Tag Archives: State

Remote Sensing Satellites and the Regulation of Violence in Areas of Limited Statehood

Posted on February 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

In 1985, American intelligence analyst Samuel Loring Morison was charged with espionage after leaking this satellite image of a Soviet shipyard:

And here’s a satellite image of the same shipyard today, free & publicly available via Google Earth:

Screen Shot 2015-02-05 at 7.03.16 AM

Thus begins colleague Steven Livingston’s intriguing new study entitled Remote Sensing Satellites and the Regulation of Violence in Areas of Limited Statehood. “These two images illustrate the extraordinary changes in remote sensing that have occurred since 2000, the year the first high-resolution, commercially owned and operated satellite images became available. Images that were once shrouded in state secrecy are now available to anyone possessing a computer and internet connection, sometimes even at no cost.”

Steven “considers the implications of this development for governance in areas of limited statehood.” In other words, he “explores digitally enabled collective action in areas of limited statehood” in order to answer the following question: how might remote sensing “strengthen the efforts to hold those responsible for egregious acts of violence against civil populations to greater account”?

Areas of Limited Statehood

An area of limited statehood is a “place, policy arena, or period of time when the governance capacity of the state is unrealized or faltering.” To this end, “Governance can be defined as initiatives intended to provide public goods and to create and enforce binding rules.” I find it fascinating that Steven treats “governance as an analog to collective action, a term more common to political economics.” Using the lens of limited statehood also “disentangles governance from government (or the state). This is especially important to the discussion of remote sensing satellites and their role in mitigating some of the harsher effects of limited statehood.”

In sum, “rather than a dichotomous variable, as references to failed states imply, state governance capacity is more accurately conceptualized as running along a continuum: from failed states at one end to fully consolidated states at the other.” To this end, “What might appear to be a fully consolidated state according to gross indicators might in fact be a quite limited state according to sectorial, social or even spatial grounds.” This is also true of the Global North. Take natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, for example. Disasters can, and do, “degrade the governance capacity of a state in the affected region.”

Now, the term “limited governance” does not imply the total lack of governance. “Governance might instead come from alternative sources,” writes Steven, such as NGOs, clans and even gangs. “Most often, governance is provided by a mix of modalities […],” which is “particularly important when considering the role of technology as a sort of governance force multiplier.” Evidently, “Leveraging technology lowers the organizational burden historically associated with the provisioning of public goods. By lowering communication and collaboration costs, information and communication technology facilitates organizing without formal organizations, such as states.” To this end, “Rather than building organizations to achieve a public good, digital technologies are used to organize collective actions intended to provide a public good, even in the absence of the state. It involves a shift from a noun (organizations) to a verb (organizing).”

Remote Sensing Satellites

Some covert satellites are hard to keep out of the public eye. “The low-earth orbit and size of government satellites make them fairly easy to spot, a fact that has created a hobby: satellite tracking.” These hobbyists are able to track govern-ment satellites and to calculate their orbits; thus deducing certain features and even purpose of said satellites. What is less well known, however, are the “capabilities of the sensors or camera carried onboard.”

The three important metrics associated with remote sensing satellites are spatial resolution, spectral resolution and temporal resolution. Please see Steven’s study (pages 12-14) for a detailed description of each. “In short, ‘seeing’ involves much more data than is typically associated in popular imagination with satellite images.” Furthermore, “Spatial resolution alone may not matter as much as other technical characteristics. What is analytically possible with 30-centimeter resolution imagery may not outweigh what can be accomplished with a one-meter spatial resolution satellite with a high temporal resolution.” (Steven also provides an informative summary on the emergence of the commercial remote sensing sector including micro-satellites in pages 14-18).

The Regulation of Violence

Can non-state actors use ICTs to “alter the behavior of state actors who have or are using force […] to violate broadly recognized norms”? Clearly one element of this question relates to the possibility of verifying such abuse (although this in no way implies that state behaviors will change as a consequence). “Where the state is too weak [or unwilling] to hold its own security forces to account and to monitor, investigate, and verify the nature of their conduct, nonstate actors fill at least some of the void. Nonstate actors offer a functional equivalency to a consolidated state’s oversight functions.”

Steven highlights a number of projects that seek to use satellite imagery for the above stated purposes. These include projects by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, AAAS and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s (HHI) Satellite Sentinel Project. These projects demonstrate that monitoring & verifying state-sanctioned violence is certainly feasible via satellite imagery. I noted as much here and here back in 2008. And I’ve had several conversations over the years with colleagues at Amnesty, AAAS and the Sentinel Project on the impact of their work on state behavior. There are reasons to be optimistic even if many (most?) of these reasons cannot be made public.

There are also reasons to be concerned as per recent conversations I’ve had with Harvard’s Sentinel Project. The latter readily admit that behavior change in no way implies that said change is a positive one, i.e., the cessation of violence. States who learn of projects that use remote sensing satellites to document the mass atrocities they are committing (or complicit in) may accelerate their slaughter and/or change strategies by taking more covert measures.

There is of course the possibility of positive behavior change; one in which “Transnational Advocacy Networks” are able to “mobilize information strategic-ally to help create new issues and categories and to persuade, pressure, and gain leverage over much more powerful organizations and governments […],” who subsequently change their behaviors to align with international norms and practices. While fraught with the conundrums of “proving” direct causality, the conversations I’ve had with some of the leading advocacy networks engaged in these networks leave me hopeful.

In conclusion

Satellite imagery—once the sole purview of intelligence agencies—is increasingly accessible to these advocacy networks who can use said imagery to map unregulated state violence. To this end, “States no longer enjoy a mono-poly on the synoptic view of earth from space. […] Nonstate actors, from corporations to nongovernmental organizations and community groups now have access to the means of ordering a disorderly world on their own terms.”

The extent to which this loss of monopoly is positively affecting state behavior is unclear (or not fully public). Either way, and while obvious, transparency in no way implies accountability. Documenting state atrocities does not automatically end or prevent them—a point clearly lost on a number of conflict early warning “experts” who overlooked this issue in the 1990s and 2000s. Prevention is political; and political will is not an icon on the computer screen that one can turn on with a double-click of the mouse.

In addition to the above, Steven and I have also been exploring the question of UAVs within the context of limited statehood and the regulation of violence for a future book we’re hoping to co-author. While NGOs and community groups are in no position to operate or own a satellite (typical price tag is $300 million), they can absolutely own and operate a $500 UAV. Just in the past few months, I’ve had 3 major human rights organization contact me for guidance on the use of UAVs for human rights monitoring. How all this eventually plays out will hopefully feature in our future book.

Map or Be Mapped: Otherwise You Don’t Exist

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 3 comments

“There are hardly any street signs here. There are no official zip codes. No addresses. Just word of mouth” (1). Such is the fate of Brazil’s Mare shanty-town and that of most shantytowns around the world where the spoken word is king (and not necessarily benevolent). “The sprawling complex of slums, along with the rest of Rio de Janerio’s favelas, has hung in a sort of ‘legal invisibility’ since 1937, when a city ordinance ruled that however unsightly, favelas should be kept off maps because they were merely ‘temporary'” (2).

The socio-economic consequences were far-reaching. For decades, this infor-mality meant that “entire neighborhoods did not receive mail. It had also blocked people from giving required information on job applications, getting a bank account or telling the police or fire department where to go in an emergency call. Favela residents had to pick up their mail from their neighborhood associations, and entire slums housing a small town’s worth of residents had to use the zip code of the closest officially recognized street” (3).

All this is starting to change thanks to a grassroots initiative that is surveying Mare’s 16 favelas, home to some 130,000 people. This community-driven project has appropriated the same survey methodology used by the Brazilian government’s Institute of Geography and Statistics. The collected data includes “not only street names but the history of the original smaller favelas that make up the community” (4). This data is then “formatted into pocket guides and distributed gratis to residents. These guides also offer background on certain streets’ namesakes, but leave some blank so that residents can fill them in as Mare […] continues shifting out from the shadows of liminal space to a city with distinct identities” (5). And so, “residents of Rio’s famed favelas are undergoing their first real and ‘fundamental step toward citizenship'” (6).

These bottom-up, counter-mapping efforts are inherently political—call it guerrilla mapping. Traditionally, maps have represented “not just the per-spective of the cartographer herself, but of much larger institutions—of corporations, organizations, and governments” (7). The scale was fixed at one and only one scale, that of the State. Today, informal communities can take matters into their own hands and put themselves on the map; at the scale of their choosing. But companies like Google still have the power to make these communities vanish. In Brazil, Google said it “would tweak the site’s [Google Maps’] design, namely its text size and district labeling to show favela names only after users zoomed in on those areas.”

Meanwhile, Google is making North Korea’s capital city more visible. But I had an uncomfortable feeling after reading National Geographic’s take on Google’s citizen mapping expedition to North Korea. The Director for National Geographic Maps, Juan José Valdés, cautions that, “In many parts of the world such citizen mapping has proven challenging, if not downright dangerous. In many places, little can be achieved without the approval of local and or national authorities—especially in North Korea.” Yes, but in many parts of the world citizen mapping is safe and possible. More importantly, citizen mapping can be a powerful tool for digital activism. My entire doctoral dissertation focuses on exactly this issue.

Yes, Valdés is absolutely correct when he writes that “In many countries, place-names, let alone the alignment of boundaries, remain a powerful symbol of independence and national pride, and not merely indicators of location. This is where citizen cartographers need to understand the often subtle nuances and potential pitfalls of mapping.” As the New Yorker notes, “Maps are so closely associated with power that dictatorships regard information on geography as a state secret.” But map-savvy digital activists already know this better than most, and they deliberately seek to exploit this to their advantage in their struggles for democracy.

National Geographic’s mandate is of course very different. “From National Geographic’s perspective, all a map should accomplish is the actual portrayal of national sovereignty, as it currently exists. It should also reflect the names as closely as possible to those recognized by the political entities of the geographic areas being mapped. To do otherwise would give map readers an unrealistic picture of what is occurring on the ground.”

This makes perfect sense for National Geographic. But as James Scott reminds us in his latest book, “A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control. I think of this as the ‘miniaturization of order.'” Scott adds that, “The order, rationality, abstractness and synoptic legibility of certain kinds of schemes of naming, landscape, architecture, and work processes lend themselves to hierarchical power […] ‘landscapes of control and appropriation.'”

Citizen mapping, especially in repressive environments, often seeks to change that balance of power by redirecting the compass of political power with the use of subversive digital maps. Take last year’s example of Syrian pro-democracy activists changing place & street names depicted on on the Google Map of Syria. They did this intentionally as an act of resistance and defiance. Again, I fully understand and respect that National Geographic’s mandate is completely different to that of pro-democracy activists fighting for freedom. I just wish that Valdés had a least added one sentence to acknowledge the importance of maps for the purposes of resistance and pro-democracy movements. After all, he is himself a refugee from Cuba’s political repression.

There is of course a flip side to all this. While empowering, visibility and legibility can also undermine a community’s autonomy. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously put it, “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.” To be digitally mapped is to be governed, but perhaps at multiple scales including the preferred scale of self-governance and self-determination.

And so, we find ourselves repeating the words of Shakespeare’s famous character Hamlet: “To be, or not to be,” to map, or not to map.

How Civil Disobedience Improves Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa)

Posted on August 22, 2012 | 8 comments

Update: The most recent example of the link between disobedience and disaster response is Occupy #Sandy. As the New York Times and ABC News have noted, “the movement’s connections and ‘altruistic drive’ has led to them being some-what more effective in the northwestern Hurricane Sandy relief movement than ‘larger, more established charity groups.'”As noted here, “the coordinators of the Occupy Sandy relief effort have been working in conjunction with supply distributors, such as the Red Cross and FEMA, while relying on the National Guard for security.” Many describe the movement’s role in response to Sandy as instrumental. The Occupy movement also worked with New York City’s office and other parts of the government. Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised Occupy for their invaluable efforts: “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You guys are great […]. You really are making a difference.” The Occupy Sandy documentary below is well worth watching. I also recommend reading this blog post.

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When Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office following widespread protests in 2001, he complained bitterly that “the popular uprising against him was a coup de text.” Indeed, the mass protests had been primarily organized via SMS. Fast forward to 2012 and the massive floods that re-cently paralyzed the country’s capital. Using mobile phones and social media, ordinary Filipinos crowdsourced the disaster response efforts on their own without any help from the government.

In 2010, hundreds of forest fires ravaged Russia. Within days, volunteers based in Moscow launched their own crowdsourced disaster relief effort, which was seen by many as both more effective and visible than the Kremlin’s response. These volunteers even won high profile awards in recognition of their efforts (picture below). Some were also involved in the crowdsourced response to the recent Krymsk floods. Like their Egyptian counterparts, many Russians are par-ticularly adept at using social media and mobile technologies given the years of experience they have in digital activism and civil resistance.

At the height of last year’s Egyptian revolution, a female activist in Cairo stated the following: “We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” Several weeks later, Egyptian activists used social networking platforms to organize & coordinate their own humanitarian convoys to Tripoli to provide relief to Libyan civilians affected by the fighting.

The same is true of Iranians, as witnessed during the Green Revolution in 2009. Should anyone be surprised that young, digitally savvy Iranians took the lead in using social media and mobile technologies to crowdsource relief efforts in response to the recent earthquakes in the country’s northern region? Given their distrust of the Iranian regime, should anyone be surprised that they opted to deliver the aid directly to the disaster-affected communities themselves?

Whether they are political activists on one day and volunteer humanitarians on another, the individuals behind the efforts described above use the same tools to mobilize and coordinate. And they build social capital in the process—strong and weak ties—regardless of whether they are responding to repressive policies or “natural’ disasters. Social capital facilitates collective action, which is key to political movements and humanitarian response—both on and offline. While some individuals are more politically inclined, others are more drawn to helping those in need during a disaster. Either way, these individuals are already part of overlapping social networks.

In fact, some activists may actually consider their involvement in volunteer-based humanitarian response efforts as an indirect form of nonviolent protest and civil resistance. According to The New York Times, volunteers who responded to Iran’s deadly double earthquake were “a group of young Iranians—a mix of hipsters, off-road motor club members and children of affluent families […]”. They “felt like rebels with a cause […], energized by anger over widespread accusations that Iran’s official relief organizations were not adequately helping survivors […].” Interestingly, Iran’s Supreme Leader actually endorsed this type of private, independent delivery of aid that Iranian volunteers had undertaken. He may want to think that over.

The faster and more ably citizen volunteers can respond to “natural” disasters, the more backlash there may be against governments who are not seen to respond adequately to these disasters. Their legitimacy and capacity to govern may come into question by more sectors of the population. Both Beijing and Iran have already been heavily criticized for their perceived failure in responding to the recent floods and earthquakes. More importantly, perhaps, these crowd-sourced humanitarian efforts may serve to boost the confidence of activists. As one Iranian activist noted, “By organizing our own aid convoy, we showed that we can manage ourselves […]. We don’t need others to tell us what to do.”

In neighboring Pakistan, the government failed catastrophically in its response to the devastating cyclone that struck East Pakistan in 1970. To this day, Cyclone Bhola remains the most deadly cyclone on record, killing some 500,000 people. A week after the hazard struck, the Pakistani President acknowledged that his government had made “mistakes in its handling of the relief efforts due to a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the disaster.” The lack of timely and coordinated government response resulted in massive protests agains the state, which served as an important trigger for the war of independence that led to the creation of Bangladesh. (Just imagine, SMS wasn’t even around then).

Given a confluence of grievances, “natural” disasters may potentially provide a momentary window of opportunity to catalyze regime change. This is perhaps more likely when those citizens responding to a disaster also happen to be savvy digital activists (and vice versa).

8 Comments

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, Social Media

Tagged citizens, civil, Disasters, Regime, Relief, Resistance, Response, State, Volunteers

Seeking the Trustworthy Tweet: Can “Tweetsourcing” Ever Fit the Needs of Humanitarian Organizations?

Posted on June 5, 2011 | 6 comments

Can microblogged data fit the information needs of humanitarian organizations? This is the question asked by a group of academics at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Their study (PDF) is an important contribution to the discourse on humanitarian technology and crisis information. The applied research provides key insights based on a series of interviews with humanitarian professionals. While I largely agree with the majority of the arguments presented in this study, I do have questions regarding the framing of the problem and some of the assertions made.

The authors note that “despite the evidence of strong value to those experiencing the disaster and those seeking information concerning the disaster, there has been very little uptake of message data by large-scale, international humanitarian relief organizations.” This is because real-time message data is “deemed as unverifiable and untrustworthy, and it has not been incorporated into established mechanisms for organizational decision-making.” To this end, “committing to the mobilization of valuable and time sensitive relief supplies and personnel, based on what may turn out be illegitimate claims, has been perceived to be too great a risk.” Thus far, the authors argue, “no mechanisms have been fashioned for harvesting microblogged data from the public in a manner, which facilitates organizational decisions.”

I don’t think this latter assertion is entirely true if one looks at the use of Twitter by the private sector. Take for example the services offered by Crimson Hexagon, which I blogged about 3 years ago. This successful start-up launched by Gary King out of Harvard University provides companies with real-time sentiment analysis of brand perceptions in the Twittersphere precisely to help inform their decision making. Another example is Storyful, which harvests data from authenticated Twitter users to provide highly curated, real-time information via microblogging. Given that the humanitarian community lags behind in the use and adoption of new technologies, it behooves us to look at those sectors that are ahead of the curve to better understand the opportunities that do exist.

Since the study principally focused on Twitter, I’m surprised that the authors did not reference the empirical study that came out last year on the behavior of Twitter users after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile. The study shows that about 95% of tweets related to confirmed reports validated that information. In contrast only 0.03% of tweets denied the validity of these true cases. Interestingly, the results also show that “the number of tweets that deny information becomes much larger when the information corresponds to a false rumor.” In fact, about 50% of tweets will deny the validity of false reports. This means it may very well be posible to detect rumors by using aggregate analysis on tweets.

On framing, I believe the focus on microblogging and Twitter in particular misses the bigger picture which ultimately is about the methodology of crowdsourcing rather than the technology. To be sure, the study by Penn State could just as well have been titled “Seeking the Trustworthy SMS.” I think this important research on microblogging would be stronger if this distinction were made and the resulting analysis tied more closely to the ongoing debate on crowdsourcing crisis information that began during the response to Haiti’s earthquake in 2010.

Also, as was noted during the Red Cross Summit in 2010, more than two-thirds of respondents to a survey noted that they would expect a response within an hour if they posted a need for help on a social media platform (and not just Twitter) during a crisis. So whether humanitarian organizations like it or not, crowdsourced social media information cannot be ignored.

The authors carried out a series of insightful interviews with about a dozen international humanitarian organizations to try and better understand the hesitation around the use of Twitter for humanitarian response. As noted earlier, however, it is not Twitter per se that is a concern but the underlying methodology of crowdsourcing.

As expected, interviewees noted that they prioritize the veracity of information over the speed of communication. “I don’t think speed is necessarily the number one tool that an emergency operator needs to use.” Another interviewee opined that “It might be hard to trust the data. I mean, I don’t think you can make major decisions based on a couple of tweets, on one or two tweets.” What’s interesting about this latter comment is that it implies that only one channel of information, Twitter, is to be used in decision-making, which is a false argument and one that nobody I know has ever made.

Either way, the trade-off between speed and accuracy is a well known one. As mentioned in this blog post from 2009, information is perishable and accuracy is often a luxury in the first few hours and days following a major disaster. As the authors for the study rightly note, “uncertainty is ‘always expected, if sometimes crippling’ (Benini, 1997) for NGOs involved in humanitarian relief.” Ultimately, the question posed by the authors of the Penn study can be boiled down to this: is some information better than no information if it cannot be immediately verified? In my opinion, yes. If you have some information, then at least you can investigate it’s veracity which may lead to action. I also believe that from this philosophical point of view, the answer would still be yes.

Based on the interviews, the authors found that organizations engaged in immediate emergency response were less likely to make use of Twitter (or crowdsourced information) as a channel for information. As one interviewee put it, “Lives are on the line. Every moment counts. We have it down to a science. We know what information we need and we get in and get it…” In contrast, those organizations engaged in subsequent phases of disaster response were thought more likely to make use of crowdsourced data.

I’m not entirely convinced by this: “We know what information we need and we get in and get it…”. Yes, humanitarian organizations typically know but whether they get it, and in time, is certainly not a given. Just look at the humanitarian responses to Haiti and Libya, for example. Organizations may very well be “unwilling to trade data assurance, veracity and authenticity for speed,” but sometimes this mindset will mean having absolutely no information. This is why OCHA asked the Standby Volunteer Taskforce to provide them with a live crowdsourced social media may of Libya. In Haiti, while the UN is not thought to have used crowdsourced SMS data from Mission 4636, other responders like the Marine Corps did.

Still, according to one interviewee, “fast is good, but bad information fast can kill people. It’s got to be good, and maybe fast too.” This assumes that no information doesn’t kill people. Also good information that is late, can also kill people. As one of the interviewees admitted when using traditional methods, “it can be quite slow before all that [information] trickles through all the layers to get to us.” The authors of the study also noted that, “Many [interviewees] were frustrated with how slow the traditional methods of gathering post-disaster data had remained despite the growing ubiquity of smart phones and high quality connectivity and power worldwide.”

On a side note, I found the following comment during the interviews especially revealing: “When we do needs assessments, we drive around and we look with our eyes and we talk to people and we assess what’s on the ground and that’s how we make our evaluations.” One of the common criticisms leveled against the use of crowdsourced information is that it isn’t representative. But then again, driving around, checking things out and chatting with people is hardly going to yield a representative sample either.

One of the main findings from this research has to do with a problem in attitude on the part of humanitarian organizations. “Each of the interviewees stated that their organization did not have the organizational will to try out new technolo-gies. Most expressed this as a lack of resources, support, leadership and interest to adopt new technologies.” As one interview noted, “We tried to get the president and CEO both to use Twitter. We failed abysmally, so they’re not– they almost never use it.” Interestingly, “most of the respondents admitted that many of their technological changes were motivated by the demands of their donors. At this point in time their donors have not demanded that these organizations make use of microblogged data. The subjects believed they would need to wait until this occurred for real change to begin.”

For me the lack of will has less to do with available resources and limited capacity and far more to do with a generational gap. When today’s young professionals in the humanitarian space work their way up to more executive positions, we’ll see a significant change in attitude within these organizations. I’m thinking in particular of the many dozens of core volunteers who played a pivotal role in the crisis mapping operations in Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, Russia and most recently Libya. And when attitude changes, resources can be reallocated and new priorities can be rationalized.

What’s interesting about these interviews is that despite all the concerns and criticisms of crowdsourced Twitter data, all interviewees still see microblogged data as a “vast trove of potentially useful information concerning a disaster zone.” One of the professionals interviewed said, “Yes! Yes! Because that would – again, it would tell us what resources are already in the ground, what resources are still needed, who has the right staff, what we could provide. I mean, it would just – it would give you so much more real-time data, so that as we’re putting our plans together we can react based on what is already known as opposed to getting there and discovering, oh, they don’t really need medical supplies. What they really need is construction supplies or whatever.”

Another professional stated that, “Twitter data could potentially be used the same way… for crisis mapping. When an emergency happens there are so many things going on in the ground, and an emergency response is simply prioritization, taking care of the most important things first and knowing what those are. The difficult thing is that things change so quickly. So being able to gather information quickly…. <with Twitter> There’s enormous power.”

The authors propose three possible future directions. The first is bounded microblogging, which I have long referred to as “bounded crowdsourcing.” It doesn’t make sense to focus on the technology instead of the methodology because at the heart of the issue are the methods for information collection. In “bounded crowdsourcing,” membership is “controlled to only those vetted by a particular organization or community.” This is the approach taken by Storyful, for example. One interviewee acknowledge that “Twitter might be useful right after a disaster, but only if the person doing the Tweeting was from <NGO name removed>, you know, our own people. I guess if our own people were sending us back Tweets about the situation it could help.”

Bounded crowdsourcing overcomes the challenge of authentication and verification but obviously with a tradeoff in the volume of data collected “if an additional means were not created to enable new members through an automatic authentication system, to the bounded microblogging community.” However, the authors feel that bounded crowdsourcing environments “undermine the value of the system” since “the power of the medium lies in the fact that people, out of their own volition, make localized observations and that organizations could harness that multitude of data. The bounded environment argument neutralizes that, so in effect, at that point, when you have a group of people vetted to join a trusted circle, the data does not scale, because that pool by necessity would be small.”

That said, I believe the authors are spot on when they write that “Bounded environments might be a way of introducing Twitter into the humanitarian centric organizational discourse, as a starting point, because these organizations, as seen from the evidence presented above, are not likely to initially embrace the medium. Bounded environments could hence demonstrate the potential for Twitter to move beyond the PR and Communications departments.”

The second possible future direction is to treat crowdsourced data is ambient, “contextual information rather than instrumental information, (i.e., factual in nature).” This grassroots information could be considered as an “add-on to traditional, trusted institutional lines of information gathering.” As one interviewee noted, “Usually information exists. The question is the context doesn’t exist…. that’s really what I see as the biggest value [of crowdsourced information] and why would you use that in the future is creating the context…”.

The authors rightly suggest that “that adding contextual information through microblogged data may alleviate some of the uncertainty during the time of disaster. Since the microblogged data would not be the single data source upon which decisions would be made, the standards for authentication and security could be less stringent. This solution would offer the organization rich contextual data, while reducing the need for absolute data authentication, reducing the need for the organization to structurally change, and reducing the need for significant resources.” This is exactly how I consider and treat crowdsourced data.

The third and final forward-looking solution is computational. The authors “believe better computational models will eventually deduce informational snippets with acceptable levels of trust.” They refer to Ushahidi’s SwiftRiver project as an example.

In sum, this study is an important contribution to the discourse. The challenges around using crowdsourced crisis information are well known. If I come across as optimistic, it is for two reasons. First, I do think a lot can be done to address the challenges. Second, I do believe that attitudes in the humanitarian sector will continue to change.

6 Comments

Posted in Big Data, Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Technologies, Information Forensics, Social Computing, Social Media

Tagged Humanitarian, Organizations, Penn, State, Twitter

Tag Archives: State