Crowdsourcing. How it’s keeping us informed.
The evolution of crowdsourcing as a tool for gathering information about events like crisis, civil unrest and natural disasters has been both swift and widespread. Its origins lie in the business world where crowdsourcing was used to harness ideas, pictures and videos from its customers via an open call (Petavy 2016).
Some of you may argue that elements of this type of information may be useless and misleading. There is no question that as the use of crowdsourcing platforms increase, so will the volumes of information and its validity should be questioned (Ford 2012, p. 34), but I think it’s a priceless source of intelligence that can help amongst many things police solve crimes as was evidenced during last months Bourke St massacre in Victoria where the public were asked to post videos of the tragedy on social media.
Crowdsourcing is a fast way of sharing information. The social media revolution has meant that its users are virtual news reporters. They are able to capture events as they happen, and their video footage is often broadcast during television news telecasts.
A successful and well-known example of this form of crowdsourcing was seen during the Queensland floods in 2011.The floods that besieged South-East Queensland in January of that year lasted for close to a week and caused significant damage and created a logistical nightmare for emergency services. They were helped however by the many thousands of people who were using social media platforms Facebook and Twitter to post and share messages, updates and tweets about the floods. In fact, the hashtag #gldfloods was tweeted about 35,000 times (Bruns et al. 2012, p. 7), and proved to be a valuable way of spreading information for the authorities.
(IRevolutions 2013)
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), successfully used social mapping to collect information during the Libyan civil war in 2011. It had set up a live crisis map and commissioned the Standby Task Force (SBTF) www.standbytaskforce.org to report events on the ground so the UN OCHA could use the data to better determine where to deploy their services (Standby Task Force 2011).
(Standby Task Force 2011)
In both these cases the use of crowdsourcing not only proved to be fruitful, but also showed how the power of information sharing can be instrumental for those authorities and institutions making life or death decisions. Despite the potential problems, without the power of the people so many things would go unreported!!
Ford, H 2012, 'Crowd Wisdom', Index on Censorship, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 33-39.
Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, ‘#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods’, Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, viewed 31 January 2017, <http://www.cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf>.
‘Libya Crisis Map’ [image], in Standby Task Force 2011, Libya Crisis Map Deployment 2011 Report, Standby Task Force, viewed 1 February 2017, <http://www.standbytaskforce.org/2011/09/01/libya-crisis-map-report/>.
MyRealStuff 2011, Raw Footage. Grantham! Queensland Floods! Lockyer Valley Ground Zero, 14 January, viewed 31 January 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNGOd36qLfU>.
Petavy, F 2016, ‘5 Ways to Crowdsource User Generated Content Right’, Wired Insights, 12 January, viewed 31 February 2017, <http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=crowdsourcing>.
‘Social Media for Emergency Management: Question of Supply and Demand’ [image], in IRevolutions 2013, Humanitarian Crisis Computing 101, IRevolutions, viewed 1 February 2017, <https://irevolutions.org/2013/04/23/smem-supply-demand/>.
Standby Task Force 2011, Libya Crisis Map Deployment 2011 Report, Standby Task Force, viewed 1 February 2017, <http://www.standbytaskforce.org/2011/09/01/libya-crisis-map-report/>.
