#usahidi

Yeah, first of all, what is crowdsourcing ? in order to easily understand the term, crowdsourcing is the combination of crowd and outsource which means taking work and outsourcing it to a crowd of workers. This is a process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a network of people.

To be more specific, a popular example is Wikipedia, you guys all know about it, right? They do not hire authors to write the content for the encyclopedia but they give everyone the chance to get access to write, create the content of their own and everyone is able to fix, update information. Then, what we got here? Tadaaa, it has become the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever. Basically, the idea of crowdsourcing is more heads are better than one; by combining ideas, skills of bunch of people, the result should be superior.

Now, the main point I’d like to talk about is crowdsourcing in time of crisis. When safety is concern, for example, earthquake or tsunami, crowdsourcing becomes crucial when any pieces of information contribute to help the rescue work. If you are still confused, the Queensland floods case may give you a better look.

The 2011 Queensland floods as many Australians know were a devastating series of events that flooded over 30,000 homes, 6,000 business’s and towns and regional centers across the state were affected (Hayes & Goonetilleke, 2012, p.1). : Conventionally within emergency situations mainstream media will use traditional forms of information distribution such as radio, television and telephone lines in order to distribute emergency information. This however changed when the Queensland floods saw media services resort to social media such as Facebook and Twitter as alternative streams of information. In particular the hashtag #qldfloods became a focal point for Queensland residents and emergency services to receive and distribute information pertinent to the flooding going on in their area. Furthermore, a platform was formed in order to visualize the location and tweets across Queensland regarding floods. This platform facilitated citizens becoming suppliers of information and created a real-time public map with which individuals and journalists could quickly bring up information regarding different areas as quickly as citizens could upload it.

Well, you see, crowdsourcing plays a very important role in time of crisis. In the future, there may be more diverse crowdsourcing platforms but now Facebook, Twitter are running the main role. This somehow shows the real purpose of social media which is connecting people than sharing memes every day.

Week 8 presentation:

Usahidi, meaning “witness” or “Testimony” in Kiswahili, was first developed in 2008 as a result of a media ban following the contested election of Kenyan President Mwai Kabiki in late 2007, where protests quickly escalated into widespread ethnic attacks and violence across the country. Over 20 software developers and many international citizen journalists contributed to the coding of the platform that for the first time allowed ordinary citizens to report human rights abuses eg death, rape, looting,  in real time, submitting reports publically and plotting them on a map. When the conflict subsided, it was considered a huge success and the software was rewritten so that it could be used by anyone wanting to take similar action and crowd source crisis information in the future. Now incorporating Twitter and Facebook, there are many different Usahidi sites active and for many different reasons; there are Usahidi sites for natural disaster responses, including one for the earthquakes in Nepal that was called quakemap.org, (that has currently been withdrawn from active service), there are Usahidi sites used by the UN to track peace keeping efforts, Usahidi software is being used by news company Aljazeera, to gather and report upon a range of topics including Crisis in Haiti (http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/ushahidi-tracking-haitis-crisis), and current Usahidi running to track human rights attrocities in Syria including Syria Tracker ( https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2011/05/24/syria-tracker-crowdsourcing-crisis-information ) which contains a lot of general reports about the situation there and also Women Under Seige, run by the Women’s Media Centre to track and report upon many cases of rape and sexual assault that have occurred there since the beginning of the Syrian Conflict (https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2012/07/18/women-under-siege-mapping-sexualized-violence-in-syria/). 

This is just to name a few...... Professor Clay Shirky at New York University Heralded Usahidi as “Liberation Technology”, but there are issues involved with this as well. As use of the software has grown, so too has the need to verify the reports that have been pouring in. This is important because sometimes rumours or false information can be leaked intentionally, and if left unchecked could potentially has long lasting effects on the situation on the ground. 

Verifying this information can present challenges; a lot of what an Usahidi Deployer’s job entails actually involves coordinating and training teams on the ground to make sure the information in the reports is as accurate as possible. Ford notes that this can often make the Deployer’s feel like the gatekeepers (usually organised media) that they were trying to sidestep in the first place by creating the Usahidi. The reports that aren’t verified are still visible to the public, but carry less value as they are not considered as reliable.

 It will be interesting to see that if the popularity of the Usahidi software continues how the teams deploying these Usahidi tackle these problems, as I can imagine there is a limit to how many people can really be free to verify human rights and emergency information in times of crisis. It doesn’t help that photo and video editing software is becoming so good, so as time goes on it will be more and more difficult to verify reports coming in remotely. 

What is clear is that this tool has provided citizens with a powerful tool to relay their experiences and record information and evidence that can be for the most part used for good to spread news and to help with prosecution or social improvement once the conflict or emergency has passed. I also found this blog post interesting, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/blog/tech-human-rights-blog-series-after-ushahidi-using-new-technologies-to-prevent-mass-atrocities.html?referrer=https://www.google.com.au/ which introduces new applications that have evolved from the concept of Usahidi, which not only are designed to record human rights attrocities and disaster, but to also prevent them and to more effectively get help and support to victims of these events.