The Economist recently published this insightful article entitled” Six Degrees of Mobilisation: To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?” The notion, six degrees of separation, comes from Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1960s which found that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people in the US. Last year, Facebook found that users on the social network were separated by an average of 4.7 hops. The Economist thus asks the following, fascinating question:
“Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilisation, which treats the population as a distributed knowledge resource which can be tapped using modern technology.”
The article refers to DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge, which I already blogged about here: “Time-Critical Crowdsourcing for Social Mobilization and Crowd-Solving.” The Economist also references DARPA’s TagChallenge. In both cases, the winning teams leveraged social media using crowdsourcing and clever incentive mechanisms. Can this approach also be used to verify social media content during a crisis?
This new study on disasters suggests that the “degrees of separation” between any two organizations in the field is 5. So if the location of red balloons and individuals can be crowdsourced surprisingly quickly, then can the evidence necessary to verify social media content during a disaster be collected as rapidly and reliably? If we are only separated by four-to-six degrees, then this would imply that it only takes that many hops to find someone connected to me (albeit indirectly) who could potentially confirm or disprove the authenticity of a particularly piece of information. This approach was used very successfully in Kyrgyzstan a couple years ago. Can we develop a platform to facilitate this process? And if so, what design features (e.g., gamification) are necessary to mobilize participants and make this tool a success?
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