humanitarian.info

… I promise. I’m drafting a reply to Patrick’s thoughtful response to my original discussion, but a few links came across my radar which I felt the need to dig into:

Crowdsourcing the counter-piracy problem in Somalia:

While criminals and pirates have effectively used a mix of low-tech and high-tech solutions to collaborate and target shipping, the maritime and national security communities have largely ignored their information strengths. Given the amount of data available and the large community of interest, we should launch a program to expose our information and develop a crowdsourced counter-piracy campaign… While we are not offering a specific approach, we hope the US and broader community will adopt crowdsourcing as a key strategy to achieve information superiority in the fight against pirates.

This is relatively non-insane, merely opaque. I am not claiming that crowdsourcing will not or should not be a key strategy in the fight against piracy; just because they don’t specify an approach, it doesn’t mean that such an approach doesn’t exist. However given that they don’t have any specific recommendations to make, they seem awfully confident that crowdsourcing will be key to any successful approach to the problem.

Crowdsourcing Security:

Imagine the US erected a thirty-foot pole every mile or so on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with a swiveling video camera, solar panel, and satellite Internet connection mounted on top. Now imagine all of these videos feeds were accessible on the Internet, live, perhaps through an interface like Google Earth. Click the camera you want, and any American–or Korean, or Frenchman for that matter–could watch a live stretch of Afghanistan… Now wrap the thing up in a basic collaborative workspace. Have real-time statistics, showing which cameras are being manned and which aren’t. Let multiple users viewing the same camera chat with each other. Create spaces where self-organizing communities of armchair intelligence analysts can recruit members, discuss ideas, or analyze suspicious snapshots.

You’ll have to read the entire thing to get a full idea of just how bonkers¹ this proposal is on every level except the technical – as they point out, it could be done (although the author seems to have a very limited idea of what the cost of maintaining this infrastructure would be). This proposal has the virtue of explaining exactly how crowdsourcing security would work in theory, but the unfortunate side effect of demonstrating exactly why it wouldn’t work in practice.² However the mention of “armchair intelligence analysts” is a pointer to another aspect of beliefs about crowdsourcing; that nearly every human activity can be successfully undertaken by non-experts as long as there are enough of them.

How Ushahidi could help indigenous peoples:

Indigenous people still face marginalization, extreme poverty, forced relocation and other human rights violations. Their way of life and often their very survival is threatened, according to the United Nations. To me, this means that there are over three hundred seventy million people who could benefit from Ushahidi’s web based reporting tool… Where media has failed to report on the issues facing the indigenous communities spanning over seventy countries, data visually organized via Ushahidi could provide a bridge.

This is not insane – in fact I think it sounds like a very nice idea.³ However little is described about how crowdsourcing will help indigenous peoples – it just will, because that’s what crowdsourcing does. In general there seems to be a sense that information produced by crowdsourcing will be somehow more compelling and useful than any other kind.

Twitter is good, or else…:

I noticed a recent report, claiming to prove that Facebook and Twitter at work are good for productivity… What’s interesting here is less the validity or otherwise of the finding, than the urge to arrive at it… Clearly it would be nice, exciting, helpful if Twittering were good for workplace productivity. It would suggest a convenient alliance between a normative view of connectivity-as-good-in-itself and economic necessity. The very fact that the study was carried out confirms a desire for this convenient alliance.

Once again, I am not arguing that crowdsourcing does not work, since clearly there is evidence that it has provided significant returns in key areas (although I found Wikinomics to be unconvincing). I think crowdsourcing can work very well in a number of different areas, although the successful examples (or at least the most publicised ones) seem to be either emergent (rather than guided) or incentivised (rather than voluntary). This is not a criticism of crowdsourcing per se, but a call for consideration of the possibility that, while crowdsourcing is a very useful tool to have in the toolbox, it is not the only tool – and for some jobs it might not be the right tool.

1. No offense intended. [↩]
2. As well as being utterly abhorrent to anybody who places any value on personal liberty. [↩]
3. Note that this opinion may be a result of my personal bias towards do-gooding – somebody with a penchant for security issues will probably find the suggestion above more compelling. [↩]