Gentlemen, Ladies of Ushaidi. As a fellow technologist and enthusiast on tech and code developments, I'd like to share this with you. I've been reading various news stories on Libya ever since the issues started there. Whilst the crowd-sourcing platform may even helped saved lives in various natural disasters, after reading an article from IRIN today, I hope that you can understand that social networks should not be integrated into the platform. SMS based system helped to ensure that Ushaidi remained an accurate crises management tool in many ways. As far as I've been reading the news etc, Libya internet access is still restricted and so I was a bit shocked by this paragraph in the IRIN article : The idea was to map out social and traditional media reports from within Libya. That led to the creation of LibyaCrisisMap.net. "Given that the UN had virtually no access to the country, we now had situational awareness," Verity said. "And, within 48 hours, we had 100-plus response activities collected and compiled - the same amount of data [that] took about four weeks in the Philippines, two weeks in Haiti, and two weeks in Pakistan to be made available." http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92686 -The first thing that came to mind was the claim within 48 hours there was 100+ responses. I'm assuming this input of data was based on social networks like twitter etc. -Youtube stopped working in Libya around the 24th of Jan 2010 -Facebook and the rest were being filtered. Now, this video on youtube has been there with so many various headings and was created sometime in 1st Week of March. Obviously the video has its own agendas etc however please ignore the header and comments, and focus on the social media aspect. Until today there are tweets from libya even from places that are in the war zones which don't have internet access, yet you read people are tweeting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB6WF3B6DQ8 Whatever the system of social networks, I think Ushaidi Team must prevent any social networks as a source of input data. The SMS based system is the only way to validate the data inputs. My amateur view, critisms and opinions welcome. Rgds.
Hi Aki, Just some thoughts, In each Ushahidi instance a report is submitted then there has to be an admin to check the veracity of the report then approve it, thus map it. It does not matter where the report is coming from, twitter or any other social network, it has to be verified. I remember helping out during the Haiti crisis (we had a Kenya situation room) and there were guidelines on how certain reports should be treated and I think this is the case here. (Not sure though..) It would be foolhardy to ignore reports from social networks because for every 10 tweets there's truth in one. Cheers, V On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 1:19 PM, aki <aki275@gmail.com> wrote:
Gentlemen, Ladies of Ushaidi. As a fellow technologist and enthusiast on tech and code developments, I'd like to share this with you.
I've been reading various news stories on Libya ever since the issues started there. Whilst the crowd-sourcing platform may even helped saved lives in various natural disasters, after reading an article from IRIN today, I hope that you can understand that social networks should not be integrated into the platform. SMS based system helped to ensure that Ushaidi remained an accurate crises management tool in many ways.
As far as I've been reading the news etc, Libya internet access is still restricted and so I was a bit shocked by this paragraph in the IRIN article :
The idea was to map out social and traditional media reports from within Libya. That led to the creation of LibyaCrisisMap.net. "Given that the UN had virtually no access to the country, we now had situational awareness," Verity said. "And, within 48 hours, we had 100-plus response activities collected and compiled - the same amount of data [that] took about four weeks in the Philippines, two weeks in Haiti, and two weeks in Pakistan to be made available."
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92686
-The first thing that came to mind was the claim within 48 hours there was 100+ responses. I'm assuming this input of data was based on social networks like twitter etc. -Youtube stopped working in Libya around the 24th of Jan 2010 -Facebook and the rest were being filtered.
Now, this video on youtube has been there with so many various headings and was created sometime in 1st Week of March. Obviously the video has its own agendas etc however please ignore the header and comments, and focus on the social media aspect. Until today there are tweets from libya even from places that are in the war zones which don't have internet access, yet you read people are tweeting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB6WF3B6DQ8
Whatever the system of social networks, I think Ushaidi Team must prevent any social networks as a source of input data. The SMS based system is the only way to validate the data inputs.
My amateur view, critisms and opinions welcome.
Rgds.
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Hey Victor, thanks for the reply. I'm sure you are aware but I'll list it anyway: please keep in mind that SMS data can be validated, e.g. not some tweet feed. Unless Ushaidi can find some ways to verfiy such data, it may become involved in a humanitarian situation itself in the future. Rumors cost innocent civilain lives, facts remove fear, confusion and intimidation. I hope Ushaidi is looking into how best data validation can work so that it truly becomes an essential tool used by many. Within the IRIN article, this person has summarized it well from another angle: Critics like Paul Currion, an aid worker who has been working on the use of ICTs in large-scale emergencies for the last 10 years, question the value to humanitarians of information obtained through crowd-sourcing. Limitations, he suggests, include the problem of connectivity where access to the internet is not reliable, reliability of the data and the functional perspectives of the interface. "The visual appeal of Ushahidi is similar to that of PowerPoint, casting an illusion of simplicity over what is a complex situation," he argued . "If I have 3,000 text messages saying, "I need food and water and shelter", what added value is there from having those messages represented as a large circle on a map? ... crowd-sourced information will not ever provide the sort of detail that aid agencies need to procure and supply essential services to entire populations." http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92686 Good luck. :-) On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Victor Ngeny <victormaritim@gmail.com>wrote:
Hi Aki,
Just some thoughts, In each Ushahidi instance a report is submitted then there has to be an admin to check the veracity of the report then approve it, thus map it. It does not matter where the report is coming from, twitter or any other social network, it has to be verified. I remember helping out during the Haiti crisis (we had a Kenya situation room) and there were guidelines on how certain reports should be treated and I think this is the case here. (Not sure though..) It would be foolhardy to ignore reports from social networks because for every 10 tweets there's truth in one.
Cheers, V
@Aki Thing is with good verification guidelines, it wont matter where the report comes from. One thing that makes me very proud of the Ushahidi Haiti deployment is that NGOs and Humanitarian agencies used the info/map to direct their relief process. That said, I totally concur with you that validation is something the Ushahidi team should look more into... V On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:42 PM, aki <aki275@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Victor, thanks for the reply. I'm sure you are aware but I'll list it anyway: please keep in mind that SMS data can be validated, e.g. not some tweet feed. Unless Ushaidi can find some ways to verfiy such data, it may become involved in a humanitarian situation itself in the future. Rumors cost innocent civilain lives, facts remove fear, confusion and intimidation.
I hope Ushaidi is looking into how best data validation can work so that it truly becomes an essential tool used by many.
Within the IRIN article, this person has summarized it well from another angle:
Critics like Paul Currion, an aid worker who has been working on the use of ICTs in large-scale emergencies for the last 10 years, question the value to humanitarians of information obtained through crowd-sourcing. Limitations, he suggests, include the problem of connectivity where access to the internet is not reliable, reliability of the data and the functional perspectives of the interface.
"The visual appeal of Ushahidi is similar to that of PowerPoint, casting an illusion of simplicity over what is a complex situation," he argued . "If I have 3,000 text messages saying, "I need food and water and shelter", what added value is there from having those messages represented as a large circle on a map? ... crowd-sourced information will not ever provide the sort of detail that aid agencies need to procure and supply essential services to entire populations."
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92686
Good luck. :-)
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Victor Ngeny <victormaritim@gmail.com>wrote:
Hi Aki,
Just some thoughts, In each Ushahidi instance a report is submitted then there has to be an admin to check the veracity of the report then approve it, thus map it. It does not matter where the report is coming from, twitter or any other social network, it has to be verified. I remember helping out during the Haiti crisis (we had a Kenya situation room) and there were guidelines on how certain reports should be treated and I think this is the case here. (Not sure though..) It would be foolhardy to ignore reports from social networks because for every 10 tweets there's truth in one.
Cheers, V
_______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
-- Victor Ngeny Mobile +254713957356 GTalk: victormaritim Twitter: @ngeny Yahoo: vikngne Skype: victor.ngeny
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Victor Ngeny <victormaritim@gmail.com>wrote:
@Aki Thing is with good verification guidelines, it wont matter where the report comes from.
@Victor, it definately does matter where the report comes from. For example, if you look at the tweeter map for war torn city of Misrata in libya, not a single tweet is local as obviously there in no power, food etc let alone any internet access. All the tweets for Misrata come in from the UK, USA. Now if anyone was using Ushaidi, how can they map external data to a local location and also verify the data to be accurate?
One thing that makes me very proud of the Ushahidi Haiti deployment is that NGOs and Humanitarian agencies used the info/map to direct their relief process.
Was Ushaidi deployed on the ground and its data generated from local contacts? Using Haiti as an example, would you kindly write more on how the data flowed between a person stuck in a collapsed building to the data being sent to the Ushaidi people?
That said, I totally concur with you that validation is something the Ushahidi team should look more into...
V
Agreed 100% . :-)
Anyway, since I saw the Ushaidi article on IRIN, so I shared the info and opinion. Hopefully, Ushaidi Team will not let their well developed system become obsolete or an extension of social networks but will go further into data integrity and accuracy combined with what is has already achieved which will help it become a benchmark. Thank you for your time, am out of here as have much work to attend to. Gd day. Rgds. :-)
Going by the same, that they require to check there sources this video has some footage from the same video earlier posted but with a different side of the story so which is true? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwt5K4KGnkk&feature=related * If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. - Emerson M. Pugh *
@Kris, let me try and respond. When BBC did that story, they sent someone to the ground who actually verified the accounts and provided an insight into the news there. They followed the story piece by piece, note that the date posted is Mar 21st, just after the UNSC resolution. Obviously there is much to be told, many sides of the story, and also the loss of innocent lives. What BBC may not have covered is the killings and bad treatment of african migrant workers in liberated areas but that is another story too. Libya news is quite complicated but not limited to consipracy theorists. Now, how would Ushaidi verify its social networks inputs, and then without any verfications, publish that data on Maps on the public internet? I believe when Ushaidi was born, at that time they still didn't have a verification mechanism on SMS but am sure they do by now which is why the system would be accurate. Social networks is almost impossible to verify due to proxies etc unless from the ground, as in the case of the BBC report. me thots. On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 4:57 PM, kris njoroge <krsnjo@gmail.com> wrote:
Going by the same, that they require to check there sources this video has some footage from the same video earlier posted but with a different side of the story so which is true?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwt5K4KGnkk&feature=related *
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. - Emerson M. Pugh
*
participants (3)
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aki -
kris njoroge -
Victor Ngeny