humanitarian.info

Here’s another thing to throw into the mix. Part of my thoughts (parts of my thought?) was generated by a post by Ethan Zuckerman entitled Watching Madagascar, via Twitter. He starts off strong:

The nature of breaking news is changing… The (confusing, apparent, partial, incomplete) coup in Madagascar is the first event I’ve been able to watch only through social media.

But a few paragraphs later, the big reveal:

So I’m doing what my Malagasy friends across the net are doing – religiously watching the #Madagascar tag on Twitter. That means I’m primarily reading Thierry Ratsizehena, a marketing and social media expert in Antananarivo, who is listening closely to news via television and radio, and sharing what he knows with his Twitter readers. Lova, who’s in the US, is translating his tweets into English and adding context and commentary.

I don’t doubt that these two were working as an “effective news bureau” for Ethan and other interested observers, and this is clearly a useful service in the Twitter manner, but I couldn’t help but notice something that Ethan had slipped in there. Thierry Ratsizehena was “listening closely to news via television and radio” and then sending that on to Twitter. While Ethan may have been literally watching events through social media, he was getting all his news from television and radio. Ethan’s not making any claims for Twitter but in this instance I’m not sure Twitter is doing much more than ham radio would?

I don’t want to harp on about Twitter, really I don’t; it’s pretty much irrelevant to any of the work that I’m likely to be doing in the near future¹. The reason I find the coverage of Twitter interesting (rather than finding Twitter itself interesting) is that in some senses it’s clearly a fad (in the same way as most technology journalism is fad-based) and in some senses it clearly represents a shift in the foundations – although I don’t think that it is that shift, which is what the breathless news coverage tries to suggest.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this. As our traditional media dies off (as per Clay Shirky’s recent article), people are looking for something to take its place. In this case, Twitter looks like journalism – they’re broadcasting reports from on (or near) the spot! – but it isn’t journalism, and it doesn’t possess the powers of organisation that people seem to think it should at first sight. We want it to be journalism because we want something to take journalism’s place – or in Ethan’s case, fill the gaps that his traditional media leaves in his coverage of the world. In countries where traditional media retains its position – particularly radio, which shows little sign of dying out in developing countries – journalism is alive and well, and in fact provides the raw material on which Twitter users draw.

1. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it won’t be relevant to any of the humanitarian work that I’ll do in the future at all. [↩]

Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter!

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police. The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

Here’s how it went down:

The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate – I’ve been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes – and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with “pman” (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English)… All in all, while it’s probably too early to tell whether Moldova’s Twitter revolution will be successful, it would certainly be wrong to disregard the role that Twitter and other social media have played in mobilizing (and, even more so, reporting on) the protests.

Or did it?

In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple – young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and “mourning Moldova” because of Communists victory… They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc…. That was a civic protest, which grew up out of a flash-mob initiative organized through blogs and social network connections, and then which grew even bigger as the protesters used mobile phones to summon their friends and classmates.

Apparently it didn’t.

Mihai Muscovici… suggests that the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong and there is scant mention of the organisation of the protests at all apart from a rather vague quote the Times has put in at the end of the piece… As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth. What happened, and is still happening, in Moldova is a protest organised using social media.

Last word to Evgeny:

It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It’s really good that the Moldovan students didn’t organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world.

Indeed. The reason I’m posting this – even though it’s not strictly speaking “humanitarian” – is because it shows three things which to some extent follow from each other:

1. It’s hazardous to use press coverage to determine what tools are being used and what tools are working in a crisis. The press frequently have even less understanding of the tools than they do of the crisis, and they <em>will</em> focus on what’s “popular”. It’s very difficult to verify the claims about these tools while the crisis is unfolding, so I find it hard to blame them – they need people to read their stuff – but the people making the claims need to be more careful.¹
2. They need to be more careful because media coverage of technology is the product of the echo chamber that dominates the technology sector – and steers the media when it comes to reporting on technology. No offense to all those tech guys providing their opinions to the media – they are smart, no doubt – but because they’re tech guys they love Twitter, and discuss it a lot, so that’s the headline we read.
3. The good news is that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have demonstrated their utility as organising tools in advance of a protest; mobile phones we already knew are of maximum utility even while the crisis is full on (right up until the network goes down). Twitter – maybe good visibility for people on the periphery or further out, but I’m just not convinced that microblogging in general is of much use in a crisis. Head over to Jon’s place for the opposing point of view.

1. To be fair, in that initial article they only refer to Twitter as part of a suite of tools, but the general tenor of coverage has been “The Twitter Revolution” or something similar. [↩]

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:

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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.

1. I don’t mean “trivial” in a derogatory way, only in the sense that nobody’s going to make potentially life or death decisions on the basis of a Dugg article. [↩]

So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid – we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it?

There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological Survey to the punch with news of the Chengdu Earthquake. Twitterer dtan felt the earth move under his feet in Beijing, and his twitter was picked up by Robert Scoble, one of the world’s best-known technology writers and a man with about 23,000 people following his Twitter stream. On his blog, Scoble explains:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News. How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!! Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

The result has been a whole discussion about how this shows that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The Online Journalism Blog goes link crazy on crowdsourcing without managers, so start reading there and follow the trail. The key indicator for the Twitterers (ironically) is a post on the BBC News dot.life blog:

I was beginning to think Twitter – the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati – was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning. When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China… Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Many of the comments on these posts express their skepticism, particularly about the claim about having the news before the USGS – it’s more likely that the USGS was cross-checking their data before releasing it. This relates back to something I wrote a few weeks ago – there’s no accountability on Twitter, so there’s no requirement for people to check facts.

When the World Trade Centre fell, the reason I knew about it was that my Dad phoned me and told me to turn on the television. This Twitter coverage operates in the same way – as gossip, rather than news. Check out the direction of the conversation on Twitter after the initial news breaks – it falls into three categories:

1. This earthquake is terrible, isn’t it?
2. Here’s a link to a news source with some actual detail about the earthquake.
3. Isn’t Twitter great for breaking this news first?

That doesn’t mean that it’s not valid, useful or interesting – but it does mean that you’re not going to find it that useful as a news source. If you think I’m harshing Twitter’s buzz, then you should try Better Living through Software:

It’s silly in the extreme to act like twitter is somehow breaking news, though. Masses of people within China found out about the earthquake as it was happening via messages from friends on QQ (which is massively more popular than twitter), and CCTV carried the news almost instantly. I suppose it’s cute that some English-speaking expats using echo-chamber technology were able to *also* report the event on twitter, but even the tweetscan example seems a bit lame to me. When I search for tweets with the word “地震”, tweetscan gives me nothing — apparently tweetscan doesn’t care about Chinese.

Ouch, but a fair ouch.

UPDATE: As always, Global Voices Online is the solid antidote to Anglocentrism, while the Frontline Club is much more positive about the whole Twitter ride.