Category: Crowd-Sourcing

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Patrick Meier: Humanitarianism in the Network Age: Groundbreaking Study

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, United Nations & NGOs
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Humanitarianism in the Network Age: Groundbreaking Study

My colleagues at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have just published a groundbreaking must-read study on Humanitarianism in the Network Age; an important and forward-thinking policy document on humanitarian technology and innovation. The report “imagines how a world of increasingly informed, connected and self-reliant communities will affect the delivery of humanitarian aid. Its conclusions suggest a fundamental shift in power from capital and headquarters to the people [that] aid agencies aim to assist.” The latter is an unsettling prospect for many. To be sure, Humanitarianism in the Network Age calls for “more diverse and bottom-up forms of decision-making—something that most Governments and humanitarian organizations were not designed for. Systems constructed to move information up and down hierarchies are facing a new reality where information can be generated by any-one, shared with anyone and acted by anyone.”

The purpose of this blog post (available as a PDF) is to summarize the 120-page OCHA study. In this summary, I specifically highlight the most important insights and profound implications. I also fill what I believe are some of the report’s most important gaps. I strongly recommend reading the OCHA publication in full, but if you don’t have time to leaf through the study, reading this summary will ensure that you don’t miss a beat. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and figures below are taken directly from the OCHA report.

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Owl: Mexican Revolution Begins — Pilot for US Revolution?

Crowd-Sourcing, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Security
Who? Who?
Who? Who?

Uprisings Taking Place “All Over Guerrero” in Mexico

Utterly pervasive and deep police and political corruption always leads to rebellion, and it's happening in Mexico now, according to Raimondo:

“The people of Tierra Colorada, in Mexico’s Guerrero province, have had enough. On March 28, 1,500 armed citizens took to the streets, set up roadblocks, and arrested local officials. Tierra Colorada sits on a major road which runs from the popular tourist city of Acapulco, less than 40 miles away, to Mexico City. Armed citizens have set up checkpoints along the road, stopping cars, taxis, and other vehicles, as well as searching homes for known criminals. They have also arrested the former mayor, the chief of police, and 12 officers. The charges: murder, and collusion with criminals. The force’s spokesman, Bruno Placido Valerio, said: “We have besieged the municipality, because here criminals operate with impunity in broad daylight, in view of municipal authorities.”

Continue reading “Owl: Mexican Revolution Begins — Pilot for US Revolution?”

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Patrick Meier: Digital Humanitarians and The Theory of Crowd Capital

Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Digital Humanitarians and The Theory of Crowd Capital

An iRevolution reader very kindly pointed me to this excellent conceptual study: “The Theory of Crowd Capital”. The authors’ observations and insights resonate with me deeply given my experience in crowdsourcing digital humanitarian response. Over two years ago, I published this blog post in which I wrote that, “The value of Crisis Mapping may at times have less to do with the actual map and more with the conversations and new collaborative networks catalyzed by launching a Crisis Mapping project. Indeed, this in part explains why the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) exists in the first place.” I was not very familiar with the concept of social capital at the time, but that’s precisely what I was describing. I’ve since written extensively about the very important role that social capital plays in disaster resilience and digital humanitarian response. But I hadn’t taken the obvious next step: “Crowd Capital.”

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Jean Lievens: Sharing is Caring

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Sharing is Caring

The S(e)oul of Asia aims to become a ‘Sharing City’. Forbes Magazine refers to it as an ‘unstoppable force’, replications of AirBnB or TaskRabbit pop ups as mushrooms and 2013 is named as the year of the Sharing Economy – Seoul bandwagons the trend and sets out the be the ‘Sharing City’.

South Korea is a key country when observing the rising trends in social innovation and social entrepreneurship in East- and South East Asia. The passing of the Social Enterprise Act in 2007 and the election of Park Won-Soon for Seoul mayor in 2011 are only two amongst other milestones that have indicated the embracement of social entrepreneurship as guideline in addressing the societal issues arisen in the wake of the financial crisis in 1997.

Park Won-Soon is the founder of South Korea’s first social enterprise The Beautiful Store and a think-tank known as The Hope Institute (the South Korean SIX Asia partner) and now a strong supporter of the initiative to establish Seoul as a ‘Sharing City’

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Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Three.

Crowd-Sourcing

Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Three.

Swarm Management:  If the last chapter was about the first six to eight days of the swarm’s lifecycle, this chapter is about the first six to eight weeks.

While the effective swarm consists almost entirely of loosely-knit activists, there is a core of people – a scaffolding for the swarm – that requires a more formal organization. It is important to construct this scaffolding carefully, paying attention to known facts about how people work in social groups. Without it, the swarm has no focal point around which it can… well, swarm.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats (this chapter)
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Patrick Meier: Automatically Extracting Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Automatically Extracting Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media

My team and I at QCRI have just had this paper (PDF) accepted at the World Wide Web (WWW 2013) conference in Rio next month. The paper relates directly to our Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR) project. One of our main missions at QCRI is to develop open source and freely available next generation humanitarian technologies to better manage Big (Crisis) Data. Over 20 million tweets and half-a-million Instagram pictures were posted during Hurricane Sandy, for example. In Japan, more 2,000 tweets were posted every second the day after the devastating earthquake and Tsunami struck the Eastern Coast. Recent empirical studies have shown that an important percentage of tweets posted during disaster are informative and even actionable. The challenge before is how to find those proverbial needles in the haystack and to do so in as close to real-time as possible.

So we analyzed disaster tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Joplin Tornado (2011). We demonstrate that disaster-relevant information can be automatically extracted from these datasets. The results indicate that 40% to 80% of tweets that contain disaster-related information can be automatically detected. We also demonstrate that we can correctly identify the type of disaster information 80% to 90% of the time. Because these classifiers are developed using machine learning, they get more accurate with more data. This explains why we are building AIDR. Our aim is not to replace human involvement and oversight but to significantly lessen the load on humans.

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Patrick Meier: GDACSmobile: Disaster Responders Turn to Bounded Crowdsourcing

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Uncategorized
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

GDACSmobile: Disaster Responders Turn to Bounded Crowdsourcing

GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, sparked my interest in technology and disaster response when it was first launched back in 2004, which is why I’ve referred to GDACS in multiple blog posts since. This near real-time, multi-hazard monitoring platform is a joint initiative between the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission (EC). GDACS serves to consolidate and improve the dissemination of crisis-related information including rapid mathematical analyses of expected disaster impact. The resulting risk information is distributed via Web and auto-mated email, fax and SMS alerts.

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with two new colleagues, Daniel Link and Adam Widera, who are researchers at the University of Muenster’s European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). Daniel and Adam have been working on GDACSmobile, a smartphone app that was initially developed to extend the reach of the GDACS portal. This project originates from a student project supervised by Daniel, Adam along with the Chair of the Center Bernd Hellingrath in cooperation with both Tom de Groeve from the Joint Research Center (JRC) and Minu Kumar Limbu, who is now with UNICEF Kenya.

GDACSmobile is intended for use by disaster responders and the general public, allowing for a combined crowdsourcing and “bounded crowdsourcing“ approach to data collection and curation. This bounded approach was a deliberate design feature for GDACSmobile from the outset. I coined the term “bounded crowd-sourcing” four years ago (see this blog post from 2009). The “bounded crowd-sourcing” approach uses “snowball sampling” to grow a crowd of trusted reporters for the collection of crisis information. For example, one invites 5 (or more) trusted local reports to collect relevant information and subsequently ask each of these to invite 5 additional reporters who they fully trust; And so on, and so forth. I’m thrilled to see this term applied in practical applications such GDACSmobile. For more on this approach, please see these blog posts.

Read full post with additional links.