Posts Tagged ‘news’

Take any crisis in the past 10 years and there has been an increasing amount of digital content created immediately during and after the crisis events. For events like the Mumbai terror attacks in November, the amount of information is enormous and lasts multiple days. For shorter, more localized events like US Air Flight 1549 crashing in the Hudson, the amount is understandably lower. But in either case, pervasive new media allows citizens and professionals alike to create massive amounts of data. Sifting through and making sense of it all can quickly overwhelm an individual person or news organization.

Recognizing this, Ushahidi, the brilliant crisis mapping application, is approaching the question of how to filter through the information overload. Their simple approach is to “crowdsource the filter.” Writing on their blog, Erik Hersman calls this project “swift river” and will allow connected individuals to “go and rate the information as it comes in… where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.”

According to Erik, the prototype has successfully filtered a large amount of data and can combine experts and amateurs. When I first read this, I was understandably excited to see this in practice. During the Mumbai attacks, I watched as Gaurav Mishra chronicled the events by scanning blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and the MSM in order to synthesize and explain the story to his audience (in classic bridge-blogger style). His incredible public service kept me glued to my screen over Thanksgiving break. Amid his heroic effort, Gaurav occasionally mentioned to his appreciative audience how exhausted he was, and I can only imagine how much work it took. A reliable “Swift River” style tool would have allowed Gaurav to grab a couple more hours of sleep, knowing that the important truths would rise to the top. A look at the mock-up they provided shows a bit more what they imagine – individuals transparently describing their sources and adding “facts” that they trust to be true.

A mock-up of Project Swift River

No news consumers are completely autonomous; we all rely on some sort of filter. There is a spectrum from the obsessive consumers whose filter is minimal – reading and watching a ton of first-hand reports from Twitter, Flickr, etc. – to the mainstream consumers who get their news from CNN or even water cooler conversations.

My belief is that there is a sweet-spot for this spectrum of signal-to-noise filters – somewhere between (1) the exhausting work of reading all the information/analysis coming out of a crisis and (2) the lackadaisical, third-hand accounts which are colored by personal bias and memory.

The Spectrum of News Sources and Potential Downfalls

No one’s crisis news intake will ever be completely autonomous – even eye-witnesses only experience so much. But filters, especially the unreliable ones that exist in our world, can act like people in the children’s game “telephone” where each node can obfuscate the truth. Although news sources also add analysis, insight and context, my hunch is that during and immediately after a crisis, what matters most are verifiable facts. Ushahidi’s idea seems like a great way to find the sweet-spot for crisis reporting.

Although it will have to answer the same questions that were sneered at Digg and Wikipedia – who will trust a bunch of amateurs?! – a wealth of literature supports the ability of crowds to quickly and reliably reach consensus. Certainly there are some serious questions given the importance of the information that will be filtered (and I wish I had my copy of Infotopia to revisit how the wisdom of crowds can fail), but the open source nature of the project will allow for experimentation and revision that the New York Times or other news sources cannot do very adeptly.