First, I want to thank everyone for their support leading to the success of Ushahidi at the Netsquared Challenge (More details here).
Next, I'm delighted to witness the rise of the Peer-To-Peer economy, and the death of the One-To-Many business model. Since time immemorial, information has flowed from one entity to everyone else, hence the one-to-many descriptor. The media industry one of the first victims i.e. newspaper publishers, tv, music and movie companies. As our ability to consume and create different kinds of media surges, old media struggles to stay significant and pay the bills. The same thunderbolt that impacted old media is poised to strike other industries even more disruptively.
Crisis reporting is one of those industries. Often an ultra-sensitive affair, it has had to deal with issues of politics, bureaucracy and authenticity mostly because policy making and crisis situations are joined by the hip. It has always been a one-to-many situation with government/corporate dominated (and manipulated) crisis reporting. Basically we have always had to believe what 'they' tell us about how it happened, how it is being handled and how it will be prevented in future. Things are beginning to change however with the proliferation of social media and specifically the rise of the bloggers.
Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be freeing up information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have safeguarded information release for self-preservation. Behold the rise of Many-To-One and Many-To-Many paradigm shift in crisis reporting.
The posthaste delivery of crisis information as it happens is something we'll begin to see in coming years. As all this data converges we'll have the ability to visualize patterns that were previously indescernible. With this new power policy making will finally return to the people.
While all this seems a bit idealistic, I should point out that this model is not perfect. It should be understood that crowdsourcing is still vulnerable to data poisoning (as my friend Hash pointed out). This is when malevolence is injected into the system. P2P (Peer-To-Peer) systems have often overcome this using their vastness. Try and imagine misleading data engulfed by a sea of reliable information - ultimately the authenticity can be determined by the bigger picture.
I’m finally back after a 6 month hiatus from blogging and I want to start by addressing a very nagging question but I’ll get to that in just a moment. No doubt you’ve experienced social networking in one form or another (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter etc etc), and if you haven’t you’d better quit living in the 90’s. It’s all about creating and sharing information with friends, colleagues and basically everyone. The last 3 years especially have been witness to an explosive growth in the size and influence of these social networks. “Individuals finally have the power” - wow! (btw, that wow is supposed to be sarcastic).