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Ushahidi
May 11, 2011

Over the year and half working with Ushahidi on the SwiftRiver project, I've thought a lot about the subject of crowdsourcing. Not so much the how, but the how. (I suppose the pseudo-science of crowdsourcing would be a fitting subtitle.) Partly because it's part of my job to help prevent 'the gaming of the system' within Ushahidi deployments, but partly because it's become a subject I'm obsessed with. So rather than continue to force my wife to listen to all my thoughts and observations, I've started an audio podcast and blog called Cult of the Crowd. One of my favorite blogs is Kevin Kelly's blog The Technium which is sort of like a living book, and so COTC takes that format with lengthy posts and video versions which I also hope will be later combined into a book. crowdsourcing The subject certainly includes collaborative or activist mapping, but it also includes participatory journalism, distributed labor and micro-tasking which the podcast will also discuss in depth. The first episode is up now, you can watch it above or at cultofthecrowd.com. Obviously Ushahidi will be covered quite a bit but so will other companies that heavily rely upon crowds and crowdsourcing in their work.

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