iRevolution

Digital Humanitarians and The Theory of Crowd Capital

Posted on April 2, 2013 | 3 Comments

An iRevolution reader very kindly pointed me to this excellent conceptual study: “The Theory of Crowd Capital”. The authors’ observations and insights resonate with me deeply given my experience in crowdsourcing digital humanitarian response. Over two years ago, I published this blog post in which I wrote that, “The value of Crisis Mapping may at times have less to do with the actual map and more with the conversations and new collaborative networks catalyzed by launching a Crisis Mapping project. Indeed, this in part explains why the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) exists in the first place.” I was not very familiar with the concept of social capital at the time, but that’s precisely what I was describing. I’ve since written extensively about the very important role that social capital plays in disaster resilience and digital humanitarian response. But I hadn’t taken the obvious next step: “Crowd Capital.”

John Prpić and Prashant Shukla, the authors of “The Theory of Crowd Capital,” find inspiration in F. A. Hayek, “who in 1945 wrote a seminal work titled: The Use of Knowledge in Society. In this work, Hayek describes dispersed knowledge as:

“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. […] Every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.”

“Crowd Capability,” according to John and Prashant, “is what enables an organization to tap this dispersed knowledge from individuals. More formally, they define Crowd Capability as an “organizational level capability that is defined by the structure, content, and process of an organizations engagement with the dispersed knowledge of individuals—the Crowd.” From their perspective, “it is this engagement of dispersed knowledge through Crowd Capability efforts that endows organizations with data, information, and knowledge previously unavailable to them; and the internal processing of this, in turn, results in the generation of Crowd Capital within the organization.”

In other words, “when an organization defines the structure, content, and processes of its engagement with the dispersed knowledge of individuals, it has created a Crowd Capability, which in turn, serves to generate Crowd Capital.” And so, the authors contend, a Crowd Capable organization “puts in place the structure, content, and processes to access Hayek’s dispersed knowledge from individuals, each of whom has some informational advantage over the other, and thus forming a Crowd for the organization.” Note that a crowd can “exist inside of an organization, exist external to the organization, or a combination of the latter and the former.”

The “Structure” component of Crowd Capability connotes “the geographical divisions and functional units within an organization, and the technological means that they employ to engage a Crowd population for the organization.” The structure component of Crowd Capability is always an Information-Systems-mediated phenomenon. The “Content” of Crowd Capability constitutes “the knowledge, information or data goals that the organization seeks from the population,” while the “Processes” of Crowd Capability are defined as “the internal procedures that the organization will use to organize, filter, and integrate the incoming knowledge, information, and/or data.” The authors observe that in each Crowd Capital case they’ve analyzed , “an organization creates the structure, content, and/or process to engage the knowledge of dispersed individuals through Information Systems.”

Like the other forms of capital, “Crowd Capital requires investments (for example in Crowd Capability), and potentially pays literal or figurative dividends, and hence, is endowed with typical ‘capital-like’ qualities.” But the authors are meticulous when they distinguish Crowd Capital from Intellectual Capital, Human Capital, Social Capital, Political Capital, etc. The main distinguishing factor is that Crowd Capability is strictly an Information-Systems-mediated phenomenon. “This is not to say that Crowd Capability could not be leveraged to create Social Capital for an organization. It likely could, however, Crowd Capability does not require Social Capital to function.”

That said, I would opine that Crowd Capability can function better thanks to Social Capital. Indeed, Social Capital can influence the “structure”, “content” and “processes” integral to Crowd Capability. And so, while the authors argue that “Crowd Capital can be accrued without such relationship and network concerns” that are typical to Social Capital, I would counter that the presence of Social Capital certainly does not take away Crowd Capability but quite on the contrary builds greater capability. Otherwise, Crowd Capability is little else than the cultivation of cognitive surplus in which crowd workers can never unite. The Matrix comes to mind. So this is where my experience in crowdsourcing digital humanitarian response makes me diverge from the authors’ conceptualization of “Crowd Capital.” Take the Blue Pill to stay in the disenfranchised version of Crowd Capital; or take the Red Pill if you want to build the social capital required to hack the system.

To be sure, the authors of Crowd Capital Theory point to Google’s ReCaptcha system for book digitization to demonstrate that Crowd Capability does not require a network of relationships for the accrual of Crowd Capital.” While I understand the return on investment to society both in the form of less spam and more digitized books, this mediated information system is authoritarian. One does not have a choice but to comply, unless you’re a hacker, perhaps. This is why I share Jonathan Zittrain’s point about “The future of the Internet and How To Stop It.” Zittrain promotes the notion of a “Generative Technologies,” which he defines as having the ability “to produce unprompted, user-driven change.”

Krisztina Holly makes a related argument in her piece on crowdscaling. “Like crowdsourcing, crowdscaling taps into the energy of people around the world that want to contribute. But while crowdsourcing pulls in ideas and content from outside the organization, crowdscaling grows and scales its impact outward by empowering the success of others.” Crowdscaling is possible when Crowd Capa-bility generates Crowd Capital by the crowd, for the crowd. In contrast, said crowd cannot hack or change a ReCaptcha requirement if they wish to proceed to the page they’re looking for. In The Matrix, Crowd Capital accrues most directly to The Matrix rather than to the human cocoons being farmed for their metrics. In the same vein, Crowd Capital generated by ReCaptcha accrues most directly to Google Inc. In short, ReCaptcha doesn’t even ask the question: “Blue Pill or Red Pill?” So is it only a matter of time until the users that generate the Crowd Capital unite and revolt, as seems to be the case with the lawsuit against CrowdFlower?

I realize that the authors may have intended to take the conversation on Crowd Capital in a different direction. But they do conclude with a number of inter-esting, open-ended questions that suggest various “flavors” of Crowd Capital are possible, and not just the dark one I’ve just described. I for one will absolutely make use of the term Crowd Capital, but will flavor it based on my experience with digital humanitarias, which suggests a different formula: Social Capital + Social Media + Crowdsourcing = Crowd Capital. In short, I choose the Red Pill.

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, Social Media

Tagged Capital, Crowd, Digital, Human, Humanitarians, Intellectual, microtasking, social

Automatically Extracting Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media

Posted on April 1, 2013 | 6 Comments

My team and I at QCRI have just had this paper (PDF) accepted at the Social Web for Disaster Management workshop at the World Wide Web (WWW 2013) conference in Rio next month. The paper relates directly to our Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR) project. One of our main missions at QCRI is to develop open source and freely available next generation humanitarian technologies to better manage Big (Crisis) Data. Over 20 million tweets and half-a-million Instagram pictures were posted during Hurricane Sandy, for example. In Japan, more 2,000 tweets were posted every second the day after the devastating earthquake and Tsunami struck the Eastern Coast. Recent empirical studies have shown that an important percentage of tweets posted during disaster are informative and even actionable. The challenge before is how to find those proverbial needles in the haystack and to do so in as close to real-time as possible.

So we analyzed disaster tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Joplin Tornado (2011). We demonstrate that disaster-relevant information can be automatically extracted from these datasets. The results indicate that 40% to 80% of tweets that contain disaster-related information can be automatically detected. We also demonstrate that we can correctly identify the type of disaster information 80% to 90% of the time. This means, for example, that once we identify a disaster tweet, we can automatically correctly determine whether that tweet was written by an eyewitness 80%-90% of the time. Because these classifiers are developed using machine learning, they get more accurate with more data. This explains why we are building AIDR. Our aim is not to replace human involvement and oversight but to take much of the weight off the shoulders of humans.

The classifiers we’ve developed automatically identify tweets that are personal in nature and those that are informative—that is, tweets that are of interest to others beyond the author’s immediate circle. We also created classifiers to differentiate between informative content shared by eye-witnesses versus content that is simply recycled by other sources such as the media. What’s more, we also created classifiers to distinguish between various types of informative content. Additionally to classifying, we extract key phrases from each tweet. A key phrase summarizes the essential message of a tweet on a few words, allowing for better visualization/aggregation of content. Below, we list real-world examples of tweets on each class. The underlined text is what the extraction system finds to be the key phrase of each tweet:

Caution and Advice: message conveys/reports information about some warning or a piece of advice about a possible hazard.

.@NYGovCuomo orders closing of NYC bridges. Only Staten Island bridges unaffected at this time. Bridges must close by 7pm. #Sandy

Casualties and Damage: message mentions casualties or infrastructure damage related to the disaster.

At least 39 dead; millions without power in Sandy’s aftermath. http//[Link].

Donations and Offers: message speaks about goods or services offered or needed by the victims of an incident.

400 Volunteers are needed for areas that #Sandy destroyed.
I want to volunteer to help the hurricane Sandy victims. If anyone knows how I can get involved please let me know!

People Missing, Found, or Seen: message reports about a missing or found person affected by an incident, or reports reaction or visit of a celebrity.

rt @911buff: public help needed: 2 boys 2 & 4 missing nearly 24 hours after they got separated from their mom when car submerged in si. #sandy #911buff

Information Sources: message points to information sources, photos, videos; or mentions a website, TV or radio station providing extensive coverage.

RT @NBCNewsPictures: Photos of the unbelievable scenes left in #Hurricane #Sandy’s wake http//[Link] #NYC #NJ

The two metrics used to assess the results of our analysis are: “Detection Rate” and “Hit Ratio”. The best way explain these metrics is by way of analogy. The Detection Rate measures how good your fishing net is. If you know (thanks to sonar) that there are 10 fish in the pond and your net is good enough to catch all 10, then your Detection Rate is 100%. If you catch 8 out of 10, you rate is 80%. In other words, the Detection Rate is a measure of sensitivity. Now say you’ve designed the world’s first ever “Smart Net” which only catches salmon and thus leaves all other fish in the same pond alone. Now say you caught 5 fish and that you wanted salmon. If all 5 are salmon, your Hit Ratio is 100%. If only 2 of them are salmon, then your Hit Ratio is 40%. In other words, Hit Ratio is a measure of accuracy.

Turning to our results, the Detection Rate was higher for Joplin (78%) than for Sandy (41%). The Hit Ratio is also higher for Joplin (90%) than for Sandy (78%). In other words, our classifiers find the Sandy dataset more challenging to decode. That that said, the Hit Ratio is rather high in both cases, indicating that when our system extracts some part of the tweet, it is often the correct part. In sum, our approach can detect from 40% to 80% of the tweets containing disaster-related information and can correctly identify the specific type of disaster information 80% to 90% of the time. This means, for example, that once we identify a disaster tweet, we can automatically correctly determine whether that tweet was written by an eyewitness between 80% to 90% of the time. Because these classifiers are developed using machine learning, they get more accurate with more data. This explains why we are building AIDR. Our aim is not to replace human involvement and oversight but to significantly lessen the load on humans.

This tweet-level extraction is key to extracting more reliable high-level information. Observing, for instance, that a large number of tweets in similar locations report the same infrastructure as being damaged, may be a strong indicator that this is indeed the case. So we are very much continuing our research and working hard to increase both Detection Rates and Hit Ratios.

Using Crowdsourcing to Counter the Spread of False Rumors on Social Media During Crises

Posted on March 31, 2013 | 12 Comments

My new colleague Professor Yasuaki Sakamoto at the Stevens Institute of Tech-nology (SIT) has been carrying out intriguing research on the spread of rumors via social media, particularly on Twitter and during crises. In his latest research, “Toward a Social-Technological System that Inactivates False Rumors through the Critical Thinking of Crowds,” Yasu uses behavioral psychology to under-stand why exposure to public criticism changes rumor-spreading behavior on Twitter during disasters. This fascinating research builds very nicely on the excellent work carried out by my QCRI colleague ChaTo who used this “criticism dynamic” to show that the credibility of tweets can be predicted (by topic) with-out analyzing their content. Yasu’s study also seeks to find the psychological basis for the Twitter’s self-correcting behavior identified by ChaTo and also John Herman who described Twitter as a ”Truth Machine” during Hurricane Sandy.

Twitter is still a relatively new platform, but the existence and spread of false rumors is certainly not. In fact, a very interesting study dated 1950 found that “in the past 1,000 years the same types of rumors related to earthquakes appear again and again in different locations.” Early academic studies on the spread of rumors revealed that “that psychological factors, such as accuracy, anxiety, and impor-tance of rumors, affect rumor transmission.” One such study proposed that the spread of a rumor “will vary with the importance of the subject to the individuals concerned times the ambiguity of the evidence pertaining to the topic at issue.” Later studies added “anxiety as another key element in rumormongering,” since “the likelihood of sharing a rumor was related to how anxious the rumor made people feel. At the same time, however, the literature also reveals that counter-measures do exist. Critical thinking, for example, decreases the spread of rumors. The literature defines critical thinking as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

“Given the growing use and participatory nature of social media, critical thinking is considered an important element of media literacy that individuals in a society should possess.” Indeed, while social media can “help people make sense of their situation during a disaster, social media can also become a rumor mill and create social problems.” As discussed above, psychological factors can influence rumor spreading, particularly when experiencing stress and mental pressure following a disaster. Recent studies have also corroborated this finding, confirming that “differences in people’s critical thinking ability […] contributed to the rumor behavior.” So Yasu and his team ask the following interesting question: can critical thinking be crowdsourced?

“Not everyone needs to be a critical thinker all the time,” writes Yasu et al. As long as some individuals are good critical thinkers in a specific domain, their timely criticisms can result in an emergent critical thinking social system that can mitigate the spread of false information. This goes to the heart of the self-correcting behavior often observed on social media and Twitter in particular. Yasu’s insight also provides a basis for a bounded crowdsourcing approach to disaster response. More on this here, here and here.

“Related to critical thinking, a number of studies have paid attention to the role of denial or rebuttal messages in impeding the transmission of rumor.” This is the more “visible” dynamic behind the self-correcting behavior observed on Twitter during disasters. So while some may spread false rumors, others often try to counter this spread by posting tweets criticizing rumor-tweets directly. The following questions thus naturally arise: “Are criticisms on Twitter effective in mitigating the spread of false rumors? Can exposure to criticisms minimize the spread of rumors?”

Yasu and his colleagues set out to test the following hypotheses: Exposure to criticisms reduces people’s intent to spread rumors; which mean that ex-posure to criticisms lowers perceived accuracy, anxiety, and importance of rumors. They tested these hypotheses on 87 Japanese undergraduate and grad-uate students by using 20 rumor-tweets related to the 2011 Japan Earthquake and 10 criticism-tweets that criticized the corresponding rumor-tweets. For example:

Rumor-tweet: “Air drop of supplies is not allowed in Japan! I though it has already been done by the Self- Defense Forces. Without it, the isolated people will die! I’m trembling with anger. Please retweet!”

Criticism-tweet: “Air drop of supplies is not prohibited by the law. Please don’t spread rumor. Please see 4-(1)-丸 4-エ.”

The researchers found that “exposing people to criticisms can reduce their intent to spread rumors that are associated with the criticisms, providing support for the system.” In fact, “Exposure to criticisms increased the proportion of people who stop the spread of rumor-tweets approximately 1.5 times [150%]. This result indicates that whether a receiver is exposed to rumor or criticism first makes a difference in her decision to spread the rumor. Another interpretation of the result is that, even if a receiver is exposed to a number of criticisms, she will benefit less from this exposure when she sees rumors first than when she sees criticisms before rumors.”

Findings also revealed three psychological factors that were related to the differences in the spread of rumor-tweets: one’s own perception of the tweet’s accuracy, the anxiety cause by the tweet, and the tweet’s perceived importance. The results also indicate that “exposure to criticisms reduces the perceived accuracy of the succeeding rumor-tweets, paralleling the findings by previous research that refutations or denials decrease the degree of belief in rumor.” In addition, the perceived accuracy of criticism-tweets by those exposed to rumors first was significantly higher than the criticism-first group. The results were similar vis-à-vis anxiety. “Seeing criticisms before rumors reduced anxiety associated with rumor-tweets relative to seeing rumors first. This result is also consistent with previous research findings that denial messages reduce anxiety about rumors. Participants in the criticism-first group also perceived rumor-tweets to be less important than those in the rumor-first group.” The same was true vis-à-vis the perceived importance of a tweet. That said, “When the rumor-tweets are perceived as more accurate, the intent to spread the rumor-tweets are stronger; when rumor-tweets cause more anxiety, the intent to spread the rumor-tweets is stronger; when the rumor-tweets are perceived as more im-portance, the intent to spread the rumor-tweets is also stronger.”

So how do we use these findings to enhance the critical thinking of crowds and design crowdsourced verification platforms such as Verily? Ideally, such a platform would connect rumor tweets with criticism-tweets directly. “By this design, information system itself can enhance the critical thinking of the crowds.” That said, the findings clearly show that sequencing matters—that is, being exposed to rumor tweets first vs criticism tweets first makes a big differ-ence vis-à-vis rumor contagion. The purpose of a platform like Verily is to act as a repo-sitory for crowdsourced criticisms and rebuttals; that is, crowdsourced critical thinking. Thus, the majority of Verily users would first be exposed to questions about rumors, such as: “Has the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles been destroyed by the Earthquake?” Users would then be exposed to the crowd-sourced criticisms and rebuttals.

In conclusion, the spread of false rumors during disasters will never go away. “It is human nature to transmit rumors under uncertainty.” But social-technological platforms like Verily can provide a repository of critical thinking and ed-ucate users on critical thinking processes themselves. In this way, we may be able to enhance the critical thinking of crowds.

GDACSmobile: Disaster Responders Turn to Bounded Crowdsourcing

Posted on March 27, 2013 | 5 Comments

GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, sparked my interest in technology and disaster response when it was first launched back in 2004, which is why I’ve referred to GDACS in multiple blog posts since. This near real-time, multi-hazard monitoring platform is a joint initiative between the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission (EC). GDACS serves to consolidate and improve the dissemination of crisis-related information including rapid mathematical analyses of expected disaster impact. The resulting risk information is distributed via Web and auto-mated email, fax and SMS alerts.

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with two new colleagues, Daniel Link and Adam Widera, who are researchers at the University of Muenster’s European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). Daniel and Adam have been working on GDACSmobile, a smartphone app that was initially developed to extend the reach of the GDACS portal. This project originates from a student project supervised by Daniel, Adam along with the Chair of the Center Bernd Hellingrath in cooperation with both Tom de Groeve from the Joint Research Center (JRC) and Minu Kumar Limbu, who is now with UNICEF Kenya.

GDACSmobile is intended for use by disaster responders and the general public, allowing for a combined crowdsourcing and “bounded crowdsourcing“ approach to data collection and curation. This bounded approach was a deliberate design feature for GDACSmobile from the outset. I coined the term “bounded crowd-sourcing” four years ago (see this blog post from 2009). The “bounded crowd-sourcing” approach uses “snowball sampling” to grow a crowd of trusted reporters for the collection of crisis information. For example, one invites 5 (or more) trusted local reports to collect relevant information and subsequently ask each of these to invite 5 additional reporters who they fully trust; And so on, and so forth. I’m thrilled to see this term applied in practical applications such GDACSmobile. For more on this approach, please see these blog posts.

GDACSmobile, which operates on all major mobile smartphones, uses a delibera-tely minimalist approach to situation reporting and can be used to collect info-rmation (via text & image) while offline. The collected data is then automatically transmitted when a connection becomes available. Users can also view & filter data via map view and in list form. Daniel and Adam are considering the addition of an icon-based data-entry interface instead of text-based data-entry since the latter is more cumbersome & time-consuming.

Meanwhile, the server side of GDACSmobile facilitates administrative tasks such as the curation of data submitted by app users and shared on Twitter. Other social media platforms may be added in the future, such as Flickr, to retrieve relevant pictures from disaster-affected areas (similar to GeoFeedia). The server-side moderation feature is used to ensure high data quality standards. But the ERCIS researchers are also open to computational solutions, which is one reason GDACSmobile is not a ‘data island’ and why other systems for computational analysis, microtasking etc., can be used to process the same dataset. The server also “offers a variety of JSON services to allow ‘foreign’ systems to access the data. [...] SQL queries can also be used with admin access to the server, and it would be very possible to export tables to spreadsheets [...].”

I very much look forward to following GDACSmobile’s progress. Since Daniel and Adam have designed their app to be open and are also themselves open to con-sidering computational solutions, I have already begun to discuss with them our AIDR project (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) project at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). I believe that making the ADIR-GDACS interoperable would make a whole lot of sense. Until then, if you’re going to this year’s International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2013) in May, then be sure to participate in the workshop (PDF) that Daniel and Adam are running there. The side-event will present the state of the art and future trends of rapid assessment tools to stimulate a conver-sation on current solutions and developments in mobile tech-nologies for post-disaster data analytics and situational awareness. My colleague Dr. Imran Muhammad from QCRI will also be there to present findings from our crisis computing research, so I highly recommend connecting with him.

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Tech, Social Media

Tagged App, Bounded, Crowdsourcing, curation, Disaster, GDACS, GDACSmobile, Response, Smartphone, Twitter

Zooniverse: The Answer to Big (Crisis) Data?

Posted on March 26, 2013 | 3 Comments

Both humanitarian and development organizations are completely unprepared to deal with the rise of “Big Crisis Data” & “Big Development Data.” But many still hope that Big Data is but an illusion. Not so, as I’ve already blogged here, here and here. This explains why I’m on a quest to tame the Big Data Beast. Enter Zooniverse. I’ve been a huge fan of Zooniverse for as long as I can remember, and certainly long before I first mentioned them in this post from two years ago. Zooniverse is a citizen science platform that evolved from GalaxyZoo in 2007. Today, Zooniverse “hosts more than a dozen projects which allow volunteers to participate in scientific research” (1). So, why do I have a major “techie crush” on Zooniverse?

Oh let me count the ways. Zooniverse interfaces are absolutely gorgeous, making them a real pleasure to spend time with; they really understand user-centered design and motivations. The fact that Zooniverse is conversent in multiple disciplines is incredibly attractive. Indeed, the platform has been used to produce rich scientific data across multiple fields such as astronomy, ecology and climate science. Furthermore, this citizen science beauty has a user-base of some 800,000 registered volunteers—with an average of 500 to 1,000 new volunteers joining every day! To place this into context, the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a digital humanitarian group has about 1,000 volunteers in total. The open source Zooniverse platform also scales like there’s no tomorrow, enabling hundreds of thousands to participate on a single deployment at any given time. In short, the software supporting these pioneering citizen science projects is well tested and rapidly customizable.

At the heart of the Zooniverse magic is microtasking. If you’re new to microtasking, which I often refer to as “smart crowdsourcing,” this blog post provides a quick introduction. In brief, Microtasking takes a large task and breaks it down into smaller microtasks. Say you were a major (like really major) astro-nomy buff and wanted to tag a million galaxies based on whether they are spiral or elliptical galaxies. The good news? The kind folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have already sent you a hard disk packed full of telescope images. The not-so-good news? A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals it would take 3-5 years, working 24 hours/day and 7 days/week to tag a million galaxies. Ugh!

Screen Shot 2013-03-25 at 4.11.14 PM

But you’re a smart cookie and decide to give this microtasking thing a go. So you upload the pictures to a microtasking website. You then get on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and invite (nay beg) your friends (and as many strangers as you can find on the suddenly-deserted digital streets), to help you tag a million galaxies. Naturally, you provide your friends, and the surprisingly large number good digital Samaritans who’ve just show up, with a quick 2-minute video intro on what spiral and elliptical galaxies look like. You explain that each participant will be asked to tag one galaxy image at a time by simply by clicking the “Spiral” or “Elliptical” button as needed. Inevitably, someone raises their hands to ask the obvious: “Why?! Why in the world would anyone want to tag a zillion galaxies?!”

Well, only cause analyzing the resulting data could yield significant insights that may force a major rethink of cosmology and our place in the Universe. “Good enough for us,” they say. You breathe a sigh of relief and see them off, cruising towards deep space to bolding go where no one has gone before. But before you know it, they’re back on planet Earth. To your utter astonishment, you learn that they’re done with all the tagging! So you run over and check the data to see if they’re pulling your leg; but no, not only are 1 million galaxies tagged, but the tags are highly accurate as well. If you liked this little story, you’ll be glad to know that it happened in real life. GalaxyZoo, as the project was called, was the flash of brilliance that ultimately launched the entire Zooniverse series.

No, the second Zooniverse project was not an attempt to pull an Oceans 11 in Las Vegas. One of the most attractive features of many microtasking platforms such as Zooniverse is quality control. Think of slot machines. The only way to win big is by having three matching figures such as the three yellow bells in the picture above (righthand side). Hit the jackpot and the coins will flow. Get two out three matching figures (lefthand side), and some slot machines may toss you a few coins for your efforts. Microtasking uses the same approach. Only if three participants tag the same picture of a galaxy as being a spiral galaxy does that data point count. (Of course, you could decide to change the requirement from 3 volunteers to 5 or even 20 volunteers). This important feature allows micro-tasking initiatives to ensure a high standard of data quality, which may explain why many Zooniverse projects have resulted in major scientific break-throughs over the years.

The Zooniverse team is currently running 15 projects, with several more in the works. One of the most recent Zooniverse deployments, Planet Four, received some 15,000 visitors within the first 60 seconds of being announced on BBC TV. Guess how many weeks it took for volunteers to tag over 2,000,0000 satellite images of Mars? A total of 0.286 weeks, i.e., forty-eight hours! Since then, close to 70,000 volunteers have tagged and traced well over 6 million Martian “dunes.” For their Andromeda Project, digital volunteers classified over 7,500 star clusters per hour, even though there was no media or press announce-ment—just one newsletter sent to volunteers. Zooniverse de-ployments also involve tagging earth-based pictures (in contrast to telescope imagery). Take this Serengeti Snapshot deployment, which invited volunteers to classify animals using photographs taken by 225 motion-sensor cameras in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. Volunteers swarmed this project to the point that there are no longer any pictures left to tag! So Zooniverse is eagerly waiting for new images to be taken in Serengeti and sent over.

One of my favorite Zooniverse features is Talk, an online discussion tool used for all projects to provide a real-time interface for volunteers and coordinators, which also facilitates the rapid discovery of important features. This also allows for socializing, which I’ve found to be particularly important with digital humanitarian deployments (such as these). One other major advantage of citizen science platforms like Zooniverse is that they are very easy to use and therefore do not require extensive prior-training (think slot machines). Plus, participants get to learn about new fields of science in the process. So all in all, Zooniverse makes for a great date, which is why I recently reached out to the team behind this citizen science wizardry. Would they be interested in going out (on a limb) to explore some humanitarian (and development) use cases? “Why yes!” they said.

Microtasking platforms have already been used in disaster response, such as MapMill during Hurricane Sandy, Tomnod during the Somali Crisis and CrowdCrafting during Typhoon Pablo. So teaming up with Zooniverse makes a whole lot of sense. Their microtasking software is the most scalable one I’ve come across yet, it is open source and their 800,000 volunteer user-base is simply unparalleled. If Zooniverse volunteers can classify 2 million satellite images of Mars in 48 hours, then surely they can do the same for satellite images of disaster-affected areas on Earth. Volunteers responding to Sandy created some 80,000 assessments of infrastructure damage during the first 48 hours alone. It would have taken Zooniverse just over an hour. Of course, the fact that the hurricane affected New York City and the East Coast meant that many US-based volunteers rallied to the cause, which may explain why it only took 20 minutes to tag the first batch of 400 pictures. What if the hurricane had hit a Caribbean instead? Would the surge of volunteers may have been as high? Might Zooniverse’s 800,000+ standby volunteers also be an asset in this respect?

Clearly, there is huge potential here, and not only vis-a-vis humanitarian use-cases but development one as well. This is precisely why I’ve already organized and coordinated a number of calls with Zooniverse and various humanitarian and development organizations. As I’ve been telling my colleagues at the United Nations, World Bank and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, Zooniverse is the Ferrari of Microtasking, so it would be such a big shame if we didn’t take it out for a spin… you know, just a quick test-drive through the rugged terrains of humanitarian response, disaster preparedness and international development.

Postscript: As some iRevolution readers may know, I am also collaborating with the outstanding team at CrowdCrafting, who have also developed a free & open-source microtasking platform for citizen science projects (also for disaster response here). I see Zooniverse and CrowCrafting as highly syner-gistic and complementary. Because CrowdCrafting is still in early stages, they fill a very important gap found at the long tail. In contrast, Zooniverse has been already been around for half-a-decade and can caters to very high volume and high profile citizen science projects. This explains why we’ll all be getting on a call in the very near future.

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Posted in Big Data, Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Satellite Imagery

Tagged development, Disaster, Humanitarian, microtasking, Preparedness, Response, UN, WorldBank, Zooniverse

Resilience = Anarchism = Resilience?

Posted on March 25, 2013 | 4 Comments

Resilience is often defined as the capacity for self-organization, which in essence is cooperation without hierarchy. In turn, such cooperation implies mutuality; reciprocation, mutual dependence. This is what the French politician, philo-sopher, economist and socialist “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had in mind when he first used the term ‘anarchism,’ namely, mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” (1).

As renowned Yale Professor James Scott explains in his latest book, Two Cheers for Anarchism, “Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people.” To be sure, “most villages and neighborhoods function precisely be-cause of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization, let alone hierarchy. In other words, the experience of anar-chistic mutuality is ubiquitous. The existence, power and reach of the nation-state over the centuries may have undermined the self-organizing capacity (and hence resilience) of individuals and small communities.” Indeed, “so many functions that were once accomplished by mutuality among equals and informal coordination are now state organized or state supervised.” In other words, “the state, arguably, destroys the natural initiative and responsibility that arise from voluntary cooperation.”

This is goes to the heart what James Scott argues in his new book, and he does so in a very compelling manner. Says Scott: “I am suggesting that two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.” And yet, we also see a very different picture of reality, one in which solidarity thrives and mutual-aid remains the norm: we see this reality surface over & over during major disasters—a reality facilitated by mobile technology and social media networks.

Recall Jürgen Habermas’s treatise that “those who take on the tools of open expression become a public, and the presence of a synchronized public increas-ingly constrains undemocratic rulers while expanding the right of that public.” One of the main instruments for synchronization is what the military refers to as “shared awareness.” As my colleague Clay Shirky notes in his excellent piece on The Political Power of Social Media, “shared awareness is the ability of each member of a group to not only understand the situation at hand but also under-stand that everyone else does, too. Social media increase shared awareness by propagating messages through social networks.” Moreover, while “Opinions are first transmitted by the media,” they are then “echoed by friends, family mem-bers, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference.”

In 1990, James Scott published Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, in which he distinguishes between public and hidden transcripts. The former describes the open, public interactions that take place between dominators and oppressed while hidden transcripts relate to the critique of power that “goes on offstage” and which the power elites cannot decode. This hidden transcript is comprised of the second step described above, i.e., the social conversations that ultimately change political behavior. Scott writes that when the oppressed classes publicize this “hidden transcript”, they become conscious of its common status. Borrowing from Habermas, the oppressed thereby become a public and more importantly a synchronized public. Social media is the metronome that can synchronize the collective publication of the hidden trans-cript, yielding greater shared awareness that feeds on itself, thereby threatening the balance of power between Leviathan and now-empowered and self-organized mutual-aid communities.

I have previously argued that social media and online social networks also can and do foster social capital, which increases capacity for self-organization and renders local communities more resilient & independent, thus sowing the seeds for future social movements. In other words, habits of mutuality are not all lost and the Leviathan may still face some surprises. As Peter Kropotkin observed well over 100 years ago in his exhaustive study, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, cooperation and mutual aid are the most important factors in the evolution of species and their ability to survive. “There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense… Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”

Sociability is the tendency or property of being social, of interacting with others. Social media, meanwhile, has become the media for mass social interaction; enabling greater volumes of interactions than at any other time in human history. By definition, these mass social interactions radically increase the probability of mutuality and self-organization. And so, as James Scott puts it best, Two Cheers for Anarchism!

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Posted in Digital Activism, iRevolution, Social Media

Tagged Anarchism, Capital, Habermas, James, Resilience, Scott, Shirky, social

GeoFeedia: Ready for Digital Disaster Response

Posted on March 24, 2013 | 15 Comments

GeoFeedia was not originally designed to support humanitarian operations. But last year’s blog post on the potential of GeoFeedia for crisis mapping caught the interest of CEO Phil Harris. So he kindly granted the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) free access to the platform. In return, we provided his team with feedback on what features (listed here) would make GeoFeedia more useful for digital disaster response. This was back in summer 2012. I recently learned that they’ve been quite busy since. Indeed, I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the stage with Phil and his team at this superb conference on social media for emergency management. After listening to their talk, I realized it was high time to publish an update on GeoFeedia, especially since we had used the tool just two months earlier in response to Typhoon Pablo, one of the worst disasters to hit the Philippines in the past 100 years.

The 1-minute video is well worth watching if you’re new to GeoFeedia. The plat-form enables hyper local searches for information by location across multiple social media channels such as Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Picasa & now Instagram. One of my favorite GeoFeedia features is the awesome geofeed (digital fence), which you can learn more about here. So what’s new besides Instagram? Well, the first suggestion I made last year was to provide users with the option of searching by both location and topic, rather than just location alone. And presto, this now possible, which means that digital humanitarians today can zoom into a disaster-affected area and filter by social media type, date and hashtag. This makes the geofeed feature even more compelling for crisis response, especially since geofeeds can also be saved and shared.

The vast majority of social media monitoring tools out there first filter by key-word and hashtag. Only later do they add location. As Phil points out, this mean they easily miss 70% of hyper local social media reports. Most users and org-anizations, who pay hefty licensing fees to uses these platforms, are typically unaware of this. The fact that GeoFeedia first filters by location is not an accident. This recent study (PDF) of the 2012 London Olympics showed that social media users posted close to 170,000 geo-tagged to Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube during the games. But only 31% of these geo-tagged posts contained any Olympic-specific keywords and/or hashtags! So they decided to analyze another large event and again found the number of results drop by about 70% when not first filtering by location. Phil argues that people in a crisis situation obviously don’t wait for keywords or hashtags to form; so he expects this drop to happen for disasters as well. “Traditional keyword and hashtag search thus be complemented with a geo-graphical search in order to provide a full picture of social media content that is contextually relevant to an event.”

One of my other main recommendations to Phil & team last year had to do with analytics. There is a strong need for an “Analytics function that produces summary statistics and trends analysis for a geofeed of interest. This is where Geofeedia could better capture temporal dynamics by including charts, graphs and simple time-series analysis to depict how events have been unfolding over the past hour vs 12 hours, 24 hours, etc.” Well sure enough, one of GeoFeedia’s major new features is a GeoAnalytics Dashboard; an interface that enables users to discover temporal trends and patterns in social media—and to do so by geofeed. This means a user can now draw a geofeed around a specific area of interest in a given disaster zone and search for pictures that capture major infrastructure damage on a specified date that contain tags or descriptions with the words “#earthquake”, “damage,” “buildings,” etc. As Phil rightly points out, this provides a “huge time advantage during a crisis to give a yet another filtered layer of intelligence; in effect, social media that is highly relevant and actionable ‘bubbling-up to the top’ of the pile.”

I truly am a huge fan of the GeoFeedia platform. Plus, Phil & team have been very responsive to our interests in using their tool for disaster response. So I’m ex-cited to see which features they build out next. They’ve already got a “data portability” functionality that enables data export. Users can also publish content from GeoFeedia directly to their own social networks. Moreover, the filtered content produced by geofeeds can also be shared with individual who do not have a GeoFeedia account. In any event, I hope the team will take into account two items from my earlier wish list—namely Sentiment Analysis and GeoAlerts.

A Sentiment Analysis feature would capture the general mood and sentiment expressed hyper-locally within a defined geofeed in real-time. The automated Geo-Alerts feature would make the geofeed king. A GeoAlerts functionality would enable users to trigger specific actions based on different kinds of social media traffic within a given geofeed of interest. For example, I’d like to be notified if the number of pictures posted within my geofeed that are tagged with the words “#earthquake” and “damage,” increases by more than 20% in any given hour. Similarly, one could set a geofeed’s GeoAlert for a 10% increase in the number of tweets with the words “cholera” and “diarrhea” (these need not be in English, by the way) in any given 10-minute period. Users would then receive GeoAlerts via automated emails, Tweets and/or SMS’s. This feature would in effect make the GeoFeedia more of a mobile and ”hands free” platform, like Waze for example.

My first blog post on GeoFeedia was entitled “GeoFeedia: Next Generation Crisis Mapping Technology?” The answer today is a definite “Yes!” While the platform was not originally designed with disaster response in mind, the team has since been adding important features that make the tool increasingly useful for humanitarian applications. And GeoFeedia has plans for more exciting develop-ments in 2013. Their commitment to innovation and strong continued interest in supporting digital disaster response is why I’m hoping to work more closely with them in the years to come. For example, our AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) platform would really add a strong Machine Learning com-ponent to GeoFeedia’s search function, in effect enabling the tool to go beyond simple keyword search.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Tech, Social Media

Tagged Disaster, Flickr, Geofeedia, Georeference, Geotagg, Instagram, Response, Twitter, Youtube

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Zooniverse: The Answer to Big (Crisis) Data?

Patrick Meier (PhD)

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Patrick Meier (PhD)

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