Crowdsourcing in time of crisis. Interesting ???
Yeah, first of all, what is crowdsourcing ? in order to easily understand the term, crowdsourcing is the combination of crowd and outsource which means taking work and outsourcing it to a crowd of workers. This is a process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a network of people.
To be more specific, a popular example is Wikipedia, you guys all know about it, right? They do not hire authors to write the content for the encyclopedia but they give everyone the chance to get access to write, create the content of their own and everyone is able to fix, update information. Then, what we got here? Tadaaa, it has become the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever. Basically, the idea of crowdsourcing is more heads are better than one; by combining ideas, skills of bunch of people, the result should be superior.
Now, the main point I’d like to talk about is crowdsourcing in time of crisis. When safety is concern, for example, earthquake or tsunami, crowdsourcing becomes crucial when any pieces of information contribute to help the rescue work. If you are still confused, the Queensland floods case may give you a better look.
The 2011 Queensland floods as many Australians know were a devastating series of events that flooded over 30,000 homes, 6,000 business’s and towns and regional centers across the state were affected (Hayes & Goonetilleke, 2012, p.1). : Conventionally within emergency situations mainstream media will use traditional forms of information distribution such as radio, television and telephone lines in order to distribute emergency information. This however changed when the Queensland floods saw media services resort to social media such as Facebook and Twitter as alternative streams of information. In particular the hashtag #qldfloods became a focal point for Queensland residents and emergency services to receive and distribute information pertinent to the flooding going on in their area. Furthermore, a platform was formed in order to visualize the location and tweets across Queensland regarding floods. This platform facilitated citizens becoming suppliers of information and created a real-time public map with which individuals and journalists could quickly bring up information regarding different areas as quickly as citizens could upload it.
Well, you see, crowdsourcing plays a very important role in time of crisis. In the future, there may be more diverse crowdsourcing platforms but now Facebook, Twitter are running the main role. This somehow shows the real purpose of social media which is connecting people than sharing memes every day.
Week 8 presentation:
https://prezi.com/p/-gifu0xc2kpn/
