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.

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.

Join the Cult of the Crowd Community

Follow us on Twitter – @cultofthecrowd
Join the Community – grou.ps/cultofthecrowd

I first have to declare that the idea of using Ushahidi to empower local Australian communities was not my own and would like to credit Anand Gridharadas who first introduced us to Ushahidi and planted the seed which was to grow into EveryMap.

In essence, EveryMap.com.au is trying to empower citizens by the simple act of sharing what we already know. If you want change in your suburb, whinging is pointless and apathy is surrender, so we are encouraging Australians to collaborate, because we know that there is power in transparent and recorded collaboration.

While many Ushahidi deployments deal with crisis situations we believe EveryMap can help deal with another kind of ‘crisis’, that of disconnection and powerlessness that comes from disengagement.  Disconnection is especially evident in local communities, a place ironically where collaboration and communication was once strongest.

The community holds 100% of all the valuable information but the knowledge is dispersed among thousands of citizens.  When we lived in small communities, this wasn’t a problem.  We regularly meet and socialised together, at Church, in the market or town square but as our towns grew, we lost access to this decentralised “treasure trove” of history, events & opinion.  In the place of complex formal and informal networks most Western societies outsourced communication of community information to media organisations.  The only problem is, much of what we still want to know isn’t news worthy and therefore isn’t covered by local media.

Through the power of collective and collated information, locals can make a difference on issues ranging from potholes and graffiti to neighbourhood crime, volunteering, road trouble spots to pedestrian death traps, garage sales and community protests.  These may seem trivial things to report, just everyday conversations that we should be able to have directly or through other means, but the truth is that there are few broad and open public communication spaces for this ‘everyday information’.  Information is controlled, “managed by spin doctors”, hidden for “our own protection” or sent off to government departments never to see the light of day again.

I want to know that my neighbour’s house was robbed yesterday, that 100 locals have been waiting for 9 months to have a dangerous pedestrian crossing signposted, and that there is a great garage sale four streets away and a local charity that would like my help to deliver meals to the elderly on Christmas Eve.  And for my relatives in the bush, a locust sighting two farms away is essential information. This stuff isn’t news worthy but is matters to me.  And there is something locally that matters to everyone.

We also tried in the design of the site to soften the look, with the hope of making it more appealing and friendly.  Unfortunately, we were working with the prior version of Ushahidi and since upgrading to Version 2.0 (Luanda) we’ve lost some of Nighean’s beautiful work, including a number of birds which have flown off the page into who knows where, so we’ll have to have another go at trying to make the site look ‘warmer’.

www.EveryMap.com.au went live on 17^th of December 2010, having been in beta testing for a few weeks and we have 550 reports across Australia, mainly in Sydney.  A number of local councils and councillors (elected local government representatives) have already signed up to receive report and as with another project I am involved with www.streetcorner.com.au (a hyper-local news network) we are finding that a surprising number of local politicians are embracing the principles of openness, transparency and direct dialogue and are very supportive of EveryMap’s vision.  Something old becomes new again perhaps.

So with EveryMap only two days old, I cannot yet share any insights into its successes or failures, but hope to have the opportunity to share more of our journey with you in the future.

Daithi O Crualaoic explains the Guardian's decisions in customizing Ushahidi.

What is Guardian Activate? A Guardian platform aimed at world-changers who have proven that through the use of technology and the Internet, we can make the world a better place. Past speakers at Guardian Activate Summit have included Katrin Verclas (Mobile Active), Rose Shuman (QuestionBox.org), Eric Schmidt (Google) and Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices).

Our own discussions with the Guardian staff spanned a number of topics:

• Lessons learned from Guardian’s uses and modifications of Ushahidi
• The role open source software like Ushahidi plays in investigative journalism
• Data Visualizing and Informatic Cartography (mapping)
• Exploring the SwiftRiver platform and products
• Ideas for new open source products for newsrooms and journalists

Guardian champions data journalism

We also had a great tour of the massive four executive floors of the Guardian’s operations in London and the opportunity to sit in on a few non-sensitive meetings and editorial discussions. In the past, Ushahidi has collaborated with newsgroups like Al Jazeera, the Guardian, BBC, Thomson Reuters and others. So it was good to finally have an intense week of discussion with one of the world’s foremost leaders in news, to get some insight as to how our products can be improved to aid the journalistic process.

At the 2010 Guardian Activate Summit our very own Juliana Rotich (Program Director, Ushahidi) gave this talk:

For all you WordPress publishers out there interested in SwiftRiver there are two official plugins we’re releasing today that bring Swift to your platform of choice: WP-SiLCC and WP-Veracity.

WP-SiLCC

WP-SiLCC is an auto tagging plug-in. Users who run news sites or aggregators should consider using this to add a basic level of taxonomy to all posts. WP-SiLCC also allows users to tag their own posts for sites that prefer a more folksonomic approach. WP-SiLCC uses active learning techniques to improve how it parses text over time.

Download WP-SiLCC from WordPress.org

WP-Veracity

WP-Veracity applies bayesian algorithms to your content to help surface posts based on “interestingness”, influence and time-published rather than popularity alone. From SwiftRiver’s perspective, popularity is only an indicator of influence, not necessarily an indicator of authority. This plug-in calculates popularity (number of hits, trackbacks, comments), a bayes score and time (older content falls off organically) to offer a better picture of the most interesting posts on your blog at any given time.

Download WP-Veracity from WordPress.org

For developers interested in creating their own plugins using Swift Web Services, visit our documentation wiki.

We’ve had a problem though, our team is small and we’ve had to use the lion’s share of our time and energy just to keep Ushahidi on track. Meaning, we’ve not been able to put as much resources into Swift necessary to make it what it should be by now.

Our answer to this is Jon Gosier.

Jon is the founder of Appfrica Labs in Uganda, a Senior TED Fellow and a name well-known amongst the African technology and blogging crowd (on Twitter at JonGos). Jon will be leading the Swift River initiative from our side. Besides his technical and organizational skills, we’re excited to have Jon on board because he shares the same ethos, energy and African roots as the rest of us.

Jon will also work alongside the rest of the Swift River community, including the ones who came up with the idea; Kaushal Jhalla and Chris Blow who have been doing most of the work over the past year on this project.

A little more on Swift River’s purpose

The purpose of the Swift River initiative is to develop a free and open-source platform to validate crowdsourced crisis information in near real-time. User-generated content is becoming an increasingly important source of information during crises while traditional media continues to play a pivotal role in documenting crises as they unfold. These two trends are expected to continue well into the future. The challenge is how to filter this growing torrent of information while keeping the “floodgates” open?

There is an apparent tradeoff between crowdsourcing (opening the floodgates) and data validation (the filter). One of the strengths of crowdsourcing is the ability to collect a high volume of information from highly diverse sources in near real time. One of the challenges, however, is to validate this vast amount of information in near real-time in order to inform crisis early warning and rapid response operations.

Want to get involved?

• The Swift Mailing List (Discussion)
• The Other Swift Mailing List (Development)
• The Swift Homepage
• The Swift repository

• First, we see an inordinate amount of traffic on the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc).
• Second, the aggregators step in to gather the data into one place.
• Third, we see visualizations (maps and graphs).

Social Network Chatter

When there is a “hot flash” emergency, the social media networks start to buzz – Twitter is the biggest and most open example of this. It’s also the place where a lot of misinformation starts to get amplified. It’s not just a place to air your own thoughts, but a place to get a bead on information as it is happening. You can get the information here faster than anywhere else, period.

Ever since the Mumbai terror attacks last year, the community behind Ushahidi has been interested in this. We think this should be done, understanding the probability of information being true by gathering streams of data and using both machine-based and human filtering to make sense of it. The Swift River project was born from this. It is currently being prototyped and iterated on within VoteReport.in project. Another interesting project in the same line is InSTEDD’s Evolve, which has a great amount of potential in just this scenario.

There is another issue at hand here though; the fact that many individuals who have information are not on Twitter, Facebook, or any other big social network. So, while there is a great deal that can be done with the open channels available in the developed world, most of the world is not on those channels when it matters most.

This is where tools like Ushahidi come in. It’s why it was developed, a way to get information from people who aren’t connected online and who might never be. A way for them to share information and receive alerts around emergency incidents.

Aggregating the News

As soon as a new emergency hits, the first thing we see is aggregation of news and data around it. This is good. In the Swine Flu case, I think the example set by Delicious creator Joshua Schachter is one of the best.

“my weekend evening project: RSS + Twitterfeed + Bit.ly + Delicious + Google News = @threatwatch“

People try to find the best places to get new news. People like Jimmy Wales will use his platform to create real-time wiki collaboration. Once in a while you’re fortunate to have institutions like the CDC give out good up-to-date information.

I’m intrigued by the aggregation of information, and it makes sense if you can actually get a handle on the different channels, not just mainstream news, wire services, images and video. It really has to be done on a large scale and it’s not an easy thing to manage in terms of both volume and veracity of information.

Visualizations and Maps

The last, and usually the most helpful to general news seekers, is the maps that have started to crop up. Google Maps Mania has an extensive list. Below is Google’s own aggregation and mapping of Swine Flu:

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Timothy O’Brien has some interesting graphs on the data as well, especially the information coming through from Twitter. As time goes on, if this follows the patterns we’ve seen before, we’ll see even better and more professionally designed informatics done by the NT Times and others.

In Summary

What we have is the beginnings of an ecosystem for emergency and disaster information. The projects are disjointed and unconnected, and there’s little hope of making them one cohesive unit (nor should the necessarily be).

What I do hope to see in the future is that the protocols, tools and processes for gathering, making sense of, and then disseminating crisis information becomes more open and standardized. There’s no reason that Ushahidi shouldn’t plug and play well with Evolve, which then feeds into Threatwatch on Twitter and is all part of a mapping and visualization scheme by larger publishers.

It would be very interesting to get some of the minds behind Twitter, Ushahidi, InSTEDD, Facebook, Wikia, Google and others together to better figure out how we can each continue to build independently, yet at the same time work towards a better ecosystem for emergency information.

Swift River was given a lot of thought by Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla before the Ushahidi meetings in March 2009. This video is a short version of what was recorded, giving an idea of what was being discussed.

What is Swift?

It’s an initiative that seeks to do two very important things, both of which are crucial for not just Ushahidi, but for many emergency response activities in the future. First, it gathers as many possible streams of data about a particular crisis event as possible. Second, using a two-part filter, that stream of data is filtered through both machine based algorithms and humans to better understand the veracity and level of importance of any piece of information.

You can read about the human interaction part of it here, where I talk about crowdsourcing the filter.

Preferred Futures for African IT Projects – Erik Hersman from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.

1. Business
2. Government
3. News and Media
4. Education
5. Philanthropy

News and Media Focus

My group was tasked with News and Media, specifically, “How do you inform and engage a large audience in the big issues of our time?” It was a good group too, with Ellen Hume of MIT, Alan Connor of the BBC, Erik Sundelof of AllVoices and others. This ended up being a really good discussion, with just the right types of people to explore both traditional and new media trends. Big items that we discussed:

Who decides what is important news, who is this mediator of what is important and why?

Localization and making things important to people at an individual level. The question here is how do you penetrate my inability to pay attention, to even understand what might be important to me?

Recognize that there is a distributed information flow growing, where everyone has a voice. There are multiple channels, modes and perspectives.

Credibility ranking of incoming news will become more important. Trust ranking, veracity and probability of truth.

There is an increasing feeling of helplessness from this river of bad news that flows at us all the time (“if it bleeds it leads”). Can we create actionable items from this, so that people aren’t helpless?

What are the new funding models? Will we go the state sponsored way of the BBC in the future?

One item that we completely missed: we talked about everything from a very Western-centric point of view, completely glossing over the largest part of the worlds population and how they will add to and consume news.

Without the internet the general public is left misinformed about international news. With a death toll of over 5.4 million, the DRC conflict is the deadliest war since WWII. Yet, in 2000, there was so little coverage that reportedly, an average viewer watching 30 minutes of news daily on CNN and BBC would have seen a total of 15 minutes and 29 minutes of coverage, respectively, over a span of one year, in the largest African country whose wealth in natural resources surpasses many. By not maintaining an informed public, an inefficient media does not only fail its audience, but it also fails those who are suffering. NGO’s and humanitarian efforts receive greater governmental funding and private contributions the more the public is aware. The more mainstream media fails to be efficient, the more powerful the internet is in maintaining and informed public.

When violent conflict broke out in 2007, international media institutions, and NGOs received a large portion of their information from bloggers within the DRC, such as Congogirl and Kate Wolf. When reporting incidences in the north kivu province, Ushahidid’s use of mobile phones and the web, in cooperation with NGO workers and local journalists, turned the blogging of 2007 into efficient media through a system of credible web based reporting*. In the last two months, lack of internet access has slowed humanitarian efforts, and weakened incident reporting on the north east province of the tracking map. Unfortunately, national low circulation of print media, lack of radios and tvs, can further fuel conflict.

In 2004, when Gen. Nkunda and Col. Mutebusi jointly took over Bukavu, violent demonstrations toward the UN (there to prevent the incident) broke out in the capital. Meanwhile the DRC government abandoned support, of a member of the presidential guard’s coup attempt. Rumors surrounding the presidential guard’s whereabouts escalated political tensions throughout the country. The rumor mill spun to such an extreme that under the threat of sanctions, the official government restricted the press from releasing any messages that might heighten tension or conflict.

Many services in Africa have built their business models around mobile technology, therefore owning a cell can dramatically improve one’s life. The African mobile market is growing twice as fast as the global market. Ushahidi has used the prevalence of mobiles in Africa, to help formulate a new journalism, however, an effective internet service is crucial in its efficiency as seen in the north eastern province. The deal between Microm DRC, and its high bandwidth, low-latency internet provider, 03b Networks says that its extensive deal will provide internet for the whole country. Financial supported by Google Inc, Liberty Global Inc and HSBC Principal Investments, the network project will combine speed, and global reach to create the first ever ultra low latency, fiber speed satellite network. With communication throughout the DRC intact, the path for a country to create, build, maintain and sustain good governance and protection its human rights can be seen, and the door for global populous to be truly informed opens.

About the guest author:
Sarah Jones is a multimedia journalist currently pursuing her masters in International Journalism at City University in London. Her thesis will feature the experiences and views of those living in the Matonge district of Belgium., She graduated with a B.A. in Communications from Lake Forest College in 2008 while working as the associate producer for the “Someone You Should Know” segment on ABC 7 News Chicago.