Small ideas for ICRCSanjana Hattotuwa

ICT4Peace Foundation, TED Fellow

what’s new

• Ubiquity of two way communications

• Addressable peoples, even those who IDPs or refugees

• Both news generation and dissemination leverages new media

• Disintermediated models vs. traditional media model

• Citizens as producers

• Low resolution content broadcast on high definition media

what’s new

• Sous-veillance (observing from underneath, anchored to human security) in place of, or in addition to, surveillance (often from centralised loci, anchored to national security)

• Sous-veillance is crowd based intelligence, generally open data (though analysis can be bounded). Surveillance ranges from sig int and psy ops to information espionage, almost always bounded.

• Important to understand Arab Spring, and situational awareness in sudden onset disasters

Focus on process, not just spikesNarrow band over time adds richness, full spectrum adds context

Local language(s)CultureLocal actorsDiasporaHagiography and mythIdentity and powerPartisan politicsRegional power blocsInequityDemographics (Youth)Civic mediaVerbal storytelling

open data

open data

open data in government

open data in government

open data by NGOs

infoviz

interactive timelineshttp://www.timetoast.com

bundling social media, adding value through curationhttp://www.bundlr.com & http://www.storify.com

word cloudshttp://groundviews.org/2011/05/11/from-draft-to-official-text-wikileaks-reveals-the-us-response-to-the-end-of-war-in-sri-lanka/

interactive graphicshttp://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/03/us/20110503-osama-response.html

infographicshttp://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics/

Some enduring challengesTweets from ICCM 2010

challenges

• Concept of failing forward missing. Everyone parading what worked, but more imp to know - what failed, why?

• Heard first cursory mention of ethics amidst overwhelmingly technocratic perspectives. Good. Need to flesh out.

• No recognition of (geo) politics and US strategic interests in use & availability of tech. Compare Haiti, Pakistan & Myanmar in '08

• A bigger disaster than Haiti, Pakistan had comparably little of this tech, volunteerism and focus. Why?

challenges

• Surprisingly everyone seems to believe crowdsourcing is good, and is only used for good. Context, content, creator, consumer absent

• At risk of sounding Rumsfeldian, why don't we know what we should know? Core datasets vital for community resilience and response

• Trust is mutable, relative, contextual, locally defined, gendered, framed by identity, inter alia.

• Violence as a result of knowledge creation.

challenges

• Impartial, accurate coverage still vital, increasingly hard to ascertain

• Torrent of information. Trickle of knowledge.

• Veracity hard to determine

• Pace of technology development hard to keep pace with

• Nature of violence, partisan bias, citizenship, governance structures, public institutions heavily influence crowdsourcing.

• Crowdsourced HR or election violations mapping with volunteers from perpetrator party/tribe/ethnicity? Proceed with caution

• Volunteerism undergirding stand-by crowdsourcing good, but what about CPE's, where personal bias can deeply influence curation?

• Related to last tweet, volunteerism works better for sudden onset natural disasters, which are also mediagenic

enduring challenges with crisismapping and crowdsourcing

how and who do we trust?abduction of a gay girl of damascus. or so we thought.

Tom MacMaster, 40 year old American

http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com Jelena Lecic, of London

A lesbian in DamascusAnd other tall tales

DisinformationMisinformationPartial accountsGaming the systemGender imbalance (e.g. rape reports in DRC)Lack of access leads to challenges in verificationMultiple retweets mistaken for authenticityAnonymity online (esp. post-Norwegian terrorist attack)Machine translation / Lack of translationLittle or no direct access TraumaAnxietyFearPersecutionNetwork infiltration and disruptionTrust perceptions and authority markersBias in mainstream mediaBias in citizen media

filter bubbles

• "A Squirrel Dying In Your Front Yard May Be More Relevant To Your Interests Right Now Than People Dying In Africa", Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook

• Human gatekeepers being replaced by algorithmic gatekeepers.

• A new, pervasive, almost invisible, systemic filtering?

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

filtering to counter filter bubbles

• Ushahidi SwiftRiver | http://ushahidi.com/products/swiftriver-platform

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb0Gs7vtrgk

SwiftRiver is a platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time.

In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels like Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.

two key effects of information overload

• Continuous partial attention, Linda Stone, Microsoft, 1997. With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.

• The immediate altruistic response rapidly diminishes over time (Melissa Brown, associate director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2010) Our brains release congratulatory hits of dopamine when we engage in selfless behaviour — which we’re moved to do the instant we witness something awful.

two key effects of information overload

two key effects of information overload

CiM drivers from other domains

• Music industry (pattern based search, e.g. Pandora’s technical + human indexing), social networking (group collaboration,e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook), social networking search (e.g. Grepling), mobile phone apps (e.g. Guardly), marketing engines (e.g. adaptive persuasion profiling), digital forensics (e.g. hyperspectral imaging with UAVs), ground truth profiling (e.g. UNOSAT images on Sri Lanka) many sourcing for situational awareness (e.g. Microsoft Photosynth), Open Data Initiatives (e.g. British, US govt’s, World Bank), visualisation (e.g. Infomous)

take home

• Think beyond text. Online is not print.

• Think beyond prose. Online can be satire, verse, haiku!

• Think of photos, audio, video. Rich media tells stories, adds context.

• Think of SMS and crowd-sourcing, the audience are the producers.

• Don’t suggest you know everything. Use the community to add value to story.

• Link to other stories online, they add value.

Thank yousanjanahattotuwa@ict4peace.org

www.ict4peace.org