcycles - they drive crazy - my friend hit him by accident." He stops the story to remind me where we are - in between villages, no streetlights.  "He acted quickly - changing into civilian clothes, getting out of the car and standing away from it.  In five minutes - really, five minutes - a crowd had formed and doused the car in gasoline.  'Where's the driver?' The crowd asked, chanting 'We're going to kill him! Kill him!', the car blazing in front of them. My friend [still dressed incognito] suggested they go to the police, but the mob was too furious to listen.  That charred car is still sitting in that town, at the police station."  Crowdsourcing in Liberia: different. I share these accounts not to propagate rumors or amplify dramatic tales, but to convey the prevalence of severe mob violence in this country.  Whether in the city or "interior", a justice-seeking crowd is likely to appear more rapidly than law enforcement officers.  My original understanding of crowdsourcing - the wisdom of crowds - is at odds with that of my Liberian colleagues, for whom crowdsourcing sounds like "the danger of volatile mobs." But it goes both ways: these informal communication and mobilization networks are extremely effective (if we consider them in terms of achieving their objectives), and it is theoretically possible that these lines can be tapped and the information of the ephemeral mob can be aggregated outside of the crowd onto Ushahidi's map. What would cause a crowd to choose its current method of data collection and response over the model proposed by Ushahidi?  Here's my guess: immediate action quickly avenges a perceived injustice.   In a country ravaged by two civil wars (not to mention hundreds of years of insufferable class disparities and pseudo-colonialism), there is little living memory of a formal justice system.  This violence may at first sound purely irrational, but it seems to be a trained response to the country's weak rule of law and the population's perception that information sharing and matters of justice must be taken into one's own hands if they are to be resolved.  It's crucial, then, that Ushahidi pays close attention to the response side of this early warning ecosystem; without a recognized response effort to these incidents, the mobs continue undaunted in their reprisals, and crowdsourcing will remain a dreaded word in Liberia.