Crowdmapping with Ushahidi

Reports and Verification

Brian HerbertDirector of Crowdmap

@brianherbert

Disaster Preparedness and Influenza WorkshopHanoi, Vietnam April 2013

Sir Francis Galton•Elitist, believing

strongly that some people were both mentally and physically superior to others.

•Thought we should make “enhanced” humans by essentially speeding up evolution.

Title•A bullet.

Sir Francis Galton"The result seems more creditable to the trustworthiness

of a democratic judgment than

might have been expected."

Crowdsourcing Before Crowdsourcing

•Open entry contests

•Refining reference materials

•Surveying for research

•Solving math problems

•Compiling reviews and guides

Crowdsourcing Online

•Wikipedia

•Threadless

•Amazon Mechanical Turk

•Kickstarter

•Ushahidi & Crowdmap

The Ushahidi Platform

•A tool developed in the heat of the moment, during a major man made crisis

•Quickly became an open source project with a developer community made up of hundreds of individuals

•A tool that spans virtually all platforms from SMS, smartphone, web and social media

The Ushahidi Platform

•A tool developed in the heat of the moment, during a major man made crisis

•Quickly became an open source project with a developer community made up of hundreds of individuals

•A tool that spans virtually all platforms from SMS, smartphone, web and social media

CNN Video clip on Haiti with OSM and Ushahidi

Crowdmap•Crowdmap is the free, hosted

Ushahidi in the cloud.

•Set up in minutes.

•Get your own subdomain like mymap.crowdmap.com

•SSL Encrypted

Health

ZOMBIE OUTBREAK

ZOMBIE OUTBREAK

Vietnam Spared

Reports and

Verification

Reports on the Map

Reports in a List

Individual Report

Approval and Verification

•Reports can be approved or unapproved

•Reports can be verified and unverified

VerificationVerification methods dependon the purpose of your map

Dr. Meier’s Case Studies on Verifying

Informationhttp://irevolution.net/2011/11/29/information-forensics-five-case-studies/

Andy Carvin and the Arab Spring

•Primarily used Twitter

•Burden of proof on original source

•Disproved reports of Israeli mortars being used

•Used traditional journalism techniques to verify information, just publicly

Kyrgyzstan Rumors•Skype was used to verify

information

•2,000+ people using the chatroom

•Connections with telecom to check geolocation of SMS

BBC•User-Generated Content Hub

•Actively scour the web

•Communicate with posters directly

•Verify claims with local news sources

Standby Volunteer Task Force

•First major deployment was a UN map in Libya

•Two step process:

•Authentication of source as valid

•Triangulation of content as valid

•Social media profiles should be complete and traceable across the web

•Double check content

Verification is not

Perfect

Mapping Communit

y

voiceofkibera.org

voiceofkibera.org

Humanitarian

OpenStreetMap Team

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