Ushahidi Crowd-Sources Crisis Response 71
We mentioned late last year how open source software called Ushahidi — which means 'testimony' in Swahili — developed for election monitoring in Kenya was being used to similar effect in Afghanistan. Now reader Peace Corps Online adds a report from the NY Times that Ushahidi's is now becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. "Ushahidi is used to gather distributed data via SMS, email, or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The program was developed after violence erupted during Kenya's disputed election in 2007. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election. After receiving threats about her work, she returned to South Africa where she posted her idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people to report anonymously on violence and other misdeeds. Volunteers built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend, and the site began plotting on a map, using the locations given by informants, user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths. When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went into action receiving thousands of messages reporting trapped victims; the same happened following the Chile earthquake. The Washington Post also used Ushahidi during the recent blizzards to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers. 'Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work,' writes Anand Giridharadas. 'The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity, and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; then journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.'"
Refreshing (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for this. Ive been getting sick of hearing about high profile lawsuits over patents and arguing over why this programming language or that database paradigm. This actually helps humanity, this is meaningful.
Re:I love this idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) In a lot of natural disasters everyone is the victim, there are few people just surfing the internet who are completely unaffected and can go 2 miles to loot
B) Looting will happen anyways, its generally pretty easy to tell where someone isn't at home and there are valuables left unguarded
C) Power outages plus the fact that most disasters that would require this are in the undeveloped world means that not everyone can easily have access to the information
Re:Lots of data, sure, but not reliable data (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, an anonymous system like this can get you lots of statistical data, but it's not verifiable data. In a scenario where there is emotional or ideological conflict, like an election, it would be trivial to abuse the system to corrupt the data, at the very least. It's also open to abuse by individual pranksters.
Everything you've said above can also be said of Wikipedia. These shortcomings are real, but they do little to reduce its overall usefulness.
As long as the volume of data is significant enough and it's mostly honestly derived, the service will work.
I'm skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
Open platforms are built on a trust model that can be easily broken by a small* group of motivated individuals. /b/tards decide to get their lulz by spamming the site with misinformation.
So just wait until
Suddenly rape is everywhere and the database is polluted.
*for the internet
Re:Refreshing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lots of data, sure, but not reliable data (Score:3, Insightful)
it's not at all like wikipedia though (wikipedia has shit loads of problems, probably best not to use it as an example).
The fact that wikipedia has shitloads of problems is precisely my point. Any crowd-sourcing application will have similar problems, but they still work, by and large.
if someone has an axe to grind and starts reporting 10 rapes a day in a certain area, how do others edit or even verify it in this model?
In this model? I don't know. I can't get to the site right now; it must be slashdotted. That means I can't comment on the specific implementation. One would hope that a simple design would allow the typical strengths of crowd-sourcing to come through, though. As a general rule, if the preponderance of data is good (i.e. honestly derived), the service has value.
The 10 rapes a day example would play out one of two ways:
In either case, the bad data wouldn't significantly debase the overall value of the service itself because, as I said in my original post, most people are honest about these things most of the time. That would make the service mostly useful.
Re:Refreshing (Score:1, Insightful)
Dude, I have to tell you, when you have something you want to do, finding a half eaten golden apple on sourceforge that looks like someone took a couple of bites out of the apple you want to build is ... well, golden. It's called sharing. Maybe you don't want to finish or can't, but share it and someone else can. I've done this twice now. Either it was not finished or did less than I required but the code given away like that helped my world, and then as a result the world of others. My latest stab at using someone else's help is on Android. From Hello World to Hello App... it works, and I share it back