Alex Evans at Global Dashboard:
The point about Twitter and other social networking technologies is that in our hyper-networked age, we just haven’t yet had the time to develop the collective mechanisms to make sure that this awesome power to aggregate, to build positive feedback loops, is channelled safely.
Erik Hersman at The Ushahidi Blog:
Since we don’t believe there will ever be one tool that everyone uses for gathering information on global crisis, we see a future where a tool like Swift River aggregates data from tools such as the aforementioned Twitter, Ushahidi, Flickr, YouTube, local mobile and web social networks. At this point what you have is a whole lot of noise and very little signal as to what the value is of the data you’re seeing.
Anyone who has access to a computer (and possibly just a mobile phone in the future), can then go and rate information as it comes in. This is classic “crowdsourcing”, where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of the finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.
The question is, how viable is a tool like Swift River as one of the “collective mechanisms” that Alex correctly identifies the need for? I think the Ushahidi developers are on an interesting track, but I think that there are limitationss to what crowdsourcing can achieve – not a problem when it’s a forum like Digg (for example) where the weight of numbers has a levelling effect on any individual distortions, and where the ratings are trivial.1 However I’m still waiting to be convinced about the value of crowdsourcing in an emergency, because it’s crowdsourcing of the type which Alex describes in his example of a potentially dangerous Twitter meme.