#powerofthecrowd

Hi,

I am on an exciting and challenging adventure and exploring new opportunities as an micropeneur and I have a couple of links to review. Here is the 1st LINK and here is the 2nd LINK that I want to share with you.

Crowdsourcing is generally common when it comes to large-scale disasters, like the one that was too close to home, The Queensland floods.  After this disaster, huge amounts of information flooded the media, a big media agency then attempted to make all the crowdsourced information and services play a big part of the disaster relief (crikey.com) 

When an emergency / disaster arises we (well most of us) instinctively want to help. With barriers like location, language and physical well-being we may not be able to do as much as we would hope to. This may have been the case years ago, but today we have the power of social media giving us the ability to interact with people around the world enabling us to participate in one way or another. Not only can we find out who is safe or In need of desperate help as the disaster unfolds, but we can take to social media to begin the process of disaster relief such as raising money. This is exactly what happened after the Queensland flood with the rise of hashtags on twitter such as #qldfloods and #thebigwet.

Below is an image of what the hashtags covered after the floods in 2011.

And a tweet from the 2013 floods.

A concern when it comes to crowdsourcing is the copious amounts of information provided by unofficial people, making it difficult to know which information is accurate or inaccurate. In the midst of a disaster, however, all crowdsourced information is still used/ considered.

To assist in the process of utilizing all this information, the concept of ‘crowdmapping’ emerged.

Crowdmapping, as discussed on kimoquaintance.com, is the term used for gathering all the information provided by people on social media and integrating this with geographic data. This information is provided in real-time and covers events like disasters or even political elections and violence. The mass media can be strict with the information that it makes available, this is why crowd mapping is a successful tool, providing information in real time. When reporting on disasters a crowd map is usually named a ‘crisis’ map.

The example below is the Libya crisis map

A quote forms the creators of ‘bushfireconnect’ a crowdsourced map for bushfires says ‘we need something where we can share information with the next village or community, and it has to be immediate’.” This in reference to losing contact with officials during the black Saturday bushfires (crikey.com)