On October 24th, Dr. Patrick Meier joined our SRA 397A class via web chat/video to discuss with us some of the details involved with crisis management and the technology he and his colleagues developed in the wake of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Patrick Meier is one of the people who developed Ushahidi for use during the Haiti disaster. He also was a co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. His developments in technology related to crisis mapping and early warning mapping systems have named his company, Ushahidi, as one of the most innovative companies in the world.
Dr. Meier started off his lecture by discussing how crisis mapping used to occur, prior to the existence of the Ushahidi platform. He praised his ideas that Ushahidi was one of the platforms that changed the way crisis mapping was conducted around the world from the date of its founding. He also talked about OpenStreetMaps. This project focused on a community and crowd-sourced system to generate maps. Unlike Google Maps or Bing Maps, OpenStreetMaps allowed users to edit street designs and street names to correct locations and patterns across cities. One of the troubles with Haiti was that there weren't accurate maps ready to help serve the country. OpenStreetMaps helped the humanitarian community get accurate locations of buildings and other small alleyways neglected from Google and Bing Maps.
The biggest surprise to Patrick was the amount technological activity that occurred from within and around Port-au-prince. He noted that 70% of the country had people with cell phones, and that they were actively using them to coordinate with friends and family abroad and to coordinate with SMS services set up by NGOs to establish updates and crowd-sourcing needed information. Haiti, to him, was the dramatic demonstration that showed the world the power of social media and technology. In combination with the number of available digital cameras, the amount of digital documentation of the disaster sky rocketed when cell phone service was fully restored and the networks continued normal service. Much information flowed out of Haiti, and Patrick's team was one lucky group who found ways to organize and retranslate data for other uses.
One thing I would like to point out was that Patrick mentioned a website which provides information for people who would like to become standby volunteers for technological assistance in natural disasters and other crises. More information can be found at http://blog.standbytaskforce.com.
Overall, I thought Mr. Meier made some good points about his product and the genius that was involved with it. Ushahidi was an innovative project, but sadly, he noted that NGOs didn't use his maps, despite the fact that they were highly identified. No action or decision was made based on the items found in his project, which seemed somewhat useless. Perhaps within a couple years, we will see a rollout of his platform that will constitute as material proper to making decisions and acting on choices.
Overall, I just opinions towards crowd-sourced information. The concept is great, but from a security and risk standpoint, there will always be the unknown threat of malicious reporters and spam-worthy data, let alone deceptive reports and flat out lies. Done in a coordinated fashion, anything crowd-sourced would be highly tainted, lacking serious integrity. I'll start trusting the results of crowd-sourced data the day that people don't have reasons to lie and deceive, obviously not plausible by any means. Do you trust the community around you?
Tony, while I agree with you that crowd sourced data is not trustworthy today; I do see it being useful in a few years. In it's earliest years people laughed at Wikipedia for relying on crowd sourced data. However, after developing a semi-serious means of verification Wikipedia has slowly become a trusted data source. While some articles are wrong, there is no statistical difference between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannia, a "trustworthy" data source. Currently, the methods of verification for crisis maps have not yet reached acceptable levels. It is still too easy for people to lie and misrepresent data for their own personnel gain. Instead, I view Crisis Mapping as a secondary source of information that can be used to verify other information sources. If people are telling you one thing and then a "crisis map" verifies that information, I am much more likely to believe that information than if someone had simply told me it.\
ReplyDeleteOne of the more fascinating things Patrick Meier talked about that you touched on was the Standby Task Force. I found it amazing that over 700+ people had volunteered from other 70+ countries to participate in this program. Created after Haiti, the Standby Task Force is dedicated to performing various crisis-mapping tasks. I think the Standby Task Force offers an interesting model for other disaster response task. Instead of hiring people to perform various tasks, relief organizations could create a volunteer community who are willing to help the cause. This community would not cost the relief organization any money and would provide a larger work force than they could help to achieve without the community. In the future, I see more and more organizations adapting this model as people from across the world become even more connected through the internet.