Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding
Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. The term crowdsourcing was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in the issue of Wired (Bannerman, 2012).
Crowdsourcing is optimistically depicted as a way of putting to use the creativity of the public for free, or for a moderate charge. ‘Turkers’, a term for online workers who use the sites, apparently makes small amounts of money by executing online tasks.
For example, a website named Mechanical Turk operated by Amazon, grants individuals or organizations to post micro-tasks, such as “find the email address for a company” (payment: $0.01/each address), “vote for the best translation” (payment: $0.05/each link), or “rate adult-oriented videos for quality and relevance” (payment: $0.15/each rating) (Amazon, 2010).
Other crowdsourcing platforms include:
Focus on crowdsourcing research and development for pharmaceutical and biomedical companies,
The world's biggest graphics design marketplace, associates customers requiring custom design work, for example, websites and logos to a thriving network of talented designers who present a new custom design to the site each 7-10 seconds.
Social media and crowdsourcing
Social media has played a significant role throughout the years in catastrophic natural disaster as an information propagator that can be utilized for disaster relief. After the devastating and disastrous Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010, individuals published numerous photographs and texts about their own encounters during the earthquake via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogs and videos were posted on YouTube. In only 48 hours, the Red Cross received US$8 million in donations legitimately from texts, which represents one advantage of the incredible propagation ability of social media sites.
Survivors likewise utilize social media to stay in contact with the world after a disaster. The jammed cellular network in Japan brought about by the tsunami and earthquake made it difficult for people to communicate with one another. In response, they used Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and local Japanese social networks to communicate and keep in touch with their loved ones (Bannerman, 2012).
Although social media can positively impact disaster relief efforts, it does not give an innate coordination ability to effectively plan and share information, resources, and plans among different relief organizations. All things considered, crowdsourcing applications dependent on social media applications, for example, Twitter and Ushahidi offer a ground-breaking ability for gathering information from disaster scenes and picturing data for relief decision-making.
Research has shown that it is possible to leverage social media to generate community crisis maps and introduce an interagency map to allow organizations to share information as well as collaborate, plan, and execute shared missions. The interagency map is intended to allow organizations to share data in the event that they operate on the same platform or utilize comparative data-representation formats (Bannerman, 2012).
What are the advantages of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?
Compared to traditional relief methods, leveraging crowdsourcing for disaster relief has three advantages.
First, crowdsourced data including user requests and status reports are collected almost immediately after a disaster using social media. Ushahidi-Haiti was set up two hours after the 12 January earthquake by volunteers from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (Heinzelman and Waters, 2003). Soon after, organizations were able to borrow a short message service (SMS) short code phone number (Mission 4636) to send free SMS texts (Munro, 2012). News of this free emergency number was spread through local and national radio stations.
As of 25 January, the Haiti crisis map had more than 2,500 incident reports, with more reports being added every day. The large amount of nearly real-time reports allows relief organizations to identify and respond to urgent cases in time.
Second, crowdsourcing tools can collect data from emails, forms, tweets, and other unstructured methods and then do rudimentary analysis and summaries, such as by creating tag clouds, trends, and other filters. These can help partition the data into bins (such as most-frequently requested resources) and requests into predetermined, most-urgent categories (such as medical help, food, shelter, or people trapped). Relief agencies can then concentrate on the issues and events that are most important to the relief effort.
Third, providers can include geo-tag information for messages sent from some platforms (such as Twitter) and devices (including handheld smart phones). Such crowdsourced data can help relief organizations accurately locate specific requests for help. Furthermore, visualizing this type of data on a crisis map offers a common disaster view and helps organizations intuitively ascertain the current status.
What are the shortfalls of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?
Despite the fact that crowdsourcing applications can give precise and convenient information about a crisis, current crowdsourcing applications actaully miss the mark in supporting disaster relief efforts (Gao et al., 2011).
Above all, most applications do give a common mechanism explicitly designed for cooperation and coordination between different relief organizations. For instance, microblogs and crisis maps don’t give a component for distributing response resources, so various organizations may react to an individual request simultaneously.
A subsequent inadequacy is that data from crowdsourcing applications, while helpful, do not generally give all the correct information required for disaster relief efforts. The accuracy of the report’s geo-tag and content is not guaranteed, in spite of the fact that relief workers enormously need the ability to naturally and precisely locate crowdsourced data on the crisis map. That is, a geo-located tweet does not really allude to the geo-location point. Somebody may message the emergency guide's telephone number to report something they saw earlier, potentially messaging from a shelter about a bridge that collapsed 10 miles not far off.
Furthermore, there are regularly duplicate reports, and information essential for relief coordination isn't promptly accessible or effectively available, for example, arrangements of relief resources or correspondence systems and relief organization contact information.
Lastly, current crowdsourcing applications do not have adequate security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For example, crowdsourcing applications that are publicly available for reporting are also publicly available for viewing. Although it is important to provide information to the public, this can create conflicts when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are needed.
In conclusion, crowdsourcing supporting applications don't have sufficient security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For instance, crowdsourcing applications that are openly accessible for revealing are additionally freely accessible for viewing. In spite of the fact that it is essential to give information to people in general, this can stimulate conflict when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are required.
Out of crowdsourcing has developed a new phenomenon: crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the act of funding a project or venture by collecting modest amounts of money from a large number of individuals, ordinarily by means of the Internet.
Crowdfunding is related to crowdsourcing in that both draw on the power of intensity of groups of people and networks. Notwithstanding, crowdfunding is additionally very unique. It works through an open call for funding for specific projects. Funding is requested online, typically in moderately modest quantities, from individual donors or investors, nd goes towards specific projects: personal loans for small businesses, the production of design t-shirts, production of movies or music, or covering medical expenses for the less privileged.
There are four basic models of crowdfunding:
1. Donation-based - funders donate to a project without any expected compensation. An example of a donation-based crowdfunding platform would be:
GoFundMe is a free crowdfunding platform tailored to fundamentally support people and causes. Since GoFundMe is fit to individual causes— anybody can make a campaign—sponsors on here tend to only support campaigns that originate from inside their own community and personal networks.
GoFundMe isn’t intended for business crowdfunding campaigns, unlike the other platforms. However, if you’re an entrepreneur who has run into difficult times, or you need to raise money to overcome a personal challenge, you can have a go at leveraging this platform for support from your personal network.
Governments, political parties, and the public sector have also experimented with crowdfunding. Barack Obama relied on small donations solicited online during his presidential campaign in 2008. Many government parties fundraise online, as do a wide variety of other initiatives and projects (Pricco, 2014).
2. Reward-based - offers non-financial rewards to funders, such as t-shirts or the opportunity to see a band backstage. An example of a reward-based crowdfunding platform would be:
This platform is designed around recurrent donations that permits content creators to monetize their videos, blog articles, music and even software developments. On the off chance that people like the project, they can pledge money to get it going. If the project succeeds with regards to arriving at its funding goal, all sponsors' credit cards are charged when time expires.
3. Lending-based - funders expect repayment of the funding they contribute to a project. An example of a lending-based crowdfunding platform would be:
Provides the ability to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."
4. Equity-based - funders receive equity, revenue, or a share of the profits in a project. An example of an equity-based crowdfunding platform would be:
StartEngine is one of the world’s biggest equity crowdfunding sites. StartEngine pulls funds from an investor's account once the company has exceeded their minimum funding goal, and the escrow account has been opened (StartEngine, n.d.).
Crowdfunding platforms encourage the assembly of ideas, the interconnection of funders with creators, the uniting of ideas and resources, and new entity prospects.
In conclusion, a few key inquiries should be posed as crowdfunding moves past its outset: How can crowdfunding work in the interests of the public, creating new opportunities, contributing to public spheres, and guaranteeing a reasonable appropriation of benefits? Should the principle that publicly-funded research be made openly available apply to crowdfunded projects?
On top of the potential advantages crowdfunding brings to individual corporations, it likewise can possibly improve the efficiency of the development sector as a whole. Numerous development organizations are dependent on traditional support mechanisms with pre-set up measures for performance defined by external donors and tested by anonymous authorities. Crowdfunding, by contrast, empowers joint development of projects and dialogue. During the selection of projects, its only reference are the organization's values and quality measures, which need to be communicated to potential supporters. Projects that are attractive and significant receive adequate sufficient support - not simply those that meet the current (political) support priorities.
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