In the digital world, the term ‘Crowdsourcing’ refers to the non-commercial collective effort aimed at developing or contributing to the making of tools or information that help solving a given issue (Kietzmann 2017). Wikipedia, which is perhaps the most popular online collective effort, is a good example of crowdsourcing. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are also a form of crowdsourcing and particularly essential ones in times of national emergencies. In this entry, I will focus on this last topic.
If there is something that characterises the Internet, that’s the limitless information we all have access to. You may know this already, but let me remind you that that rectangular device you have in your pocket is your gate to virtually all human knowledge – from the lyrics of Despacito to less frivolous things such as live information of bush fires in your local area. This sounds pretty amazing, isn’t it? However, there is tiny problem associated with this sea of information: Its credibility.
Sure, you may get upset if you read fake news about a seemingly romance between celebrities, but you can live with that for sure. However, when it comes to emergencies, accessing the right information becomes a matter of life or death. As Ford (2012) suggested, inaccurate or incorrect information may be as harmful as no information at all and that is why emergency services authorities often show a great deal of mistrust to crowdmapping. Just imagine living in an area where tornados are not uncommon. These people tend to be aware that sometimes a refuge may not be enough to resist a natural disaster and thus an evacuation is imminent. While often the mainstream media gives reliable information as to how to proceed in such situations, sometimes people cannot afford to wait for these instructions and they need to make a call by relying on alternative sources such as social media. It is then when crowdsourcing credibility becomes of major relevance. In Ford’s (2012) words, “verification can be relatively straightforward when a single team with similar views is working together, but when different stakeholders are involved the process is greatly challenged” (p. 38).
Digital humanitarianism: Watch this TED talk by Paul Conneally (2011), who shares a powerful message of how we can all contribute in times of crisis.
Nevertheless, despite the credibility issue, the evidence suggests that the contribution of crowdsourcing – and big data – as a collective effort is of immense importance. Examples of extreme situations in which this practice has been of great help include the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the Queensland floods in 2011, and a number of equally devastating scenarios in USA involving hurricanes and tornados. As such, the fact that crowdsourcing faces the inevitable issue of credibility should not discourage us. After all, we humans have long demonstrated that each and every tool we have built can (and will) always be improved. In fact, crowdsourcing seems to be quite close to be taken to the next level, or at least that is what Ford (2012) believed when he once said:
“In the future the trend is towards using ‘big data’ to automatically verify reports by semantically analysing each report for key phrases and action verbs and developing clusters of similar statements. According to pundits like Patrick Meier, director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute, this kind of computing analysis could enable verification of masses of data at digital speed” (p. 39).
References
Conneally, P 2012, ‘Digital humanitarianism’, TED, viewed January 11 2018, <https://youtu.be/L9_c1j9VRwE>
Ford, H 2012, 'Crowd Wisdom', Index on Censorship, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 33-39.
Kietzmann, JH 2017, ‘Crowdsourcing: A revised definition and introduction to new research’, Business Horizons, vol, 60., no 2, pp. 151-153.
