Nobody can deny that Clay Shirky is a clever guy, and that he knows his beans when it comes to the world of social software.1 Part of his argument is that a) television has been masking the sheer amount of leisure time that we have to participate in communal activities, and b) the information revolution has provided us with the internet as a vehicle to make that leisure time more productive. This hypothesis of cognitive surplus seems reasonable, although one can argue with his assertion that making lolcatz is better than doing nothing, on the grounds that making lolcatz is at least doing something.
The exact means by which the internet enables us to capitalise on this surplus vary, but a lot of emphasis is placed on social software of various kinds – Web 2.0, as it’s sometimes known. In the last couple of weeks we’ve had some discussion about one general application – the possibility of humanitarian wikis, and the potential of crowdsourcing, the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0 – but throughout these discussions I’ve played the role of the sceptic. Shirky’s essay provides me with a starting point to address the most basic concern that I have about the role of crowdsourcing and other approaches in the humanitarian community.
The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.
This raises a problem which I think is often overlooked in our predictions about how these tools might change the sector. Humanitarian workers, generally speaking, don’t have a whole lot of cognitive surplus. If you’ve ever worked in disaster response – even on the periphery – you know that the working day can sometimes last literally the entire day. Even when you’re not working, you’re working, because you’re still in the crisis area and you’re essentially on call if something goes wrong (especially in areas which are insecure). Your cognitive surplus will not be focused on your humanitarian work; and even if you are inclined to contribute to a humanitarian wikipedia (for example), you are very likely be in a tiny minority.
It seems to me that this poses a serious problem for those expecting aid workers to be engaged participants in experimenting with these new technologies. It seems that this basic obstacle undermines many of the claims about how the humanitarian community might use these tools, although this doesn’t mean that those technologies have no future and it definitely doesn’t mean that we won’t be affected by their spread, especially as the web becomes increasingly mobile.
- If you haven’t read Here Comes Everybody yet, please do so, and enjoy listening to this extended interview which riffs on many of the economic arguments in that book. [↩]
Related posts:
I’m not sure how what you’re talking about here and what you reference Clay talking about are more than tangentially related. In the above, Clay is talking about people’s spare time, and you’re talking about effects on a group that has no spare time, and wondering why it doesn’t apply. Am I missing something?
If someone asks “Do you think it’s time for a humanitarian wiki?” the answer is almost always no, because the question makes no reference to the problem you’re going to use it to solve. If the question was “do you think we could make issue X easier to handle via a wiki?” the answer to that question might be yes (for some values of X, or different values of wiki).
Wikis (etc) are a tool and a solution to some problems; but not the solution to all problems. As ever, what tool you should use depends on what you’re actually trying to do.
There will be applications of tools that can do good things for humanitarian workers; but they wont watch TV in that time; they’ll work for the same 25 hours a day and get more done.
Paul,
Excellent point, tho I think it’s still something of a simplification — for instance, staff in Darfur might (at least until recently) have been completely overstretched, etc., but they still theoretically collect information and send it back to country office HQ in Khartoum; to some extent, these technologies simply involve entering the same data on a different platform.
Further, there’s the question of whether micro-blogging, or a wiki, actually makes life in the field easier — i.e. instead of spending time pulling together a daily or weekly update, much less donor reports, the information could (again theoretically) be entered on a wiki; also far easier to allow for clarification when questions arise, etc.
Fair comments, both.
Shirky argues broadly that the success of social software is based on a re-allocation of leisure time, away from non-participatory forms (specifically television) and towards participatory forms (delivered by the Web). I argue that since aid workers do not generally speaking have a lot of leisure time, and the leisure time they do have they don’t want to spend doing more work, it is unrealistic to expect them to participate in any great numbers in projects which seek to apply these forms to humanitarian work.
My point relates to asking aid workers to commit to web-based social technologies in addition to their existing information burden, which seems to be an unreasonable project. It doesn’t necessarily apply to asking aid workers to substitute these technologies for existing forms – such as written situation reports – especially if that substitution would make their lives easier, i.e. lower that information burden. However few people make that argument in a credible way – it rests on the assumption that a wiki-based approach is in general better than the traditional approach.
I should make it clear that I have made exactly this argument, without really having the evidence to back it up. As Sam points out, each case needs to be judged on its own. Situation reports are essential for building a narrative – both for those in the field and those far away – and I am sceptical about the returns that microblogging would provide.
Great point about the lack of cognitive surplus among aid workers. This kind of time shortage is a real challenge for us with the kind of people who contribute at Appropedia, and the strategy for Wikipedia isn’t adequate when dealing with aid workers and the like. In our case, the vast majority of people who love the site and say they want to contribute *don’t* actually contribute. And yet the wiki grows.
The fact is that aid workers are writing and publishing all the time, on their own behalf and for their organizations. Using open licenses (or public domain, as with USAID and other US federal agencies) lets others take this work and use it on the wiki.
I’ll leave my other points for a blog post on the Appropedia blog (you’ll get the trackback here, no doubt).
Chris – good point about recycling existing material, which is something the web excels at. As per my previous posts, I advocate that UN agencies and NGOs should commit to open publishing under Creative Commons licensing.