Patrick has replied to my initial post, but unfortunately has decided to continue his hilarious Harry Potter analogy. So he depicts me as the “Muggle Master”, which I assume is an attempt to dismiss my concerns about crowdsourcing as being based on ignorant and/or reactionary attitudes on my part. As we shall see in the course of this post, however, I’m far from being a Muggle (and I’m not anybody’s Master, either). This is a boringly long post so you may want to make yourself a hot drink before you read it.
WHAT A MUGGLE KNOW
1. the traditional mindset here is that unless you have field personnel (your own people) in charge, then there is no way to get accurate information. This implies that the disaster affected populations are all liars, which is clearly untrue.
Of course they’re not all liars, and nobody has implied that they are. What they are is people who may have lost most of their livelihoods; people whose village/neighbourhood may have been destroyed; people who may be severely traumatized. You need to listen to what they have to say – but you also have to verify it, which means physically checking what you are told, which requires somebody on the ground, which will usually be an employee of your organisation.
2. So it boils down to this: is having information that is not immediately verified better than having no information at all? If your answer is yes or “it depends”, then you’re probably a Crowd Sorcerer.
In 2006 I published “Better the Devil we Know: Obstacles and Opportunities in Humanitarian GIS”, in which I specifically said that we should “accept imperfection”. My belief that perfect is the enemy of good enough was based on six years working in the field, and was shared by nearly all of the people that I’d worked with. So I guess I was a crowd-sorcerer about ten years before Patrick coined the term – who knew?
3. How can anyone innovate in a space riddled with a “No We Can’t, No We Won’t” mindset?
Patrick wants you to think that this is my mindset – the “Muggle Master” mindset – when in fact the opposite is true. If you’d like to know more, I’d refer you to a series of blog posts that I wrote on innovation in the sector or to the ALNAP Review of Humanitarian Action 2009. Patrick makes the mistake of thinking that just because people think one particular idea is a bad one, those people must therefore think that all new ideas are bad. This is false.
4. Incidentally, the majority of development, humanitarian, aid, etc., projects are never evaluated in any rigorous or meaningful way (if at all, even). But that’s ok because these are double (Muggle) standards.
Then I guess I’m not a Muggle, since I’ve always been a strong advocate of better evaluation, have been an observer member of ALNAP for ten years, have always tried to ensure that the projects that I’ve managed have been evaluated, and have carried out two evaluations so far this year – one of which used the utilization focused approach that he likes so much.
5. Concerns over security need not always be used as an excuse for not communicating with local communities.
In April 2006 I wrote “In the interests of accountability, all information that we gather in the course of our work should also be public… Our failure to share information with beneficiaries exposes our humanitarian principles as worth much less than we claim.” No muggling there, then.
6. This would provide a mechanism to allow Haitians to report problems (or complaints for that matter) via SMS, phone, etc. Imogen Wall and other experienced humanitarians have long called for this to change.
That’s right, experienced humanitarians have. I’m one of them, and have been at least since Kosovo in 1999, where we made sure that the HCIC was open to all Kosovars looking for assistance of any kind.
7. This just reinforces what I’ve already observed, many in the humanitarian space are still confused about crowdsourcing. The crowd is always there. Haitians were always there. And crowdsourcing is not about volunteering.
In the post “Haiti and the Power of Crowdsourcing”, Patrick wrote that he “wanted to share an astounding example of crowdsourcing” and then proceeded to describe the volunteer effort he was part of. In this response he wrote about the problems of “managing hundreds of unpaid volunteers” so clearly he does think that crowd-sourcing has quite a lot to do with volunteering – and this is the crowd that I was referring to. I would suggest that any confusion in the humanitarian space merely reflects the confusion of crowdsourcing’s proponents.
FOR THE DEFENCE
To be fair, Patrick does attempt a defense of his position which is reasonable on its own terms but unfortunately doesn’t fit with the reality of disaster response.
Incidentally, no one I know has advocated for the use of crowdsourced data at the expense of any other information. Crowd Sorcerers and (many humanitarians) are simply suggesting that it be considered one of multiple feeds… Humanitarians working with Crowd Sorcerers could use SMS to crowdsource reports, triangulate as best as possible using manual means combined with Swift River, cross-reference with official information feeds and investigate reports that appear the most clustered and critical.
Yes, they could, but they could do a lot of different things, and unfortunately since time tends to be quite tight in a major disaster, they will have to choose some of those things rather than having all of them, and the opportunity costs of pursuing crowdsourced data mean that other information flows are very likely to suffer from lack of attention. Based on reviewing the entire Haiti dataset downloaded from the Ushahidi website, I’m suggesting that the value of the data may not be worth the amount of effort required to make that dataset usable for the purposes of humanitarian response.
THE BIG FINISH
In the Harry Potter books, Muggles are “often portrayed as foolish, sometimes befuddled characters who are completely ignorant of the Wizarding world that exists in their midst” (thanks, Wikipedia), and Patrick wants you to think that I’m the Muggle Master – all in “good fun”, of course. Unfortunately for his argument I’m basically the opposite: I’m on record as repudiating most of the attitudes that Patrick claims characterise muggles’ opposition to crowdsourcing, often years before crowdsourcing even existed.
However it’s important to emphasise that I’m not trying to claim that my experience in this sector makes me automatically right. Instead I’m asking you to recognise that I am clearly not a Muggle, yet I still have serious concerns about the use of crowdsourcing in disaster response. I’ve raised those concerns in public for the first time here, but Patrick’s response seems to be addressing an imaginary opponent. So I look forward to Patrick addressing those concerns, as per my request on his blog:
A worked example of how the actual outputs from Ushahidi can be used to support (for example) the WASH Cluster over (for example) the next three months of the mission to meet basic co-ordination requirements.1
Related posts:
Pingback: Social memory and ICT4D collaboration « Wait… What?