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. [↩]

One of the claims made by Patrick in his defense of crowdsourcing:

Fifth, all the humanitarian organizations present during today’s meetings embraced the need for two-way, community-generated information and social media. Yet these same organizations fold there arms and revert to a one-way communication mindset when the issue of crowdsourcing comes up. They forget that they too can generate information in response to rumors and thus counter-act misinformation as soon as it spreads. If the US Embassy can do this in Madagascar using Twitter, why can’t humanitarian organizations do the equivalent? [my emphasis]

I responded:

Is there any evidence at all that the US Embassy’s Twitter feed had any impact at all on the course of events? I mean, I know it made a good headline in external media, but I don’t see how it’s a good example if there’s no actual evidence that it had any impact.

Patrick’s evidence was an assertion that the rumours didn’t spread. I find this to be implausible in the extreme, and I’ll let Jeff Allen explain why:

When the Liberian banks started charging a differential exchange rate (the same as their partner banks were doing in London), that reality-based fact morphed in the street into “the banks don’t take little heads”. The US Embassy put out a press release to try to stop the rumor. It said, “Dollars are dollars, big head or little. Every dollar anywhere on the planet can be exchanged for any other, and they are all dollars.” Which would be true, except it’s not. If you try to bring $10,000 from Liberia and spend them in the US, the odds that you have a counterfeit bill in there someplace are high enough that you’ve probably brought (on average) $9994 instead of the $10000 you thought you did.

In any case, a press release from the embassy certainly wasn’t enough to stop this story. Whether becaused they beleived the rumor, or because they just didn’t want to be the only one not believing it (the musical chairs effect), within a few days the vendors stopped accepting little head notes. This was a few days before payday, and several staff brought the story to me, worried I would pay them in little head notes that they could not spend in the local market. I showed them the newspaper, and told them a dollar is a dollar. They told me, “a dollar I can’t spend isn’t a dollar”.

This is my experience of dealing with rumours in the field. Most of the time, trying to counter them is a waste of time – you just have to work around them. In this case, MSF withdrew all the little head dollars from their financial system, and the problem was solved. Notice that the US embassy press release failed to reassure the market, and I don’t see why a twitter message (or any other web-based tool) would have any greater effect (even if Liberia had better connectivity than it does). This isn’t just a theoretical question, it has serious practical implications:

PS: Think rumors are funny? Managing rumors and knowing when to give up and get out of the way is serious business for humanitarian aid workers. Here’s an article about 3 Red Cross workers killed due to a rumor. My boss didn’t make the decision she made because she’s a nice lady. She decided this wasn’t a rumor that we were going to kill, and we needed to get the heck out of the way of it.

I agree that the humanitarian community needs to improve its communication in the field, particularly with beneficiaries, and that there are a range of tools with which to do so. However we need to be realistic about what those tools can achieve, and in this case recognise that when we feed “facts” into the rumour mill, it won’t stop the rumour mill from grinding – those facts just get all churned up with all the other rumours into a great big tasty rumour pie.

I hope that Patrick doesn’t feel that this is a hit post, because it isn’t intended to be. However I find it difficult to stay in my seat when I see the words “crowdsourcing” and “humanitarian” in the same sentence. So deep breaths, everybody. Patrick has just put up two posts, entitled Internews, Ushahidi and communication in crisis and Ushahidi: From Croudsourcing to Crowdfeeding. The posts were based on his attendance at a couple of events hosted in New York by InterNews (good organisation, by the way, we like them).

At the meetings, Patrick “introduced the concept of crowdsourcing crisis information” and says that he “should have expected the immediate push back on the issue of data validation”. These two posts taken together explain his position very well, but also explain why I am so very very unconvinced by that position – note that this doesn’t mean that I’m supportive of the status quo, which I’m not. More after the break:

Read the rest of this entry »