{"id":3893,"date":"2011-06-17T09:38:13","date_gmt":"2011-06-17T13:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/?p=3893"},"modified":"2011-06-17T12:58:52","modified_gmt":"2011-06-17T16:58:52","slug":"crowdsourcing-vs-experts-technological-approaches-to-conflict-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/2011\/06\/crowdsourcing-vs-experts-technological-approaches-to-conflict-monitoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing vs Experts: Assessing Technological Approaches to Conflict Monitoring"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Tahrir Square, February 7, 2011; Photo by Ramy Raoof via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not too long ago, I met up with a friend of mine who used to be an analyst for the State Department.\u00a0 One of the hot topics of our dialogue included the subject of peacebuilding efforts in Africa.\u00a0 During the conversation, he recounted a story about a project he was involved with where he was tasked with helping evaluate a peacebuilding project in Northern Uganda.\u00a0 The project involved building a peace center and culminated in hosting two peace conferences where the opposing parties were both brought to the table.\u00a0 The recipients of the money were very proud of their achievement, however when my friend asked them this question: \u201cWhat difference have these conferences made to decrease conflict in the area,\u201d they didn\u2019t know the answer.\u00a0 This vignette highlights the difference between outputs (hosting a peace conference) and outcomes (a decrease in violence) and the particular complexities of trying to monitor and evaluate conflict.<\/p>\n

My last post was about Ushahidi<\/a> and its novel approach to monitoring conflict through the combination of SMS, Twitter and geo-mapping.\u00a0 At the center of the Ushahidi methodology for crisis monitoring is crowdsourcing: the use of the general public\u2019s knowledge or opinion to provide information.\u00a0 Most of us benefit from crowdsourcing every day.\u00a0 When we shop on Amazon, we look at an item\u2019s reviews.\u00a0 When we rent a movie on iTunes and Netflix, we look at its ratings.\u00a0 These both use crowdsourcing methods.<\/p>\n

Contrast this use of the general public to provide information about conflict in an area with the idea of using experts in different fields to provide us with more informed opinions and observations founded in a deeper knowledge base of experience.\u00a0 We benefit from this approach, for instance, when we want to buy a large appliance and go to Consumer Reports, whose expert staff has information on thousands of items.<\/p>\n

Weaknesses of a Ushahidi:\u00a0Limits to Access<\/strong><\/strong>
\nWhile there is great innovation in harnessing the general public\u2019s information through crowdsourcing via SMS and Twitter, these methods have their drawbacks.\u00a0 First, Ushahidi utilizes a small army of volunteer computer programmers to implement a specific version of the map when a new crisis arises.\u00a0 The code is \u201copen source\u201d meaning that anyone can have access to it, but unless you are a programmer or know programmers, this is really of no use.\u00a0 Having the code open sourced also allows anyone to create their own customized version of the crisis map.\u00a0 In the recent uprising in Egypt, there were five different versions<\/a> of crisis maps created by several different factions.<\/p>\n

Another significant weakness to the method is that you do not know who is providing the information.\u00a0 Because of this, there could be disinformation sent.\u00a0 Ushahidi attempts to guard against this through validating both users and content<\/a>.\u00a0 Perhaps Ushahidi\u2019s greatest weakness is its dependence upon the general public\u2019s access to cell phones and internet.\u00a0 Countries in Africa with the highest cell phone penetration include South Africa (85%), Egypt (70%), and Kenya (50%).\u00a0 The people who live in poverty typically are most susceptible to violent acts and marginalization and can rarely afford a cell phone.<\/p>\n

An alternative to Ushahidi: Experts and SMS<\/strong>
\nA less expensive, lower-tech alternative to Ushahidi is using experts to relay information using SMS texting.\u00a0 This is what my company did in the 2010 Burundi presidential<\/a> election to monitor the post-election violence.\u00a0 In Burundi, primary schools function as community centers where information is exchanged and where networking occurs.\u00a0 Because of this, primary school teachers were used as \u201cexperts\u201d and were sent questions through SMS, asking about any election-related violence they saw or heard about from credible sources in their networks.\u00a0 The results of this surveillance indicated a low level of violence related to the election, which was validated through various media reports coming out of the country.\u00a0 This approach avoided many of the weaknesses of Ushahidi, especially given Burundi\u2019s low cell phone penetration rate of only 10%.<\/p>\n

Despite the challenges of monitoring and evaluating peacebuilding efforts, practitioners in the field have increasing access to a variety of tools that can strengthen the capacity to better evaluate their work and leverage their impact.\u00a0 As these monitoring and evaluation tools begin to be used more effectively, stories like the one in Uganda will hopefully occur less frequently.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>[Mara J. Roberts<\/a> (MA, \u201911) is the Director of Conflict Recovery at <\/em>New Dominion Philanthropy Metrics<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 This is the second post in two-part series on the use of technology in monitoring conflict (see part one<\/a>). Acknowledgements: David Roberts, who oversaw the technical details of the 2010 Burundi election violence surveillance, contributed to this article.<\/em>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago, I met up with a friend of mine who used to be an analyst for the State Department.\u00a0 One of the… Read more about Crowdsourcing vs Experts: Assessing Technological Approaches to Conflict Monitoring<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[789],"tags":[898,930,942,891,892],"issues":[],"class_list":["post-3893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-internet","tag-mara-roberts","tag-monitoring-evaluation","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3902,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions\/3902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}