Casanovas, Pompeu

Poblet, Marta

Diposit Digital de Documents de la UAB

Marta PobletDirector of the Institute of Law and Technology atUniversitat Autònoma de BarcelonaPompeu CasanovasProfessor Dpt Political Science Autonomous Universityof Barcelona & Visiting Professor, Salvador deMadariaga Fellow,School of Management andInformation Systems at Victoria University16 May 2012, 6.04am AESTAUT HO RSWeb 2.0 tools and mobile technologies have lowered the barriers not just for people to accessthe internet but to create and share content. Through open-source, collaborative programssuch as wikis, the creation and distribution of information has effectively been crowdsourced.But can this democratisation of the production of information and the expansion of networkedglobal communities lead to action in solving real-world problems? As inventor Vinay Gupta ofHexayurt sharply puts it: “Ten years from now there will be 2 billion people with broadbandinternet access, but no toilet.”Access to technology is only ever one side of the problem. The other is how people bridge thegap between the creation and sharing of knowledge and action based on that information.Crowdsourced crisis mapping represents a significant step upon this path.Syria crisis: the violence mapped by the UN. FreedomHouseCrowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters http://theconversation.com/crowdsourced-crisis-mapping-how-it-works...1 de 4 20/06/2014 16:26Crisis mapping is often equated to a geographic information system (GIS). GIS is a way ofvisually presenting, analysing and managing data and statistics, primarily through the use ofmaps. For example, a map could show the population density throughout Australia by using asliding scale of colours (see image above).Crisis mapping goes further by embracing a broader set of tasks that provide a geolocatedvisualisation, allowing for filtering, categorisation and analysis of information. The WomenUnder Siege crowdmap from Syria, for instance, allows you to filter the information by categoryof attack, location and the report’s source, while checking for any available related media.The Ushahidi (“witness” in Kiswahili) interactive mapping platform, with more than 20,000deployments across 132 countries, ranks among the most popular crisis mapping tools.Ushahidi was developed in the wake of the disputed Kenyan elections of 2007 as a way ofreporting eye-witness accounts of violence across the country. People could text thevolunteers of Ushahidi, who would display the reports through Google Maps.In 2010, the team from Ushahidi released Crowdmap, a crowdsourced version of the platform,which allows people to “check-in” with their location and add relevant reports and information.Crowdsourced crisis mapping aims to harness the streams of information that flow throughsocial media to provide response organisations and other interested parties withnear-real-time, categorised, and geolocated data.The explosion of user-generated content through social media can be leveraged to assistfirst-aid responders and humanitarian organisations in the wake of natural disasters, crisesand violent conflicts, or even (more tongue-in-cheek) a zombie apocalypse.Australian Bureau of StatisticsClick to enlargeCrowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters http://theconversation.com/crowdsourced-crisis-mapping-how-it-works...2 de 4 20/06/2014 16:26Automatic processes can be applied to extract, filter and structure content from social media –tasks that are currently performed by human volunteers.In the 2011 Libya Crisis Map, a joint initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordinationof Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and the Standby Task Force, online volunteers would workin shifts to monitor social media sites and extract relevant information to manually createreports.Other teams would provide GIS coordinates, perform categorisation checks and seek to verifythe information – a highly complex task when it comes to crowdsourced information.The advantages of crowdsourcing are becoming apparent in other areas. Software engineerand political activist Tarik Nesh-Nash launched an on-line platform where citizens would postcomments and vote for articles of the new Moroccan constitution, attracting 200,000 visits in afew weeks.He has partnered with Transparency Morocco to set up Mamdawrinch (see image below),inspired by the Indian site I Paid A Bribe – a site dedicated to tracking, verifying and mappingcorruption incidents across the country.But there is still plenty of room to foster further cooperation between computer scientists,human rights activists and digital citizens. The social web and the “web of data” have tobecome more inter-connected and usable in the deployment processes.The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Open Linking Data Community Project is a collectiveeffort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make it more readily availableand reusable.Screenshot of the Libya Crisis Map used in differentpresentations by Standby Task Force members.Click to enlargeCrowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters http://theconversation.com/crowdsourced-crisis-mapping-how-it-works...3 de 4 20/06/2014 16:26The W3C is also working on a framework for sharing knowledge and emergency managementoperating systems, with the aim of helping to classify and manage the content of reports. But,this has yet to be tested through the reality of crisis mapping deployment.Digital neighbourhood actions can operate under extremely difficult scenarios: collapsedstates, countries undergoing transitional justice and development of democratic institutions.In sensitive environments such as the Libya Crisis Map or, more recently, the Syria Tracker,building a set of trusted information sources may involve major security issues. It can seriouslycompromise the safety of the people who originally published information on social media.The crisis mapping community is currently developing general standards and the ethical,privacy and security issues that need to be carefully addressed in each case thatcrowdsourced crisis mapping is deployed.To protect and maintain the ability of human-rights activists to operate in this digital space, arenewed framework, or “relational law”, is required that can bring technology, networkedgovernance and legal protection together.One thing’s for sure – there will never be a shortage of crises nor, hopefully, enough peoplewilling to help solve them.Crowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters http://theconversation.com/crowdsourced-crisis-mapping-how-it-works...4 de 4 20/06/2014 16:26

Crowdsourced crisis mapping : how it works and why it matters

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Crowdsourced crisis mapping : how it works and why it matters

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