Here’s the article resulting from the Ushahidi alert:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50606

I’m struggling here, mate – what point do you think is a good one?

Mighty curious about what legitimate reason there might be for preventing the Mayor of Cite Soleil from entering the base until white folks intervene.

You really don’t see why there might be security procedures in place at the entry points to an international military installation in the aftermath of a major humanitarian disaster?

I agree that the process that lies behind the response service is generally lacking.

That was not the point that I was making (although it is also the case). My point was that a major international humanitarian operation is not like calling to ask the police to come round to your house because you’ve been burgled.

And I’m saying that agencies should more closely partner with Ushahidi to address that, rather than attack the project as unreliable.

Until somebody demonstrates how partnering with Ushahidi will actually address that problem, then I have no reason to accept your assertion.

I mentioned in the comment on Patrick’s post that Ushahidi was effective in March at alerting others to a forced eviction of an IDP camp.

That’s great, but Patrick’s claim is that Ushahidi saved hundreds of lives, not that Ushahidi caused a journalist to blog.

You said in the post, “it’s inaccurate to say that “Haitiansâ€

The IASC’s review will make precisely no difference to the next response, where exactly the same problems will occur. Why is it so slow to change? Two reasons. First, it’s nothing to do with Haiti or Haitians, it’s another systemic problem, and not amenable to quick fixes. Second, there are entirely acceptable reasons why the Mayor might have been prevented from entering Log Base – but I wasn’t there so I can’t comment on that.

Do I like this situation? No. Have I worked to change it in my deployments? Yes. Not sure where you want to go with this, because my point was that this is an extremely poor analogy to receiving a text message.

I don’t see how Ushahidi is very different from 911 in the States.

Maybe you’re focusing on the act of physically making an emergency call rather than the process that lies behind the response service itself. They are different in many, many ways, but even if they were identical that would be an argument against rather than for Ushahidi. This is something that many people don’t seem to understand: humanitarian operations are not like the emergency services.

Ushahidi is a feedback flow from the people on the ground to the people with access to humanitarian resources. When 911 receives a call, does there have to be a known professional at the site of the call to verify that the data is accurate for action to be taken? No. There’s generally a presumption, if the information is plausible, that might be true and merits investigation/action. That should be the case in Haiti and too often, it isn’t.

I don’t accept your premise that Ushahidi is like 911 in the US, and I also don’t accept your conclusion that this is how humanitarian response should work. This is how search and rescue works, but I think international SAR is generally a waste of money, so that’s not a very strong case. You can’t programme humanitarian operations on a case-by-case basis – you have to deal with the needs of communities rather than individuals.

Ushahidi may not be perfect. But I think it’s an creative, highly necessary attempt to bridge these gaps and should be taken seriously.

In this situation – and I should emphasise that I’m not dismissing Ushahidi as software project more broadly, only specific claims about the specific application of crowdsourcing in this specific context – I don’t think a piece of software is able to make any significant impact on what is fundamentally a question of power. I also worry that the ideological baggage that crowdsourcing brings with it is potentially detrimental to meeting the needs of affected communities.

1 – is data sent in by self-selected crowds (ie crowdsourcing) useful?

2 – does the implementation of certain tech platforms like Ushahidi increase the participation of local people and groups?

–

For 1, the answer has to be “sometimes”: as indicated in the 911 example, sometimes any report is a valid report — (even though it might be inaccurate or false). A report that “I am trapped in rubble” in the aftermath of an earthquake needs to be checked out.

At the same time, there are tremendous limitations in data from self-selected crowds: they are unlikely to be representative. Even in the 911 example, anyone who is trapped in rubble but unconscious or without a cell phone will be excluded, although those are theoretically some of the people you’d want to *prioritize*. Hence the need for other sources of data including search and rescue, etc.

Also, while crowdsourcing can tell you “x number of people are texting us that they need something” it doesn’t tell you the “out of y number of total people in the area”. You can’t determine “25% of the population is without clean water” or “30% of the children are malnourished, as compared to 42% one month ago” by crowdsourcing: for that you need some kind of statistically representative survey (yes, done by professionals who understand public health, sanitation, and statistics).

–

For 2, the problem is that right now Ushahidi has to be implemented by those same elites that are being criticized: in order to make Ushahidi work you need to, for example, know how to “configure a server” (not to mention that you must *own* a server). That automatically excludes many of the less-resourced organizations (who don’t tend to have in-house server-configuration expertise), which usually means you need a bunch of expensive foreign experts to set things up for you.

That means even in situations for which crowdsourced data IS appropriate you MUST have technical people, usually foreign, supporting you. And that means those technical people, usually foreign, get to choose which groups to support, and which not to support.

If Ushahidi can reduce this tech burden, and make an Ushahidi implementation as easy as using Google Maps, then the use of the tool will be democratized beyond well-funded foreign groups to *everyone* who needs to use it (including the major of Cité Soleil). That is totally possible technologically, and Ory Okolloh of Ushahidi has told me that they are laudably trying to move in exactly this direction — really good news for any fan of mapping in disasters or other circumstances!

We’ve got a great deal of similar experience in “tech democratization” with our EpiSurveyor mobile phone data collection software (www.episurveyor.org): it used to require a team from DataDyne to set up the system but now anyone with access to a browser can set it up and start collecting data with phones. As a result, in one year we went from 10 countries using the software to more than 2200 users in 130+ countries . . . 99% of whom never even need any support. No expats, no programmers, no specialists required.

Imagine a world in which really useful tech tools like Ushahidi are as easy to access, set up, and use as Google Maps or Flickr or Facebook. That won’t overcome the important “sampling” issues around the validity of crowdsourced data, but it will put those great tools into the hands of many more users who need them, the people trying to solve problems, the people Easterly calls “the searchers” — whether those searchers work for a tiny local NGO or for USAID.