About the time of Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people getting excited about the power of the web to respond to disasters (some of which were loosely grouped under the title Recovery2.0). The idea was that the power of the web could be harnessed to improve the speed and coverage of disaster response, creating a multiplier effect with all of those people in the world that wanted to help but didn’t know how.
Needless to say, I wasn’t one of them (grouch, grouch, grouch). That wasn’t because I didn’t think the web had the potential to transform disaster response practices – I think it does have that potential and it’s already transforming our work.
(We had an interesting idea-tumble earlier this year between Jesse Robbins, Mikel Maron myself on a very specific instance around Katrina.)
My reservations were to do with the problem that we often have in responding to disasters – unqualified people showing up to help. In this case, those people are virtual rather than physical – but they still create the same co-ordination problems.
Recently, a guy called Steve Fossett disappeared while flying across the US. I’m not sure whether this made many headlines internationally, but it was quite a big deal in the US. Shortly after the search attempts began, a couple of web-based distributed searches began using satellite imagery, the most notable of which was through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, closely followed by Google Earth.
Those efforts have now ceased, although neither Fossett or his aircraft have been found. Wired magazine just published an article entitled Online Fossett Searchers Ask, Was It Worth It? which captures some of the difficulties that the Amazon project faced without really going into the underlying problems. While feelings amongst the Turkers appears to be mixed, the opinion amongst the professionals comes through much more clearly:
“The value of the contribution is hard to quantify because ultimately we failed to find Steve, but it seems reasonable to imagine that this could work,” Chantrill says. “I don’t see any downsides to it, so long as people don’t pester the professional search-and-rescue teams with poor leads.”
Yet that is exactly what happened, much to the exasperation of Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan, who says her e-mail and voicemail boxes were flooded with leads from folks working on the Mechanical Turk. Many times, they mistook search aircraft in the air for Fossett’s plane — even though it’s unlikely Fossett’s plane would have appeared intact.
“The crowdsourcing thing added a level of complexity that we didn’t need, because 99.9999 percent of the people who were doing it didn’t have the faintest idea what they’re looking for,” Ryan says.
“In the early days, it sounded like a good idea,” Ryan continues. “In hindsight, I wish it hadn’t been there, because it didn’t produce a darn thing that was productive except for being a giant black hole for energy, time and resources. There may come a day when this technology is capable of doing what it says it can deliver, but boy, that’s not now.”
The web has a clear value in disseminating information, which can by itself empower them to act. Does it go beyond that, though? Are the tools available to us through the web going to completely change the dynamic of disaster response, engaging more people than ever before, working at a distance rather than in the field.
There are two basic principles behind Disaster2.0 or Recovery2.0 or people-to-people aid or whatever you want to call it. The first is that the internet can cut out or automate the middleman in the way it has in the private sector – getting rid of some of the troublesome and costly human elements that make disaster response difficult. The problem with that is that it also eliminates the implicit knowledge needed to approach the task in a coherent way; knowledge which is only gained with your boots on the ground.
The second principle is that a distributed approach to share out repetitive tasks amongst a wide range of people will make those tasks easier. The problem with that is that if there’s nobody directing those tasks, then you may as well not bother; and if you have unqualified volunteers working on them, they’re far less effective than trained professionals and not accountable in any way for their work.
The spirit of volunteerism is the basis for all humanitarian work. We need to encourage people to engage with these issue, and I welcome these types of initiative as useful learning experiences in how to do that better. We need to remember, however, that managing volunteers has a cost as well, whether they’re physically present or virtual, and unless they have a specialised skill (and believe me, analysing remote sensing data is a very specialised skill) they can cost more than they contribute.
I also want the humanitarian sector to professionalise, to deliver more effectively to people in need, and I worry that this type of approach gives the wrong message, while at the same time raising people’s expectations about how they might be able to contribute to what is, after all, a life and death business. How do we balance our need to engage the public in order to draw on their huge potential without undermining our actual response?