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Ushahidi Crowd-Sources Crisis Response
We mentioned late last year how open source software called Ushahidi — which means 'testimony' in Swahili — developed for election monitoring in Kenya was being used to similar effect in Afghanistan. Now reader Peace Corps Online adds a report from the NY Times that Ushahidi's is now becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. "Ushahidi is used to gather distributed data via SMS, email, or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The program was developed after violence erupted during Kenya's disputed election in 2007. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election. After receiving threats about her work, she returned to South Africa where she posted her idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people to report anonymously on violence and other misdeeds. Volunteers built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend, and the site began plotting on a map, using the locations given by informants, user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths. When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went into action receiving thousands of messages reporting trapped victims; the same happened following the Chile earthquake. The Washington Post also used Ushahidi during the recent blizzards to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers. 'Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work,' writes Anand Giridharadas. 'The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity, and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; then journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.'"
How can we monetize it?
Thanks for this. Ive been getting sick of hearing about high profile lawsuits over patents and arguing over why this programming language or that database paradigm. This actually helps humanity, this is meaningful.
'Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.' Sweet, I'll send this link to some of my tea party buddies.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
/me likes :
"The beta version platform is now available as an open source application that others can download for free,..."
We just need to cheat in the annoying form at:
http://download.ushahidi.com/
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
This is exactly what APRS does in the ham radio community since a good 20 years, and it does not need any special infrastructure. And yes, it can ALSO use the internet
Rainbow's End coming to fruition. Well, the beginning of it, anyway. No more psuedomimiviruses sneaking past!
Hmm...I gotta go; I'm having a serious craving for some honeyed nougat all of a sudden. Ya gotta believe me!
The only reason I can see for a digital ID, is something like this wired into our governmental bureaucracy. The Swedish gov. is trying to bootstrap such a system, and people seems to be liking it, generally. In fact, my ID card has a digital ID chip - it doesn't do anything at the moment, though.
Emotions! In your brain!
That might happen in the developed world but you have to remember these few things.
A) In a lot of natural disasters everyone is the victim, there are few people just surfing the internet who are completely unaffected and can go 2 miles to loot
B) Looting will happen anyways, its generally pretty easy to tell where someone isn't at home and there are valuables left unguarded
C) Power outages plus the fact that most disasters that would require this are in the undeveloped world means that not everyone can easily have access to the information
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I could use it to sell real estate on the cheap!
Sure, an anonymous system like this can get you lots of statistical data, but it's not verifiable data. In a scenario where there is emotional or ideological conflict, like an election, it would be trivial to abuse the system to corrupt the data, at the very least. It's also open to abuse by individual pranksters.
Everything you've said above can also be said of Wikipedia. These shortcomings are real, but they do little to reduce its overall usefulness.
As long as the volume of data is significant enough and it's mostly honestly derived, the service will work.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
and I hate being "that guy", but is this system open to abuse -- for example, post natural disaster when people are sending messages like "HELP! DOOR HAS BEEN BLOWN OFF AT " --
... goatse.cx?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Open platforms are built on a trust model that can be easily broken by a small* group of motivated individuals. /b/tards decide to get their lulz by spamming the site with misinformation.
So just wait until
Suddenly rape is everywhere and the database is polluted.
*for the internet
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
it's not at all like wikipedia though (wikipedia has shit loads of problems, probably best not to use it as an example). if someone has an axe to grind and starts reporting 10 rapes a day in a certain area, how do others edit or even verify it in this model? atleast in wikipedia you can examine facts.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I can see this being quite useful when the inevitable zombie / robot invasions happen.
it's not at all like wikipedia though (wikipedia has shit loads of problems, probably best not to use it as an example).
The fact that wikipedia has shitloads of problems is precisely my point. Any crowd-sourcing application will have similar problems, but they still work, by and large.
if someone has an axe to grind and starts reporting 10 rapes a day in a certain area, how do others edit or even verify it in this model?
In this model? I don't know. I can't get to the site right now; it must be slashdotted. That means I can't comment on the specific implementation. One would hope that a simple design would allow the typical strengths of crowd-sourcing to come through, though. As a general rule, if the preponderance of data is good (i.e. honestly derived), the service has value.
The 10 rapes a day example would play out one of two ways:
In either case, the bad data wouldn't significantly debase the overall value of the service itself because, as I said in my original post, most people are honest about these things most of the time. That would make the service mostly useful.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
What happens when communication lines are down? I assume they just fall back to first principles?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I can see the map now...
o - Help, emergency, need water here
o - Coke! The drink that refreshes. Just $1 a can!
o - Looting at this location!
o - Grubb, cheap security services!
I head the digital department at a nonprofit at the heart of the Haiti earthquake relief effort. The moment the earthquake hit I remembered reading about Ushahidi last year on the African tech blog White African written by Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of the crisis-mapping tool. At the time I thought it might be an interesting way to source stories from our many staff on the ground in Africa, South America, and other places where internet coverage might be sparse but where cell coverage was robust. Spoke to them once, but didn't follow up on it further at the time.
The moment the news came out about Port-au-Prince, I called Erik up to ask if they could set up an instance to help coordinate first responders and disaster relief; he and they were, and even had a team of Creole-speaking volunteers to handle incoming reports and translate back and forth from English. Watching reports pop up on the map from people who were texting SOS'es from inside collapsed buildings, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I was seeing something altogether new, different, and important.
Then reports started appearing from friends and relatives abroad, looking for loved ones who had been staying in the Hotel Montana and other major hotels for foreigners, or from expat Haitians desperate for news of their families back home. 5 days out from the event I participated on conference calls with the US State Department, Whitehouse, Red Cross, USAID, and UN Logistics Cluster and realized Ushahidi had the best actionable intelligence, bar none, and that all the other agencies had gravitated toward using it accordingly. They shared stories of the US Marines stationed on the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince begging the Pentagon for more satellite bandwidth so they could load the graphics properly, because they were scrambling missions to dig out people trapped in the rubble.
10 days out the folks at Ushahidi got hold of the owner of Haiti's cellular provider, Digicel, and he gave them the ability to push SMS back out to Haitian subscribers with official, verified locations where people could get medical attention, food, water, shelter, etc. It was incredible.
It's not often you witness something game-changing in action, but this was such a moment, and the tool was saving lives.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This is a really interesting concept. Not only from the demanding perspective (eg earthquake, blizzard) but think of the planning possibilities.
If you add some metadata about the input (eg. a snow blocked road would be a requirement for clearance, and a snow plough would be a method of clearing) and a higher level system could start to organise resources accordingly, with or without human intervention.
Of course, a "humanitarian crisis" would have human involvement anyway, but think about traffic for example. Cars could send their current speed and location to a network that redistributed traffic in peak hour. This is more than just traffic avoidance, it's highway load balancing...
There are doubtless many more opportunities!
If this is "becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes" - is this good or bad for the people affected by these quakes?!?
Legitimate criminals and psychos will LOVE this.
"OMG! There is looting and raping and pillaging and war and famine and AIDS and cats raining from the sky OVER THERE! Quick, everyone, run to help and block police and news channels with calls - while we rob this bank over here. Then, we will create another "alert" for our getaway."
Just imagine if Joker had access to this.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm Michael Caine, you insensitive bloody clod!!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
crowd source traffic data seems an obvious use anybody interested in writing iphone/android/s60 apps that give you a press to send SMS "big red button" to inform of being stuck in traffic? it would have significant advantages over existing fixed point traffic data and would link very usefully into OSM map based tools. Could someone cross-post this idea into the OSM talk space and/or on cloud made? (that someone might be me)
Just as a warning.
All's true that is mistrusted
Yes, it can be abused, but so can just about any crowdsourced technology. Wikipedia is prone to abuse, but on the whole is a tremendously valuable and accurate tool.
This is not meant to be used in the same way that a 911 system gets used, where one person reports something at a location and expects a directed response to that incident. In cases of natural or civil disasters, it is very difficult and not particularly equitable to distribute resources to combat individual problems. Instead, this would be a tool to help determine where to direct broad aid: what section of the city is facing the worst problems, where should the next food depot be established, where should you direct a police brigade to quell violence? As the tools get better and the availability of resources improves, you can start targeting the smaller targets.
Brilliant!
...is that is was born in Africa, under dire circumstances regarding connectivity and developer skills. A look at the PHP code, however, would never make you suspect this. RESPECT.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Statistical analysis.... Given enough data, you should be able to see a pattern in real data. Then you can filter for anomalies. Either investigate the anomalies or dismiss them. For example, the recent spate of "My Prius drove at 94 MPH" reports are anomalies that don't jive with the reported facts.
You will always have people falsely reporting data, but at least you will have overall patterns and outliers, which is more than you have now.
If you have 10 rape reports a day coming from a gov't owned IP block, all using similar wording, that's a good indicator that may be false. If, OTOH, you have 10 rape reports a day coming from different ISP blocks, diffferent wording, different spelling errors and grammar, those are probably legit.
...make a simple script that would do all that, with the system that you propose?
With various voices (IPs), coming from various addresses (geolocation), with varying but similar descriptions of the same situation?
You know... like it was actually coming from hundreds of people in dire need of assistance.
Or would you just hire hundreds of actors to do all that dialing and talking over that radio-thing you mention?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens