Crowd-Sourcing – Page 34 – Public Intelligence Blog

Disaster response apps have multiplied in recent years. I’ve been reviewing the most promising ones and have found that many cater to professional responders and organizations. While empowering paid professionals is a must, there has been little focus on empowering the real first responders, i.e., the disaster-affected communities themselves. To this end, there is always a dramatic mismatch in demand for responder services versus supply, which is why crises are brutal audits for humanitarian organizations. Take this Red Cross survey, which found that 74% of people who post a need on social media during a disaster expect a response within an hour. But paid responders cannot be everywhere at the same time during a disaster. The response needs to be decentralized and crowdsourced.

In contrast to paid responders, the crowd is always there. And most survivals following a disaster are thanks to local volunteers and resources, not external aid or relief. This explains why FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has called on the public to become a member of the team. Decentralization is probably the only way for emergency response organizations to improve their disaster audits. As many seasoned humanitarian colleagues of mine have noted over the years, the majority of needs that materialize during (and after) a disaster do not require the attention of paid disaster responders with an advanced degree in humanitarian relief and 10 years of experience in Haiti. We are not all affected in the same way when disaster strikes, and those less affected are often very motivated and capable at responding to the basic needs of those around them. After all, the real first responders are—and have always been—the local communities themselves, not the Search and Rescue Team sthat parachutes in 36 hours later.

In other words, local self-organized action is a natural response to disasters. Facilitated by social capital, self-organized action can accelerate both response & recovery. A resilient community is therefore one with ample capacity for self-organization. To be sure, if a neighborhood can rapidly identify local needs and quickly match these with available resources, they’ll rebound more quickly than those areas with less capacity for self-organized action. The process is a bit like building a large jigsaw puzzle, with some pieces standing for needs and others for resources. Unlike an actual jigsaw puzzle, however, there can be hundreds of thousands of pieces and very limited time to put them together correctly.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: MatchApp: Next Generation Disaster Response App?”

2013/02/26

Patrick Meier: Haiti and Crisis Mapping — Campaign of Lies Against Innovation in the Public Interest

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

Haiti: Lies, Damned Lies and Crisis Mapping

You’d think there was some kind of misinformation campaign going on about the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Map given the number of new lies that are still being manu-factured even thought it has been over three years since the earthquake. Please, if you really want a professional, independent and rigorous account of the project, read this evaluation. The findings are mixed but the report remains the only comprehensive, professional and independent evaluation of the Ushahidi-Haiti and 4636 efforts. So if you have questions about the project, please read the report and/or contact the evaluators directly.

Phi Beta Iota: Those who fear change slander their emergent replacements. This is reminiscent of Big Tobacco lies and Big Pharma and Big Sugar lies. The bottom line is quite clear: the Autonomous Internet is emerging, and between CrowdFlower and Ushandi, the way is open, within five years, to displace the corrupt Specialized Agencies and non-government organizations (the Red Cross comes to mind) that deliver less than 20% of donor funds to the real world needy. This will also scale to illuminate government fraud, waste, and abuse, as well as political high crimes and misdemeanors. Below is the remainder of the post, well worth a read to see how Epoch A walking dead slander and seek to diminish Epoch B pioneers.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Haiti and Crisis Mapping — Campaign of Lies Against Innovation in the Public Interest”

2013/02/26

Patrick Meier: Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response — and Robert Steele on CrowdFlower to Manage Micro-gifting Local to Global Range of Needs & Fulfillment Table to Household Level

Architecture, Cloud, Crowd-Sourcing, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response

Cross-posted from CrowdFlower blog

A devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. Two weeks later, on January 27th, a CrowdFlower was used to translate text messages from Haitian Creole to English. Tens of thousands of messages were sent by affected Haitians over the course of several months. All of these were heroically translated by hundreds of dedicated Creole-speaking volunteers based in dozens of countries across the globe. While Ushahidi took the lead by developing the initial translation platform used just days after the earthquake, the translation efforts were eventually rerouted to CrowdFlower. Why? Three simple reasons:

CrowdFlower is one of the leading and most highly robust micro-tasking platforms there is;
CrowdFlower’s leadership is highly committed to supporting digital humanitarian response efforts;
Haitians in Haiti could now be paid for their translation work.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response — and Robert Steele on CrowdFlower to Manage Micro-gifting Local to Global Range of Needs & Fulfillment Table to Household Level”

2013/02/252013/02/25

Patrick Meier: SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Mobile

Launching: SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response

Shortly after the devastating Haiti Earthquake of January 12, 2010, I published this blog post on the urgent need for an SMS code of conduct for disaster response. Several months later, I co-authored this peer-reviewed study on the lessons learned from the unprecedented use of SMS following the Haiti Earth-quake. This week, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2013) in Barcelona, GSMA’s Disaster Response Program organized two panels on mobile technology for disaster response and used the event to launch an official SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response (PDF). GSMA members comprise nearly 800 mobile operators based in more than 220 countries.

. . . . . . .

To connect this effort with the work that my CrisisComputing Team and I are doing at QCRI, our contact at Digicel during the Haiti response had given us the option of sending out a mass SMS broadcast to their 2 million subscribers to get the word out about 4636. (We had thus far used local community radio stations). But given that we were processing incoming SMS’s manually, there was no way we’d be able to handle the increased volume and velocity of incoming text messages following the SMS blast. So my team and I are exploring the use of advanced computing solutions to automatically parse and triage large volumes of text messages posted during disasters. The project, which currently uses Twitter, is described here in more detail.

Read full post.

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the pioneering and preparatory effort, this is the first time we have seen a reference to a pre-crisis arrangement for crisis mass broadcast to all cell phones providing a code (or multiple codes) for use in populating the crisis map. What this really means is that Dr. Meier has now set a precedent for using SMS to populate a Local to Global Range of Needs (and Fulfilment) Table. This spells the end of the Specialized Agencies (SA) and the Red Cross, among others, as inefficient intermediaries delivering less than 20% of donor dollars to end-needy. The way is now open for a self-organizing system that engages the 80% of the rich that do not donate to charity now (most because they have learned not to trust charities — the Red Cross and Katrina will long be remembered) and can address needs in near real time down to the household level. As the price point of precision-guided micro-parachutes drops, the way is open for chartered flights to literally “rain” manna from the heavens. The work of Dr. Meier and his colleagues is inspiring, and more importantly, a clear break from the past and present inefficient and unresponsive bureaucracies of government and non-governmental organizations.

2013/02/22

Yoda: Integral Science Is the Force — Joining Intelligence with Integrity

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

Imagine that the year is 1543 and you have just completed reading Copernicus’ newly published book, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, that has attempted to convince you that your daily experience of the sun moving around a stationary earth is an illusion. What do you think the chances are that you would have accepted the Copernican argument that violates your direct perceptions?

Thomas Gentry, Nonlinear Dynamicist, 1995

Is Integral Science related to Paul Ray’s work on Cultural Creatives?
Yes, ISI is working toward the same Integral Society identified by Paul Ray (see Cultural Creatives, 2003). We believe Integral Science provides a clearer understanding of why Integral Society is emerging and a more solid foundation for understanding what the Cultural Creatives must do to make it sustainable.

Is Integral Science related to Ken Wilber’s vision of Integralis?
Though there are some overlaps, Integral Science’s empirical foundation leads to some different conclusions from Wilber’s Integral Psychology and Integralis. Both views, for example, integrate spirituality and the evolution of consciousness, Integral Science integrates them into a seamless view of physical reality, using serious work from across disciplines, and taking great care to logically connect the dots from different fields.

Why is Integral Society emerging?
What does Integral Science say about what it will be like? Great changes are driven into being by the failure of the previous system, a breakdown whose root cause is cultural decay and whose main marker is a web of crises popping up in every sphere. Vowing to find a better way, a new cultural thrust then builds itself up around a new noble vision and defining metaphor that it believes will avoid the fiascoes of the old.

Hence, today’s great change, like those of the past, is being propelled by crises felt in every field. Think of education, health care, politics, energy, the economy, community, justice, and the environment. Yet, while these individual calamities grab attention, it is slowly becoming clear that the root problem is cultural decay. Late Modern culture has become a malady and late Modern America epitomizes the result.

Learn more.

Continue reading “Yoda: Integral Science Is the Force — Joining Intelligence with Integrity”

2013/02/212013/02/21

Patrick Meier: Social Media as Passive Polling: Prospects for Development & Disaster Response

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Crowd-Sourcing

Social Media as Passive Polling: Prospects for Development & Disaster Response

Posted on February 21, 2013 | 1 Comment

My Harvard/MIT colleague Todd Mostak wrote his award-winning Master’s Thesis on ”Social Media as Passive Polling: Using Twitter and Online Forums to Map Islamism in Egypt.” For this research, Todd evaluated the “potential of Twitter as a source of time-stamped, geocoded public opinion data in the context of the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East.” More specifically, “he explored three ways of measuring a Twitter user’s degree of political Islamism.” Why? Because he wanted to test the long-standing debate on whether Islamism is associated with poverty.

So Todd collected millions of geo-tagged tweets from Egypt over a six month period, which he then aggregated by census district in order to regress proxies for poverty against measures of Islamism derived from the tweets and the users’ social graphs. His findings reveal that “Islamist sentiment seems to be positively correlated with male unemployment, illiteracy, and percentage of land used in agriculture and negatively correlated with percentage of men in their youth aged 15-25. Note that female variables for unemployment and age were statistically insignificant.” As with all research, there are caveats such as the weighting scale used for the variables and questions over the reliability of census variables.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Social Media as Passive Polling: Prospects for Development & Disaster Response”

2013/02/192013/02/19

Patrick Meier: Verily: Crowdsourcing Evidence During Disasters

Crowd-Sourcing

Verily: Crowdsourcing Evidence During Disasters

Social media is increasingly used for communicating during crises. This rise in Big (Crisis) Data means that finding the proverbial needle in the growing haystack of information is becoming a major challenge. Social media use during Hurricane Sandy produced a “haystack” of half-a-million Instagram photos and 20 million tweets. But which of these were actually relevant for disaster response and could they have been detected in near real-time? The purpose of QCRI’s experimental Twitter Dashboard for Disaster Response project is to answer this question. But what about the credibility of the needles in the info-stack?

To answer this question, our Crisis Computing Team at QCRI has partnered with the Social Computing & Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. This applied research project began with a series of conversations in mid-2012 about DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge. This challenge posted in 2009 offered $40K to the individual or team that could find the correct location of 10 red weather balloons discretely placed across the continental United States, an area covering well over 3 million square miles (8 million square kilometers). My friend Riley Crane at MIT spearheaded the team that won the challenge in 8 hours and 52 minutes by using social media.

Riley and I connected right after the Haiti Earthquake to start exploring how we might apply his team’s winning strategy to disaster response. But we were pulled in different directions due to PhD & post-doc obligations and start-up’s. Thank-fully, however, Riley’s colleague Iyad Rahwan got in touch with me to continue these conversations when I joined QCRI. Iyad is now at the Masdar Institute. We’re collaborating with him and his students to apply collective intelligence insights from the balloon to address the problem of false or misleading content shared on social media during disasters.

If 10 balloons planted across 3 million square miles can be found in under 9 hours, then surely the answer to the question “Did Hurricane Sandy really flood this McDonald’s in Virginia?” can be found in under 9 minutes given that Virginia is 98% smaller than the “haystack” of the continental US. Moreover, the location of the restaurant would already be known or easily findable. The picture below, which made the rounds on social media during the hurricane is in reality part of an art exhibition produced in 2009. One remarkable aspect of the social media response to Hurricane Sandy was how quickly false information got debunked and exposed as false—not only by one good (digital) Samaritan, but by several.

Read full article with graphics.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Verily: Crowdsourcing Evidence During Disasters”