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1Maja Bott, Senior Economist, KfW Entwicklungsbank, Kompetenzcenter Governance.The author can be reached at: Maja.Bott@kfw.de

  

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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

  

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................................ 4

Foreword ...................................................................................................................................................... 5

PART I ............................................................................................................................................................ 6

Crowdsourcing – A New Panacea for Social Accountability and Governance? ......................................... 6

1.1 How is Crowdsourcing Expected to Improve Governance? .................................................................... 7

1.2 Critical Success Factors of Crowdsourcing Systems ................................................................................ 8

1.3  The  Potential  Role  of  Crowdsourcing,  and  in  Particular  Interactive  Mapping,  in  Improving  Aid 

Transparency, Effectiveness, and Social Accountability in Fragile States ................................................... 11

1.4  Challenges  and  Risks  of  Applying  Crowdsourcing  and  Interactive  Mapping  in  Fragile  State 

Environments .............................................................................................................................................. 14

PART II ......................................................................................................................................................... 18

The Experience of the Crisis Mapping Community ................................................................................... 18

2.1 The Emergence of the Crisis Mapping Community – The Case of Haiti ................................................ 18

2.2 An Evolution in Crowdsourced Crisis Mapping – The Experience of Libya ........................................... 20

The Experience of the Development Mapping Community ..................................................................... 22

2.3 Participatory Post‐Conflict & Recovery Mapping – The Case of Sudan ................................................ 22

2.4 Mapping for Sustainable Development – Participatory GIS and Community Forestry Management in 

Nepal ........................................................................................................................................................... 26

2.5 Elections Monitoring in Guinea – Crowdsourcing with Mobile Technology for Transparency and Civil 

Rights .......................................................................................................................................................... 29

2.6 Kenya Open Data and Huduma  – A Paradigm Shift for Governance in Kenya? ................................... 31

2.7 Avaaz – Crowdsourcing Political Pressure on a Global Scale ................................................................ 32

2.8 Other Emergent Applications of Crowdsourcing for Economic Development and Good Governance 33

PART III ........................................................................................................................................................ 37

Recommendations for Donors – Applying Crowdsourcing and Interactive Mapping for Socio‐economic 

Recovery and Development in Fragile States ............................................................................................ 37

List of Referenced Works ............................................................................................................................ 40

  

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to extend their gratitude to the following people whose support, input, and collaboration were instrumental in the formation of this paper: Soren Gigler, Senior Governance Specialist, Innovation Practice, World Bank Institute, Hanif Rahemtulla, Consultant, Innovation Practice, World Bank Institute, Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping and Partnerships, Ushahidi, Kaushal Jhalla, Margunn Indreboe, Replication and Policy Coordinator, Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analysis Project CPRU – UNDP Sudan, Nicole A. Hofmann, Stand-By Taskforce Coordinator Task Team and Stand by Task Force Volunteer Libya Deployment, Michael Gebert, co-founder at reputeer GmbH,

  

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Foreword

resently ubiquitous, the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine. In reference to the global technology industry, Howe defined crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and

outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”1 He states; “Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.”2 Reliant on actionable information provided by the appropriate ‘crowd,’ which itself is indentified through a self-selecting mechanism; crowdsourcing is a collaborative exercise which enables a community to form and to produce something together. Expanding the concept to include not only data collection or product design, but cultivation of public consensus to address governance issues, strengthen communities, empower marginalized groups, and foster civic participation, is at the heart of the new crowdsourcing movement.

This paper, produced for the World Bank Group, is meant to serve as a primer on crowdsourcing as an informational resource for development, crisis response, and post-conflict recovery, with a specific focus on governance in fragile states. Inherent in the theoretical approach is that broader, unencumbered participation in governance is an objectively positive and democratic aim, and that governments’ accountability to its citizens can be increased and poor-performance corrected, through openness and empowerment of citizens. Whether for tracking flows of aid, reporting on poor government performance, or helping to organize grassroots movements, crowdsourcing has potential to change the reality of civic participation in many developing countries. The objective of this paper is to outline the theoretical justifications, key features and governance structures of crowdsourcing systems, and examine several cases in which crowdsourcing has been applied to complex issues in the developing world.

                                                            1 Howe, Jeff (2006), Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Crown Business, 2008, p.99 2 Howe, Jeff (2006), The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired Magazine, Issue 14.06, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

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PART I

Crowdsourcing – A New Panacea for Social Accountability and Governance?

rowdsourcing3 has become a mega trend in recent years, fueling innovation and collaboration in research, business, society and government alike. As Clay Shirky states; “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More

people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented.”4 Global businesses like Facebook, Apple, Amazon,5 or Ebay could not have grown to cover the industrialized world at such speed without making use of this powerful tool, which essentially transforms consumers into co-producers, or ‘prosumers,’6 of their services. The power of crowdsourcing7 was first demonstrated by the ability of the open-source movement to successfully compete with proprietary software solutions by mobilizing volunteer programmers who had never met or worked together. Wikipedia showed that collaborative content creation can dwarf the quantity and quality of traditional encyclopedia and other closed expert group efforts. Other kinds of content aggregation from Flickr and YouTube to LinkedIn and Twitter use the crowd to prioritize content for their individual users. Finally, the next generation of Web 2.0 applications such as search engine advertising uses massive databases to harness the collective intelligence of their users through algorithms that detect patterns and hidden meanings in everyday user activity.8 Computing systems become ever more connected, data-rich and increasingly adaptive.

But crowdsourced volunteering activities are going far beyond coding or simple information sharing. Today, crowdsourcing is used to create and increase collective knowledge, community building, collective creativity and innovation, crowdfunding, cloud labor and civic engagement.9 Powered by widespread and increasing access to the internet, mobile phones and related communication technologies, the use of crowdsourcing for policy advocacy, e-government10 and e-democracy11 has grown exponentially across the planet during the past decade.12 The main reason for this phenomenon is that the use of these tools has led to the collapse of transaction costs for information exchange, group forming and coordination. In addition, it has become much more difficult for governments to block information and collaboration, the latter happening even without needing to establish opponent institutions, and easily traversing state borders. The right combination of social networking tools and an active audience allows any individual to inspire and coordinate collective action outside of a formal hierarchy.

The driving vision behind these phenomena is the philosophy of ‘Open-source Governance’ which advocates an intellectual link between the principles of the open-source and open-content movements, and basic democratic principles. With the objective of enabling ordinary citizens to contribute directly to the formation of policy,13 open-source governance theoretically provides more direct means to affect change than do periodic elections.

President Barack Obama’s Open Government Initiative as well as his appeal to the young “open-source generation” is considered by many to have been a determining factor of his electoral campaign success.14 “When government data is made available as a set of web services based on open Application Programming Interfaces (e.g. Code for America) rather than a set of documents, computer applications

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can process this data, draw meaning from it, and make it relevant to the daily lives of its citizens.”15 This enables citizens to improve or develop new public services by themselves, such as SeeClickfix; a citizen-based mobile phone system to report vandalism or public infrastructure in need of repair directly to the relevant local government authority. Not only are social media platforms such as Facebook16 or Meetup17), LinkedIn or Xing are increasingly used for political discussion and advocacy, but specific open government platforms such as Data.gov, political party platforms,18 think tank or citizen advocacy groups,19 citizen journalism fora such as Sourcewatch and NowPublic,20 as well as e-governance applications development platforms such as Metagovernment.org are equally on the rise.

Crowdsourcing is not only limited to industrialized countries, where it is often characterized by

high-tech data solutions and applications. In developing countries, it is applicable in the framework of popular consultations, election monitoring, constitution drafting processes or anywhere where it ensures voices of diverse groups across ethnic lines and minority representation to be heard. Crowdsourcing is already having a strong impact in developing countries, whether applied to crisis and tactical mapping21, tracking, reporting as well as coordinating relief efforts in the contexts of natural disasters (Haiti, Pakistan), civil war (Libya), as well as tracking of human rights abuses and violence (Kenya). By providing visualizations and implementation monitoring22 of relief and recovery efforts , allowing for the wide dissemination of weather and crops market price information (Mali, Uganda), crowdfunding of microcredit (Kiva.org), and many other cases, crowdsourcing is also being applied in multiple ways within the international development context. It can also serve as monitoring and evaluation tool for development and humanitarian programs evoking feedback directly from the beneficiaries.

Crowdsourcing’s potential cannot be overestimated especially in Africa, where the expansion of

mobile networks has grown exponentially during the last ten years, bypassing all other infrastructure development on the continent. Thus, crowdsourcing is increasingly seen as a core mechanism of a new systemic approach of governance to address the highly complex, globally interconnected and dynamic challenges of climate change, poverty, armed conflict, and other crises, in view of the frequent failures of traditional mechanisms of democracy and international diplomacy with respect to fragile state contexts.

1.1 How is Crowdsourcing Expected to Improve Governance?

The availability and interoperability of communication tools makes it increasingly harder to keep information secret. Since the recruitment of activists has never been easier, and accessibility to amateurs of professional tools never greater, information security has become a critical issue for governments. The cases of Wikileaks and global hacking operations have uncovered the general vulnerability of governments’ data protection systems, in contrast to the power of non-state actors to act collectively without need for individual, and thus assailable, leadership. This creates a general power shift: governments have become more vulnerable to attack – either technological or political, while citizen groups have become less vulnerable and more effective due to their increased ability to organize. In general, “transparency breeds self-correcting behavior”23 among all types of actors, since neither governments nor businesses or individuals want to be caught at doing something embarrassing or illegal.

The effectiveness of governance systems can be substantially increased by social media applications facilitating real-time data collection, categorization and redistribution from crowds to

  

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crowds, e.g. in the case of tactical mapping and reporting in emergencies, market information sharing or community planning. The greater the numbers and the stronger the group identification with the objectives and within campaigning crowds, the harder it becomes for governments to ignore them.

However, there are strong cognitive limits to interactivity; causes need to be very strong and directly touch the emotions and creativity of people, in order to draw their attention and keep them involved for long enough to make an impact. With a growing number of national and international causes competing for attention, rallying crowds around a specific cause is becoming ever more difficult. So far, crowdsourcing has not yet had a decisive impact on political governance systems, but the continuous rise of social media, especially among the younger generations, and its increasing use to consolidate support of common interests and advocacy allows one to expect its importance to grow further, especially if coupled with real-life interests, needs and commitment of its users.

1.2 Critical Success Factors of Crowdsourcing Systems

The crowdsourcing initiatives which have proven to be most successful are those which succeed in empowering a disparate group of people with the tools to contribute to a larger effort. The incentive to contribute should be tailored to attract the most effective collaborators,24 and the motive of the crowd needs to be aligned with the long term objective of the crowdsourcing initiative.25 This ensures that the crowd is willing to participate in the initiative. 26

In Sharma’s (2010) model of critical crowdsourcing success factors, which is being summarized below, motive alignment of the crowd is the central idea, whereas the vision and strategy of the crowdsourcing initiative, linkages and trust, external environment, infrastructure and human capital are the peripheral factors. 27

Infrastructure: A necessary prerequisite for crowdsourcing is the availability, acceptance and use of crowdsourcing technologies by its users. The ease of accessibility, reliability and quality of communication technologies and infrastructure is therefore imperative for crowd participation. The global spread of mobile phones has thus set the basic condition for the use of crowdsourcing in developing countries.

Vision: The crowdsourcing initiative needs to present a vision with a well defined set of ideals, goals and objectives that is flexible to the dynamics of its environment, so that the crowd can perceive the initiative as valuable and well intentioned. While government participation can add an additional trust factor to the initiative, this is not always the case in a fragile state context.

Human Capital: The other key determinant of the success of crowdsourcing is human capital, both at the level of the initiators as well as at the level of the crowd joining the initiative. This includes language skills, managerial skills, national orientation, traditions, and level of education,28 and as an entry qualification for the crowd, the skills of using a mobile phone. In an ideal scenario, the crowd must be able to engage the crowdsourcing initiative without prior training and minimum interventions.29

Financial Capital: The inherent nature of crowdsourcing initiatives does not make them very capital intensive, especially if based on existing telecommunications infrastructure, such as mobile phones. Additional investments directed towards the betterment of enabling infrastructure can enhance

  

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the crowd participation substantially. Also, in low-income countries, performance-based donor-funding of local community development could be used to create a positive incentive for governments to allow for greater citizen scrutiny and participation, e.g. through crowdsourced monitoring and reporting platforms.

Linkages and Trust: Linkages between individuals, work groups or organizations due to geographic, cultural, linguistic, or ethnic connections can be used to minimize costs of doing business. Proper linkages make knowledge transfer, sharing of best practices and innovative business models easier and help in pooling the much needed resources to develop the initiative.30 In order to develop the necessary trust among the crowd, sufficient time has to be allocated for its emergence. Proper linkages might add a substantial trust aspect to the crowdsourcing initiative.31 Additionally, diaspora linkages or links with formerly successful ventures add a substantial trust aspect. 32 If government support is not a factor enhancing trust, external support through donors and well-reputed international organizations can add a sufficient trust factor as well as global visibility to the initiative.

External Environment: The macroeconomic environment comprising of the political governance structure, economic and business environment, general attitudes towards entrepreneurship, general living conditions and risk profiles33 34 are also important determinants of success. A favorable regulatory environment and ease of doing business can encourage crowdsourcing initiatives. The tasks associated with crowdsourcing must be compatible with the prevailing practices and cultural norms. The crowd must also be able to relate the goal of the crowdsourcing initiative to their living environment. Security and regulatory risks35 can also play an important role in affecting the motive alignment of the crowd towards the long term objective of the crowdsourcing initiative.36 From another perspective however, the lack of conducive policy environment can fuel protests and create a strong motivation for crowds to engage in collective action to challenge this status quo. The aspect of external environment is the main differentiating factor pertaining to a fragile state context and will be elaborated upon further in this paper.

Motivation: Performance expectancy (i.e. the extent to which an individual believes that using the system will help him to attain gains in job performance), effort expectancy (i.e. the degree of ease associated with the use of the crowdsourcing system), social influence (i.e. the degree to which an individual perceives that others believe he or she should use the new system) and facilitating conditions (i.e. the extent to which an individual believes that organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support use of the system) are the direct determinants of the crowd motivation.37 Five of the above described peripheral factors affect one or more of these determinants. For example, human capital affects the performance expectancy and the effort expectancy. As a result, the peripheral factors affect the overall motive alignment of the crowd towards the crowdsourcing initiative in different manners (see table below).38

Thus, the above model expands on the innovation diffusion theory39 which identifies the perception of early users of the following five independent attributes as main success factors of an innovation: 1. relative advantage, i.e. the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes, 2. compatibility with existing values, past experience and the needs of potential adaptors, 3. complexity, 4. triability (trial of the innovation on a limited basis) and 5. observability of the results by others.

  

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Effect Determination Matrix 40

Performance Expectancy

Effort Expectancy Social Influence Facilitating Conditions

Vision & Strategy X X Human Capital X X Linkages & Trust X X Infrastructure & Financial Capital

X X

External Environment X X X

Criteria of Governance: Governance criteria for crowdsourcing include anonymous

participation (via a central registrar, public key infrastructure, and a trusted central authority), decentralization of authority (thus minimizing the principal-agent-problem), centralization of information (via one platform and interoperability of interfaces and applications with this platform), open and equal opportunity of participation in deliberations or peer reviews (enabling self-selection of those most affected and/or most expert to participate on an issue) and encouraging diversity of thought. In addition, safe operational procedures must be ensured; all actions are transparent, all contributions are recorded and preserved, all content and deliberation is structured (content management systems, fora, moderators), and refactored by participants (via software versioning and revision control systems), and access must be inclusive of remote and disadvantaged people (via mobile devices and specialized interfaces).

The Process of Crowdsourcing: In a successful model, a strong connection between the people

who use the initiative (crowd) and the initiators is being established for the crowdsourcing process to take off. The needs, aspirations, motivations, objectives and appropriate incentives of the crowd to participate in the initiative remain the most important consideration throughout the process. Since participation is voluntary, a community of like-minded people is the basis of successful crowdsourcing. The primary target of crowdsourcing initiatives are groups of innovators and early adaptors41, opinion multipliers who are very well connected and have a clear interest in connecting with the initiative and who embrace the concept of crowdsourcing itself. “Creating a vibrant community is all about creating a critical mass of good minds and spurring them to spark each other as much as possible.”42 They are also encouraged to spread the message as much as possible beyond the virtual realm. Uncovering shared interests, intensive communication, and deepening of personal bonds creates mutual trust that strengthens the community. Also, the community must be large and diverse enough to increase each others’ quality of contributions by collectively editing content. Most importantly, communal processes within groups are not being disturbed. Instead, they are given room to be creative. Group dynamics can be initiated and supported, but not controlled. “The provider of the platform should not be the star of the show but the producer, working from behind the scenes to make it easy and comfortable for all community members to get involved and stay involved.”43 In addition, the community is being protected from threats to its purpose, such as spamming, hacking, hijacking, spying, or too much deviation from its main objective, among others. Constructive contributions, even if they are criticizingare being acknowledged and rewarded.

  

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1.3 The Potential Role of Crowdsourcing, and in Particular Interactive Mapping, in Improving Aid Transparency, Effectiveness, and Social Accountability in Fragile States

Since crowdsourcing is in its very essence based on universal participation, it is supporting the empowerment of people. Thus, in a pure democracy or in a status of anarchy or civil war (Haiti after the earthquake, or Libya since February 2011), there are few external limitations to its use, which is the reason why most examples are from democracies and situations of crisis.

In a fragile state, the situation is quite different. “‘Fragile states’ is the term used for countries facing particularly severe development challenges: weak institutional capacity, poor governance, and political instability. Often these countries experience ongoing violence as the residue of past severe conflict.”44 An authoritarian regime for example will tend to oppose and interfere with crowdsourcing, perceiving broad-based participation and citizen empowerment as threats to its very existence.

In which ways can crowdsourcing improve governance in a fragile state?

Depending on the level of citizen-participation in a given state, crowdsourcing can potentially support governments’ and/or civil society’s efforts in informing, consulting, and collaborating, leading to empowerment of citizens, and encouraging decentralization and democratization. By providing the means to localize, visualize, and publish complex, aggregated data, e.g. on a multi-layer map, and the increasing speed of generating and sharing data up to real-time delivery, citizens and beneficiaries of government and donors become empowered to provide feedback and even become information providers in their own right.

This transformation can take place in three ways:

- By sharing, debating and contributing to publicly available government, donor and other major actors’ databases, data can be distributed directly through customized web and mobile applications and made accessible and meaningful to citizens.

- Providing independent platforms for ‘like-minded people’ to connect and collaborate, builds potential for the emergence of massive, internationally connected grassroots movements.

- By establishing platforms that aggregate and compare data provided by the official actors such as governments, donors, and companies with crowdsourced primary data and feedback.

The tracking of data by citizens increases transparency as well as pressure for better social accountability. Greater effectiveness of state and non-state actors can be achieved by using crowdsourced data and deliberations45 to inform the provision of their services. While the increasing volume of data generated as well as the speed of transactions can be attractive even to fragile-state governments, the feature of citizen empowerment is often considered as serious threat (Sudan, Egypt, Syria,Venezuela etc.).

  

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Electronic mapping as an instrument for improving governance in fragile states

Electronic mapping platforms,46 tools that combine electronic networks, satellite imagery and tracking, are currently emerging as key instrument for improving governance in fragile state environments. Mapping has become a dominant method for crowdsourcing initiatives in the area of governance due to its potential to integrate all types and kinds of information and communication channels as well as categorizing, layering and visualizing aggregated data in ways that can be understood even by non-experts with relative ease. Geospatial data can thus be linked with non-geospatial data for various purposes, such as in its established uses e.g. for disaster risk management or urban planning.

There are two basic types of interactive mapping initiatives to be distinguished: initiatives coordinated with (or at least agreed to by) national governments, taking a top-down approach, and initiatives that develop independently, with a bottom-up perspective. The determinants of these two types differ fundamentally, although with expansion both can evolve into the respective other direction, ideally ending up with a comprehensive, hybrid structure that integrates government, international, non-governmental, and locally crowdsourced data. The distinction between these two perspectives is crucial in a fragile state context, where governments are naturally suspicious of undesired grassroots movements.

The top down approach usually requires the buy-in of the national government. This provides the advantage of accessing critical government data, and using a wider variety of communication channels, as well as engaging the government and all other local stakeholders in a practical dialogue and even collaboration on political governance issues. However, every new service of a mapping initiative requires persuading and negotiating with government counterparts and thus involves the risk of slow progress. In general, the higher the interest of the government in the initiative, the easier it will be to receive the necessary approvals for rapid project setup. This explains the huge success of crowdsourced emergency services in the aftermath of natural disasters. For the government, the risk of ‘abusing the system for rebellion’ is very low, and the benefits of coordinating disaster response are enormous. Likewise, there is also an interest in e-government services that facilitate trade, tax collection and private sector development.

Reservations to crowdsourced initiatives of any kind are very high however, when it comes to conflict or post-conflict situations. Here, non-government driven initiatives, such as the tracking on acts of violence across Kenya, the first initiative by the ‘Ushahidi’ crisis mapping projects in the wake of the 2008 elections, operated independently from government. In countries like Sudan, Tunisia and Egypt telecommunication services have been periodically censored or switched-off completely in order to prevent uprisings and interrupt rebel communications. Also, critical statements by citizens on social media platforms have been used to identify and imprison regime opponents, as in the case of Zimbabwe and many other countries47.

Few electronic mapping initiatives have made progress in situations of conflict between a government and rebel movements. One example is the Crisis Prevention Mapping and Analysis (CRMA) project of UNDP in Sudan, which however promising, has not yet reached the crowdsourcing stage.

Within interactive mapping, two processes can be identified and examined separately: data collection and data dissemination. Governments, as well as other actors, are usually more interested in data collection than in data dissemination. It is a matter of negotiating with governments one process

  

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against the other one. In the case of the CRMA, the project started as a small pilot to hold state and locality level multi-stakeholder consultations in the post-conflict state of Kassala, with the aim of mapping conflict issues between local groups from different tribal and livelihoods affiliations, in addition to collecting data on emergency and early recovery needs, and projects funded by government and donors in the state. Representatives from all major tribes, government, civil society, producers’ and traders’ associations, as well as women, youth, NGOs and donors joined in this exercise. This map provided the first comprehensive snapshot of the main local conflict issues together with their geospatial localizations. The participatory, conflict-sensitive approach of this exercise as well as the volume and quality of data collected impressed both government and donors to such a degree that they agreed to collaborate. The government agreed to the expansion of the project throughout Sudan and well as the publishing of data collected by international donors in collaboration with government, while the donors agreed to share their own data in order to get a comprehensive picture of the situation in the different regions of Sudan.

The breakthrough for national expansion of this mapping exercise was reached when all major data collecting actors signed agreements to share their respective data in form of map layers, which in turn provided them with the respective data layers of all other participating actors. The government was offered access to all information layers.

Key features of a conflict-sensitive interactive mapping platform in a fragile state:

1. The incentive mechanisms for major stakeholder groups inside and outside of government, including civil society, need to be thoroughly analyzed when designing platform aims and services.

2. The government counterparts agree with all other key partners on a very clearly defined aim of the platform in order to prevent fears of political threat (such as disaster prevention, local conflict mapping or market information). The platform should focus on one objective and not attempt to serve many diverse purposes at once, since this could create suspicion of abuse and confuse citizen-providers.

3. The services offered via the platform need to be easily understood and meet a critical need or interest of the target population which directly affects their livelihoods.

4. If the government is not yet ready to provide any data, a data sharing between the main international and local actors (IFIs, UN, NGOs, Universities) can create a primary critical mass of information necessary to start the platform. Of course, the government would still need to approve even this preliminary data-sharing, if openly published, which as of now has not happened.

5. Strong information asymmetries must be avoided regarding both data collection and dissemination; a system that generates critical data about a location and its inhabitants but is only accessible to government or local elites, can increase conflict rather than reduce it and even support military actions. Therefore, the platform features need to be accessible by simple mobile phones (text-based SMS services) for sending and receiving information, since this is the only device to which most fragile state citizens have access. In cases of high illiteracy, automatic voice transcription as well as local offline information hubs managed by neutral providers can make platforms more inclusive. Real-world volunteer systems operated by international actors (e.g. crowdsourcing platform providers, UNV, NGOs) and local universities are best suited to play this role. In addition, balanced participation and inclusion of local ethnic, tribal and livelihoods groups as well as women and youth needs to be actively promoted through local consultations and capacity building of stakeholder representatives as local focal points, as well as closely monitored.

  

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6. The design of the administration and authorization structure is crucial. Usually, apart from the site administrators, there are at least three levels of volunteering users: first-time or temporary users (those with reading access only), normal users with the right to contribute their information and opinions, and power users who contribute content on a regular basis and/or provide additional volunteer services, such as editing content, mobilizing more users and linking them up with each other, networking on- and offline, and even coding new platform features. The number and contribution of the ‘power users’ determine the success of a crowdsourcing platform. In a fragile state environment, the role of these power users requires special attention in order to ensure political neutrality and inclusiveness of the platform in general.

7. Through increasing aid transparency, interactive mapping of aid projects can also incite healthy competition between NGOs and other humanitarian and development aid implementers, since their activities become more visible and traceable to their sponsors, be they donor governments or private sponsors. However, a simplistic focus on mapping of local infrastructure established can create an unwanted bias and distortional funding effects towards mapable = ‘visible’ projects leading to more “empty shells” instead of increased capacities of vulnerable and poor populations.

1.4 Challenges and Risks of Applying Crowdsourcing and Interactive Mapping in Fragile State Environments

Fundamental challenges of crowdsourcing in general are to identify the tasks for which crowdsourcing is an appropriate solution: defining, operating, supporting and ending a crowdsourcing activity; identifying and creating technical means of participation that minimize barriers to use; establishing and maintaining participation through appropriate incentives; ensuring appropriate privacy and safety for the contributors (e.g. when individual contributors might be identifiable and/or locatable); as well as maximizing the quality and benefit of the outcome (e.g. example through filtering, rating, cross-checking or peer or expert moderation).

The following issues usually pertain to crowdsourcing in general and crowdsourced geo-spatial data sharing in particular. In most cases, these issues are more critical in fragile state environments compared to stable governments.

1. There is no crowd. In various cases, top-down platforms offered by government or donors do not manage to attract the attention of crowds because they seem too static, centrally controlled and they do not offer any direct benefits, reputational gains or other incentives to potential contributors. The biggest issue with government controlled platforms seems to be that individuals do not have trust in a responsible use of their information. The more authoritarian a government’s behavior, the less trust it will inspire from its citizens. Under authoritarian regimes, it is also more difficult for NGOs and social entrepreneurs to launch a crowdsourcing initiative.

2. There is no data being shared. The trust problem also arises from the other side: the relatively slow progress of e-government in industrialized countries shows that even democracies are hesitant to share their official data. The less legitimate a government feels, the more secretive it tends to behave and vice versa: "Sharing internally was a problem in the first place. That was why the parliament secretary taking a huge role was a big deal, in terms of talking to colleagues about opening up this data. Technical challenges were not where the headache was — we have plenty of skill and partners here to do that — it was in getting the data in the first place, in the form that we needed it. Plenty of

  

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data wasn't in digital form or usable, and was trapped in agencies," stated Paul Kukobo, chief executive officer of the Kenya ICT Board, in a phone interview on the launch of ‘Open Kenya’ on July 8, 2011.48

3. There is the wrong crowd / digital divide / participation inequalities: A prerequisite for the use of crowdsourcing in participatory/democratic decision-making processes is universal technology access. Since this is nowhere reality, capacity building, mediators and transcription tools are necessary to prevent the digital divide to exclude the most vulnerable parts of the population from participating. This can be very costly. In crowd sourced projects such as OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, a small group of ‘participants contribute very significantly, while a very large group of occasional participants contribute only occasionally. Demographically, educated young males are usually overrepresented. Since governments with weak governance processes usually base their power of the support of elites, they have less incentive to reduce these inequalities. Therefore, there is a high risk of elite capture or at least strong demographic bias if not mitigated by additional measures.

4. The crowd is being manipulated. The limitation of a plain wiki is that it can only show ‘what is,’ and not ‘what should be.’ More sophisticated systems aim to provide tools for meaningful deliberation by using semantic tags, levels of control or scoring to mediate disputes. This risks however to unduly empower a clique of moderators who possess no public legitimacy (similar to the wiki problem of ‘sysop vandalism49’ or ‘administrative censorship’). On the other hand, the simpler the processes and structures of deliberation platform are, the higher the risk of minority opposition to be drowned out. In platforms that aim to combine crowdsourced contributions with official ones, a lack of trust will accentuate these problems, especially in environments of weak governance.

5. The crowd is being attacked. Contributors can be attacked, both virtually, e.g. by being spied on, and physically. Especially amid human rights violations and conflict, GPS-based data provided by individuals on the ground can be abused by government, rebels or terrorists for military action. Also, crowdsourcing contributors can be incriminated through national security moles. The case of Libya described further below shows which protective measures the system took in order to prevent intrusion by the Libyan military.

6. The crowdsourcing process is not effective. A general challenge of crowdsourcing is the management of contributions. Chaotic data and/or deliberation structures can make crowdsourcing ineffective. In order to solve this problem, highly sophisticated management structures have been designed for crowdsourcing software which address the usual concerns.

7. The clash of paradigms: The problem however becomes more complex if official government and / or donor data is to be combined with crowdsourced data that usually does not follow the same information management standards. Rahemtulla et al. (2010) argues, that “crowdsourced data will only be fully adopted if the user organisations can have trust in the data being fit for its intended purpose. Uncertainty regarding the quality of such data is often cited as a major obstruction to its wider use (Goodchild et al., 2010)50. Critics argue that such informal ad-hoc data collection does not typically adhere to formal standards of geometric precision or meta-data consistency or even provide consistency in coverage or detail. Despite this, the volume of such data can be large and gives rise to the opportunity to acquire a density of sampling often far exceeding what can be formally acquired and this can in-turn assist in the process of validation and error reduction. Furthermore, the currency of the data, particularly where the topic of capture relates to human activity, will often be much more up-to-the-minute than formal survey data. This comparison, however, illustrates that, while the content, quality and attributes of crowdsourced and authoritative data are different and can even be apparently conflicting in detail, both have informational value. Through a considered combination

  

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they can complement each other to provide a more complete, up-to-date, people-centric and richer picture of such humanitarian disasters than either could provide in isolation.” 51

8. What next? Crowdsouring = Accountability? Crowdsouring is only the first step towards better results. The next step is how that data is being used to hold power to account? As Tsai52 acknow-ledges “formal institutions of accountability are often weak in developing countries which lack strong bureaucratic institutions for controlling corruption and making sure that lower-level officials are doing their jobs. Democratic institutions such as elections that allow citizens to hold officials account-table may be unreliable or even nonexistent. Yet even in these countries, some local officials perform better than others. Under these conditions, how do citizens make government officials provide the public services that they want and need?”

To summarize, the core risks and challenges arise around the concepts of trust. These challenges increase with the loss of governance capacity and legitimacy that are typical for fragile states.

                                                            3 Definition: The act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing, Retrieved July 2011 4 Shirky, Clay (2008), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, pp. 105 5 “When Jeff Bezos opened Amazon’s database to savvy outsiders, he didn’t tell them what to do with it. He announced, “We’re going to aggressively expose ourselves!” He left it to the crowd to figure out how best to use the site, and he profited mightily.” From Libert, Barry (2010). 9 Rules for Successful Crowdsourcing (Kindle Locations 18-19). FT Press. Kindle Edition. 6 The concept was introduced by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt in their book Take Today, (1972, p.4). In his book The Third Wave (1980), Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘prosumer’ when he predicted that the role of producers and consumers would begin to merge. 7 The term was coined, among others, by Jeff Howe (2006) in his article for Wired magazine, ibid. 8 Duval, Jared (2010), Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change, Bloomsbury USA, p. XII 9 Categorization proposed by Carl Esposti on www.crowdsourcing.org, Retrieved July 2011 10 “E-Government” refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits can be less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and/or cost reductions. Source: http://go.worldbank.org/M1JHE0Z280 11 “E-Democracy” is the use of information and communications technologies and strategies by “democratic sectors” within the political processes of local communities, states/regions, nations and on the global stage. Source: Steven Clift (2003), www.publicus.net Retrieved July 2011 12 Shirky (2008), pp. 106 13 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance, Retrieved July 2011 14 Duval, (2010), pp. 126, 172 15 Ibid., p.XII 16 Facebook has about 750 million users, out of which 250 million are mobile users, www.facebook.com Retrieved September 2011 17 With 9.5 million members and 92,000 groups in 45,000 communities, Meetup is one of the world's largest networks of local groups, www.meetup.com, Retrieved July 2011 18 E,g. the 2004-2005 Green Party of Canada Living Platform or the Swedish direct democratic party ‘Aktivdemokrati’. Source: Wikipedia, Definition of E-Democracy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy, Retrieved July 2011 19 E.g. the global policy campaign platform, Avaaz.org

  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                20 Participatory Media Site with over 190,000 contributors and about 10 million page views per month (update) 21 According to “New Tactics in Human Rights”, tactical mapping is “a method of visualizing the institutions and relationships sustaining human rights abuses and then tracking the nature and potency of tactics available to affect these systems, ultimately serving as a tool to monitor the implementation of strategy.” www.newtactics.org/en/tactical-mapping, Retrieved July 2011. 22 Maptivism: Mapping Information for Advocacy and Activism, 29.09.2010, www.movements.org, Retrieved July 2011 23 Duval (2010), p.40, Citation of Vice-admiral Thad Allen, in charge of the Coast Guard during the second half of the Katrina rescue operation. 24 Lohr, S. (2009, July 18), Crowdsourcing works, when its focused. Retrieved from the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unboxed.html, Retrieved July 2011 25 Eagle, N. (2009). txteagle: Mobile Crowdsourcing. In Internationalization, Design and Global Development (pp. 447-456). Berlin: Springer. 26 Sharma, Ankit (2010), p. 8 27 Ibid., p. 9 28 Carmel, E. (2003). The New Software Exporting Nations: Success Factors, EJISDC, p. 1-12 29 Sharma, Ankit (2010), p. 12 30 Ibid., p. 13 31 Brabham, D.C. (2009), Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects, Planning Theory, p. 242-262. 32 Sharma, Ankit (2010), p. 13 33 Farrell, D. (2006), Smarter Offshoring, Harvard Business Review, p. 84-92. 34 Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J., & Willcocks, L. (2009) The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring, London: Palgrave Macmillan. 35 Ibid. 36 Sharma, Ankit (2010), p. 13 37 Viswanath, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Fred, D. D. (2003), User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward a Unified View, MIS Quarterly, pp. 425-478 38 Sharma, Ankit (2010), p. 15, 16 39 Rogers, Everett M. (1995), Diffusion of Innovations, The Free Press, New York pp.15 40Ibid., p. 15 41Rogers (1995), p. 22 42 Libert, Barry (2010), 9 Rules for Successful Crowdsourcing (Kindle Location 42) FT Press, Kindle Edition 43 Ibid., Kindle Location 15 44 Definition by the World Bank, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/STRATEGIES/EXTLICUS/0,,contentMDK:22230573~menuPK:6434002~pagePK:64171531~piPK:64171507~theSitePK:511778,00.html, Retrieved July 2011 45 e.g. through web-based deliberation platforms (e.g. DiscourseDB) that apply argumentative frameworks for issue-based argument instead of simple polling 46 Wikipedia Page on Human Rights Defenders, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_defender, Retrieved July 2011 47 Masimba, Chief, K. (2011), Technology is not the answer, D+C – Development and Cooperation, Frankfurt/Main, Vol. 38, 2011:6, pp. 254 48 Howard, Alex (2011), O’Reilly Media, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/open-kenya-government-data.html 49 So-called sysop vandalism or wiki administrator vandalism is the destruction of content by people who have wiki administrator or "system operator = sysop" privileges that other editors do not have. Because of the unequal power relationship, poor editing behaviour by such people is thought to be much worse than by ordinary users. http://openpolitics.ca/tiki-index.php?page=sysop+vandalism. Retrieved in October 2011 50 Goodchild, M.F and Glennon, A.J. (2010). Crowdsourcing Geographic Information for Disaster Response. A Research Frontier, International Journal of Digital Earth, pp. 1-11 51 Rahemtulla, H.A et al. (2010), The Use of Authenticated and Crowd-Sourced Data for Emergency Response. VALgEO Conference, Italy 52 Tsai, L.L. (2007), Solidary Groups, Informal Accountability, and Local Public Goods Provision in Rural China, American Political Science 101, pp. 355-372

 

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PART II 

The Experience of the Crisis Mapping Community

2.1 The Emergence of the Crisis Mapping Community – The Case of Haiti The first and principal objective of disaster response is to obtain a detailed picture of the situation

on the ground, the scale of the damage and above all the needs of affected people; in other words an assessment with first hand information as fast as possible in order to plan and conduct relief efforts. Effective relief relies on valid information, which most commonly is collected by assessment missions consisting of international and local experts deployed after timely processes of securing funds, recruiting teams, and sometimes awaiting security permissions for personnel to access the situation in the field. Where conventional methods have reached their limits for timely provision of necessary information, crowdsourcing has entered into humanitarian interventions. During Hurricane Katrina in 2005,53 when two searchable, user-generated missing persons boards were created under NowPublic and NOLA.com, a platform which included a voice record system that people could use to leave a message to be transcribed and posted directly to the sites. The information posted by the affected population was instantly transmitted to the Coast Guard and their volunteers who used it for directing their rescue missions.

2008 saw the creation of Ushahidi, up to now one of the most important open-source platform providers for crowdsourcing crisis information. This system was initially established to report and map violence during the post election period in Kenya in 2008, and has since been used to track a variety of crises on global, regional and national scales. The purpose of the platform is to gather distributed data from the public via several media and communication channels (i.e., SMS, email and web) and visualize it on a map or timeline. The objective is to facilitate better understanding of the needs of people affected by natural or man-made disasters and create direct and immediate links between crisis affected people and assistance providers. Such a system has shown to empower respondents to collect information together and help guide and coordinate humanitarian response efforts on the ground.54

The largest crowdsourced crisis mapping initiative to-date appeared in the wake of the Haiti earthquake in 2010, characterized by a high level of professionalism which allowed relief agencies to act in an unprecedented period of time. Within 48 hours after the earthquake, an alliance had been established which included professionals from humanitarian agencies, communication technology companies, and non-profit organizations, but foremost, volunteers from all over the world who created and fed a system called 'Mission 4636.' The concept of Mission 4636 was as simple as it was revolutionary, making use of widespread mobile communications and the most immediate source of situational knowledge; that from the affected local population of Haiti.

Setting up an SMS short code, simply 4636, crowdsourced information gathering was enabled through a joint effort including Josh Nesbit from Medic:Mobile, a non-profit organization which creates mobile communication technology solutions for the health sector, and Katie Stanton from the U.S. State Department, who had contacted Haitian's largest cell phone network, DigiCel. as well as Brian Herbert from Ushahidi, who had built a platform for collection and processing of incoming messages. Another critical actor was Timothy Large from the Thomson Reuter Foundation, due to whose support the short code was published throughout Haiti on local radio. Inasmuch as gathering of crowdsourced information

 

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had been initiated, processing of messages was equally important to the objective of providing real-time information for humanitarian response purposes. Robert Munro from Stanford University activated a workflow engaging the Haitian Diaspora who had been mobilized through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to translate and categorize text messages and determine their places of origin. Only some days later the system was incorporated into the much larger Ushahidi platform where Patrick Meier, Ushahidi Director of Crisis Mapping and Partnerships, facilitated the process of crowdsourced information gathered by ‘4636’ to be entered into a comprehensive crisis map, along with other sources monitored and reported online by volunteers. A key element of volunteer support in reviewing and curating incoming crisis data was provided by a team of students at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tufts University, which mobilized an active partnership with Ushahidi within hours of the earthquake.55 56

The achievements of Mission 4636 and Ushahidi crisis mapping in Haiti in delivering vital information for rapid response was immediately acknowledged by, among others, the U.S. Cost Guard, who made use of the platform's output, stressing the strong impact of real-time information on saving lives. Furthermore, the Haiti experience demonstrated the capacity of crowdsourced information sharing; “In total, we processed more than 80,000 messages. It was the first time that crowdsourcing had been used for real-time humanitarian relief and it is still the largest deployment of humanitarian crowdsourcing to date.” added Rob Munro57 to the success story of crisis mapping in Haiti. “By creating an SMS Shortcode, an already common approach in the entertainment industry enabling audiences to vote for America's Idol or next Top Model has been harnessed successfully for humanitarian assistance and has proven to be not only a much faster procedure for gathering information in disaster situations but also the most legitimate as it ensures participation of the affected population, often neglected in humanitarian response due to time constraints.” concludes Nicole A. Hofmann, Task Team Coordinator for the “Standby Volunteer Task Force for Live Mapping”, an Online Volunteer Initiative for Crisis Mapping which was founded as a consequence of the various loosely connected projects for Haiti recovery.

Both the strength and weakness of crowdsourced information management derives from its participatory openness. Making sense of received text messages and categorizing information appropriately has repeatedly been a major challenge. The importance of filtering and verification of text messages or crowdsourced information in general has been among the lessons learned from the Haiti experience. Most criticism of crowdsourced crisis mapping as it was conducted in Haiti refers to an overflow of information and lack of coordination with humanitarian agencies for immediate action58. But such criticism is launched at a time where the active online community has already progressed immensely. The Standby Task Force has already incorporated lessons learned and improved processes through simulations and trainings for deployments with a much more structured framework, and a comprehensive, modular approach to the various steps of crisis mapping.

Another important step of creating useful crowdsourcing platforms lies in continued access and updates of information, key for sustained efforts in information management. The collaboration between Mission 4636, Ushahidi, and especially the Haitian Diaspora, evolved into a sustainable project as it provided for the transition to local actors, who later contributed to project coordination and mapping. The involvement of diaspora and local mapping actors from the outset of Mission 4636 and Ushahidi collaboration in Haiti ensured local ownership and outstanding ongoing results of the mapping exercise. Making use of the established process of crowdsourcing information for response planning as well as the hitherto gathered data can be highlighted as one of the major successes of this project. Although transfer

 

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of the Ushahidi platform for Haiti to a local group was not originally planned for, in November 2010, the crisis mapping project was reprogrammed and transferred in full to the local software company, ‘Solutions,’ and is now operating under the name Noula.59 Noula has since established a new service number for future SMS reporting and furthered integration with aid agencies working in Haiti.60 The transfer to local groups as an afterthought will probably be characteristic of crisis response rather than longer-term projects and initiatives.

2.2 An Evolution in Crowdsourced Crisis Mapping – The Experience of Libya

In 2011, crowdsourced crisis mapping had matured to a level of reputation and professionalism that led the United Nations to acknowledge opportunities presented by social media, and their role for information sharing and management. While several disasters have occurred since Haiti, volunteers involved in the Haiti mapping also supported other crowdsourced mapping initiatives, such as in the wakes of the earthquake in Chile and floods in Pakistan. The consequences of this continued engagement have been twofold: firstly, it has allowed for building knowledge and experience in the volunteer squad; secondly, it demonstrated a reliable commitment of volunteers, thus proving that an organized structure would enable real-time crowdsourcing to be harnessed effectively when it was needed61. The Standby Volunteer Task Force for Live Mapping (SBTF) was established during the Crisis Mappers annual conference, which so far had provided the space for exchange in a horizontal network, but not set up stand-by teams for crisis mapping support, which is what the SBTF anticipated.

The rationale for pushing a conventional organization like OCHA to previously unconventional

methods of information gathering however, needs to be highlighted against the backdrop of current events and lack of current, effective tools for information gathering in order to save lives. In the popular insurrection in the Middle East - North Africa region, or what became known as the Arab Spring, Egyptian activists organized protests, through social media among other outlets including Facebook and Twitter, which lead to the resignation of an authoritarian leader. Other countries followed the Tunisian and Egyptian examples and by February, a civil war unfolded in Libya. An oil-exporting middle income country which had not experienced major disasters or conflicts on its territory for decades, OCHA did not have any presence within the country. The lack of first-hand information with the pressing need to make decisions and prepare timely relief in the crisis has been cited by Patrick Meier, co-founder of the SBTF and Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi, as the major reason for OCHA to request the SBTF's crisis mapping support for Libya. Credibility of crowdsourced information management and awareness of social media relevance appear therefore only as secondary reasons for the longest and most comprehensive deployment of the SBTF so far.62 Yet the professionalism of this passive63 crowdsourced crisis mapping exercise, capitalizing on the opportunity to collect information from several conventional and unconventional sources remotely and in real-time, was the key success factor of the Libya Crisis Map64. UNOCHA noted in its lessons learned report: The Volunteer and Technical Community helped collect more information (…) in 48 hours than we usually do in the first week.65 The Standby Task Force utilized the Ushahidi platform, incorporating various processes and technologies in a way that produced comprehensive and valid results, in the form of a real-time crowdsourced map comprising geospatial and non-geospatial data interlinked.Various teams were responsible for individual steps from technology issues concerning the platform and features, to media monitoring and translating as well as categorizing information, to approving reports and verifying

 

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information and sources, to geo-location and analysis. Almost 500 volunteers from over 50 countries committed to support the Libya deployment providing a tremendous amount of relevant information on events, food or medical needs, destruction or existence of infrastructure, and humanitarian responses which were consolidated in analytical reports, which facilitated additional ad-hoc tasks such as coordination. This real-time availability of informational outputs is unprecedented compared to professional work force achievements of any conventional organization, considering existing cost limitations. Furthermore, the direct link between crisis mapping results and actors of humanitarian response, often criticized as the major flaw of crowdsourced activities, was ensured in this project due to OCHA itself requesting the SBTF deployment and thus its direct involvement in the process and constant interaction between crowdsourced information gathering and humanitarian actors' requirements.66

Whereas the Haiti team faced several challenges for which no plan had been in place, the Libya

Crisis Map team was better prepared to embrace challenges. Dealing with sensitive information which could have been either abused for tactical purposes or endangered people acting as information sources, the map was accessible via secure log-on procedures only to volunteers working for the deployment and to the partner agencies. Nicole A. Hofmann, SBTF Task Team Coordinator and active volunteer in various teams recalls team discussions in which confidentiality versus open access had been contested priorities: “It was due to the SBTF Co-Founder and Translation Team Coordinator Robert Munro that this was realized; with a time delay between adding reports and being able to view them in the public map, so that information was available first to those who would act accordingly to the code of conduct established.”67

The Libya Crisis Map represented the first fully fledged cooperation between crowdsourcing

online initiatives and conventional international organizations which resulted in a successful joint venture. In terms of team coordination, on-the-job training and maintaining the spirit of group work, the Skype chat groups have manifested themselves as a key method of communication for home-based online volunteering in crowdsourced crisis mapping. Nicole A. Hofmann is convinced that this mode of communication plays a major role for the success of the SBTF performance: “Although work flows were generally provided, (…) new volunteers often have questions which require instant clarification in a live crisis mapping process. During deployments, the Skype group chat window was active 24/7 for live support, and volunteers guided and informed each other simultaneously. If anything important needed to be clarified, coordinators reacted immediately (…) on valuable inputs concerning creation or re-definition of information categories. (…) The SBTF follows a very cooperative, low hierarchy teamwork approach that is very effective in the fast paced environment live crisis mapping has to cope with.”68 The most important lessons learned on this collaboration with UNOCHA were summarized by the SBTF69 as follows: First, it is of pivotal importance for the motivation of volunteers, to provide feedback to them on how their work is making a difference, in this case through daily updates on how exactly the live map is being used to inform decision-making and response. To this end among others, there is need to dedicate more official UN-project staff to distribute tasks and provide feedback to volunteers, to better categorize information, to further standardize communication procedures, to provide translation services for local languages, and to better train volunteers. Duration of the SBTF deployment needs to be agreed and respected ex ante. Protocols on exit strategies should be devised. It has also been noted, that it is very problematic to change the rules of the game during project implementation: the decision to transfer from the initial private map to a public map introduced security concerns that ultimately limited the recruitment

 

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of volunteers with crucial local knowledge. In its own lessons learned report, UNOCHA emphazises in addition the importance to recognize volunteers efforts and results, the need to protect indivuals, e.g. by omitting data that could be used for military reconnaissance, by not soliciting or storing information that could be personally compromising as well as the use of open source standards and applications which are accessible to everybody.70

The Experience of the Development Mapping Community

2.3 Participatory Post-Conflict & Recovery Mapping – The Case of Sudan71 The transition from an emergency to a post-emergency situation is always highly complex. On

the one side, the population is still severely affected and in need of humanitarian support, on the other side, local actors usually call for a longer-term perspective to peace-building and recovery. In most cases, government wants to take the lead, but is still facing severe capacity and/or legitimacy deficits. Sudan, both during and after the CPA72 period, is one of the best examples of the manifold challenges arising from such a transition. Sudan’s security, political and socio-economic situation is extremely intricate, constantly shifting and subject to regional crises. A multitude of actors have been working on poverty reduction and peace building: two UN peacekeeping missions, almost all existing UN agencies, over 300 international aid agencies, and more than 2,000 national NGOs work in partnership with the governments both North and South to deliver critical humanitarian and development aid. These challenges and complexities call for effective tools to assist actors in identifying, prioritizing and coordinating interventions that can enhance peace and stability.

The UNDP Sudan Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analysis Project (CRMA) project has been working since 2007 with key international, government, and community actors across the country’s conflict-affected areas to respond to the need for enhanced coordination and prioritization. The core objectives of the CRMA are to build local capacities for crisis mapping, conflict analysis and strategic planning; to institutionalize evidence-based and conflict-sensitive planning across the UNDP portfolio; to enhance knowledge management and coordination for the UN ‘Delivering as One;’ as well as to explore innovative GIS-enabled platforms and participatory methods for early warning and conflict prevention. The project is based on four principal, interconnected mechanisms as follow.

First, a core component of the support has been the establishment of an Information Management Working Group (IMWG) of the UN Country Team, the first of its kind at country level, to facilitate the development of a coherent information management approach for the United Nations agencies and INGOs in Sudan, in cooperation with local authorities and institutions. The IMWG has developed a formal information sharing platform that provides all recovery and development actors with a common, basic package of relevant baseline information for their individual analyses, planning and programming efforts.73 Every quarter, the IMWG produces a state-by-state Digital Atlas containing multi-sectoral and geo-referenced information from all participating actors. Datasets are sourced and dated to facilitate queries and temporal analysis. Maps can be exported, saved and printed. An online resource centre for recovery and development information will be made publicly available soon, linked to each of the member agencies’ own websites as well as the UNSudanIG web-platform developed by OCHA. This resource centre will host all data made available through the IMWG, as well as the analyses and products

 

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produced by through CRMA. It will feature an interactive GIS tool as well as off-the-shelf PDF maps and background documents.

Second, CRMA has worked with government and community actors to develop a blueprint for state and community-level participatory mapping workshops that capture community perceptions of priorities and emerging risks. Priorities and risks are grouped along socio-economic and security lines and identified for specific geographic and thematic areas. Qualified participants are drawn from a socially and culturally diverse group of people that seeks to ensure as wide of representation as possible. The aim is to capture the full spectrum of dynamics in any given locality or state. Participation has included youth representatives, cultural and religious leaders, women’s unions, and pastoralists and farmers unions, among others. This community level process serves to provide a link between state and population with the findings feeding directly into state policy.

Third, the community perceptions of threats and risks with regards to crisis and recovery are fed into an analysis and planning support process. Making use of the interactive community mapping process as well as the baseline data collected through the information management platform, CRMA supports state governments, UN agencies, and NGOs alike in ensuring that their strategic planning, design and targeting of interventions are evidence-based and conflict-responsive. Working together with the state governments, CRMA supports the development of a State Situation Analysis using a mixed-methods and participatory approach. This analysis in turn becomes the backbone and evidence-base for the government’s own development and revision of their five-year state strategic plans. Further, this joint analysis product facilitates coordination and collaboration amongst all major actors in designing joint needs assessments, disaster risk reduction programs, early warning systems as well as monitoring and evaluation.

Fourth, a comprehensive capacity development program is deployed, focusing mainly on developing the capacity of local authorities, ensuring that the processes, skills, and tools needed for continued data collection, knowledge management and analysis for evidence-based and conflict-responsive strategic planning are institutionalized. The capacity development program uses two principal methods: classroom-based training on core themes and skill-sets, and process accompaniment throughout the partners’ strategic planning cycles, ensuring that tools, skill-sets and knowledge gained are employed in day-to-day work.

The participatory mapping and analysis of community perceptions of threats and risks serves multiple purposes. It can help to identify priority areas for intervention across sectors in a (post) crisis and recovery setting by localizing concentrations of threats and risks pertaining to a particular issue, such as community security, access to health services, or environmental degradation. As all threats and risks are geo-located at the village level, it can provide detailed contextual information about a specific location of interest to actors, shedding light on how different threats and risks interact and impact the community locally. Beyond collecting grass-roots information, this process poses an important opportunity for diverse communities to come together in the aftermath of crisis to discuss challenges, differing perceptions of the situation, and views towards the future. This process fosters open dialogue in a safe setting where opinions are heard and valued rather than silenced and criticized. Though peacebuilding and indeed statebuilding per se, have not been articulated as discrete focuses of the CRMA, the crisis and recovery mapping process has become an important tool in bringing communities and local authorities

 

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together, gaining a broader understanding of the situation and jointly developing priorities for the future. The process has thus contributed to the strengthening of the relationship between state and society, building trust and improving the legitimacy and accountability of the state.

Realizing the potential of combining participatory methods with innovative GIS-enabled tools and new technologies, CRMA has now started to explore the possibility of designing an early warning system for its local government partners. This system would be based on the continuous monitoring of a carefully selected set of minimum essential indicators from the CRM data, updated via a SMS reporting tool and integrated into a specifically tailored database, whether on- or offline, using a combination of crowdsourcing and trusted networks of community-based rapporteurs. This information would provide the foundation for thematic and area-based conflict analyses that would in turn inform the targeting and design of conflict prevention and peacebuilding interventions. The ownership and management of the early warning system would be firmly embedded within the local institution, with the possibility of requests for support from international actors for the particular interventions identified and designed.

Source: UNDP Sudan Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analysis Project (CRMA)

Key success factors of the Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analysis Project: 1. Its diverse professional staff with experience in a range of data collection, processing and analysis

techniques, from traditional GIS to participatory community security workshops, using a variety of new and established data processing and mapping technologies, with a strong focus on volunteered GIS data (VGIS).

 

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2. Its design and roll-out of a conducive incentive mechanism for all major actors helped to the project to achieve framework agreements both with the Northern and Southern Sudanese governments at federal and state levels on the one side, as well as data-sharing agreements with all major UN-agencies, large NGOs and donors on the other side. Its key selling point was its usefulness for all actors involved as well as the neutrality of UNDP as a convening power behind it. In addition, the joint analysis brought all major actors together and managed to provide a solid platform for coordinated and evidence-based designing and targeting of programs.

3. The implementation modality also was a key success factor for its effectiveness. The project design

was adaptable, context driven, client-oriented and easily replicable. Data layers provided through the IMWG range from hydrology, soil types and land cover to demography (including IDP/returnee populations), and distribution of basic services and who-does-what-where-when (4Ws). However, particularly in crisis settings, most of these datasets are old, with partial coverage and unverified data. In an attempt at improving the evidence-base in such settings, the CRMA project in Sudan designed a ‘Crisis and Recovery Mapping’ process (CRM).

4. Participatory and consultative approach to ensure leadership and ownership of the process is firmly

embedded with the project’s counterparts. The inclusiveness of the CRM- process lies at the core of the implementation modality; while validating and updating available IMWG data layers, it generates new grassroots information related to accessing essential resources like water, land, and basic services as well as monitoring of small arms proliferation, counterproductive behaviors, and rule of law deficits, ecological hazards and livelihoods related issues collected through two-day participatory mapping workshops carried out at state and local levels. With 25 to 35 participants each, and inclusive regarding gender, age, livelihoods groups (e.g. farmers and nomads), government, traditional, and religious leaders as well as civil society representatives, workshops seek to bring together widely representative groups.

5. An Inductive approach: The CRMA data analysis follows an ‘inductive’ approach. Important themes

are grounded in the data instead of developed from a preexisting framework. The aim of this approach is to explain perceptions of threats and risks to communities by identifying key characteristics, relationships and processes involved. The categories used throughout the workshop are thus decided upon by the participants themselves and derived from the topics of discussion brought forward. These categories are then fed into an overall Human Security Framework in the CRM database, the indicators for which have been derived from the data itself. CRMA’s methodology is informed by Participatory Rural Appraisals, Participatory Learning Action, Participatory, Post-Conflict Needs Assessment, UNDP’s conflict related development analysis, Conflict Vulnerability Assessments, Human Security Frameworks, and mixed-method research. Margunn Indreboe Alshaikh, UNDP CRMA Replication & Policy Coordinator stated that “through our participatory approach and close collaboration with state authorities and local communities, CRMA has gained the trust of its counterparts and opened doors to topics of discussion hitherto silenced and delegitimized. Using innovative technologies and GIS, sensitive issues are contextualized and depoliticized through novel correlations and visualisations, allowing previously contesting actors to jointly identify priorities for intervention and response. Participatory mapping has become a key tool in managing complexities in peacebuilding and planning for post-crisis settings.”

 

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6. Interoperability: The information management support tools are based on GIS-enabled, open source

software, and are compatible with DevInfo, OCHA’s ProMIS, and other GIS platforms to ensure full interoperability with key partners’ internal databases and tools. Additionally, the standardized Digital Atlas package produced through the IMWG is based on Arc Reader GIS software which is not restricted by current embargos. The Digital Atlases are distributed in CD format to government and donors and NGOs.

7. Use of Mobile applications: From the onset of the project, mobile applications, through NOKIA Data

Gathering, were explored as alternatives methods to paper forms, PDAs or laptops, when conducting data collection from remote locations. Allowing for real-time transmission and sharing and near-real time analysis, the potential of mobile applications is clear when working in fragile and constantly shifting settings. Currently looking at the design of an early warning system, CRMA is also looking at various SMS reporting tools, adding a feature to the database tool developed in-house for this purpose, and allowing for crowdsourcing of information as well as basic information sharing within a trusted network of rapporteurs. The project can be followed on Twitter, at @undpcrma.

Local government ownership has been crucial for the desired project impact on government policies: To ensure local ownership of the process, the CRM and analysis/planning support processes are organized at the request of and in collaboration with local authorities. The current products, such as the State Situation Analyses, are always nationally-owned and have become milestones in and of themselves in terms of counterparts’ efforts at enhancing institutions, processes and capacities in what are often fragile environments, following years of instability and conflict. UNDP cites a DDR Commission official from Southern Kordofan, who stated that “the CRMA provides direction for community security initiatives and can help us ensure that these programs do no harm.”

2.4 Mapping for Sustainable Development – Participatory GIS and Community Forestry Management in Nepal

Unlike in the context of a crisis or recent conflict, wherein people are desperate for rapid assistance and motivated to contribute information, development and poverty reduction are more long-term activities in which sustained civic participation may be more difficult to cultivate. Incentive structures for citizen-led development mapping, information aggregation, or monitoring in a non-crisis context must be more explicit; not provision for day-to-day survival in a humanitarian emergency, as in the Haiti case, or strategic and political assistance, as in the Libya case, but more directed towards consistent access to economic and livelihood resources, with a view to sustained progress and optimal economic, ecological and social outcomes. Interactive engagement in decision-making should engender the attitude that participation is a right, not merely a means to achieve outsiders' project goals.74 Therefore, several conditions are requisite to crowdsourcing for development: appropriate incentives for participation, government/authority approval of the concerned activity, and sufficient technical aptitude, access, and support for the target population to actively engage.

If GIS incorporates community knowledge, it is valuable for multiple applications in the developing world, especially for resource management and planning, when the concerned resources to be managed, such as land, are highly-conducive to spatial definition. Land tenure is one of the most pressing

 

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issues in the developing world, as the vast majority of the global poor engage in agriculture as their primary economic activity. Not surprisingly, land rights and usage are disproportionately important assets of the rural poor. As a valuable, finite resource of oftentimes disputed ownership, ambiguity of land rights and proper usage can disrupt agricultural production, contribute to deforestation, and adversely affect the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor. Conflict, displacement, and inequitable legal status compound the issue further. These issues are a major concern particularly in fragile state contexts. In the following case study, examining the experience of participatory GIS (PGIS) for forestry management in Nepal, inclusive, crowdsourced approaches to land tenure and management of natural resources have shown to have net positive effects.

The visual medium of maps as well as aerial photography, provide a dual benefit. They are simultaneously digestible to the non-literate or undereducated,75 and particularly useful for forestry and natural resource management, a critical sustainable development issue. Participatory GIS (PGIS) provides a platform for communities to delineate their claimed territories and resources, determine usage rights and management imperatives, and generate local consensus, whether through top-down engagement or as community-driven petition to the government.76 The following case illustrates the genuine and long-term effect of government forestry agencies incorporating the knowledge and needs of local communities into sustainable practices, and creating new, multidirectional information flows.

Community forestry was introduced in Nepal in 1978, with the dual objective of reducing environmental degradation and deforestation, while improving access to forest resources needed for subsistence.77 Since then, Nepal has made significant efforts to engage its rural population through PGIS. In 1999, over 8,000 selected forest sections had been officially handed over to locally managed Forest User Groups (FUGs), then representing almost one million households.78 By 2003, there were over 13,000 active FUGs, representing over 34% of Nepal’s population.79 Surveys conducted between 1978 and 1992 suggested a significant positive correlation between community forestry programs and reduced rates of deforestation.80 Out of the village development communities (VDCs) surveyed, those with formally instituted community forest management experienced much smaller net losses of forest cover than those without; 1.9% versus 9.9% respectively.81

The Nepal methodology dictates that rural groups must apply for Forest User Group status. After consultation with government representatives and technical partners, and provision of information about the concerned area, the approved FUG is granted certain usage rights and management responsibilities for segments of forest. Legally recognized, the FUGs are entitled to all benefits of the forest resources in the agreed area, and are made responsible for conserving and sustainably managing the forest.82 In terms of structuring incentives for participation in this process, it is clearly to the advantage of forest-based communities to become FUGs. Legal land tenure status is instrumental for the rural poor, to become more productive and ensure better stewardship of the land. Land tenure generates stability for families and communities, however tenure is complicated and not always easy to secure or grant, due to political biases, displacement and refugees and presence of current tenants, or the government’s private and economic interests. In the case that community management and legal rights over land coincides with government’s desire for an inclusive, locally-managed, and decentralized forestry mechanism, the benefits to both the governed and governing are very clear.

 

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Mapping has proven to be an ideal medium for engagement of rural communities in Nepal. Many of the concerned participants are not literate, and therefore benefit from visual information mediums to dictate and interpret the dimensions and landmarks of their forested areas. Mapping exercises have encouraged discussion between villagers, and helped with information transfer between villagers and the government, as well as between villages.83 Delineation of proposed FUG areas is a critical function of the local community, and helps to generate an upward informational flow that the government can use.

At present, the prolonged social impact of PGIS for forestry management in Nepal is a significant one, as evidenced by the Federation of community Forestry Users, Nepal (FECOFUN), a formal network of FUGs whose incorporation empowers collective action. The overriding goal of FECOFUN is to ensure equitable access to resources for about 8.5 million forest-dependent Nepalese. Not only an informational resource for FUG applicants and members, FECOFUN supports programming, training, and research in sustainable usage, help with alignment under REDD+ regulations, resource-based conflict transformation, and more.84

Of course, PGIS is not a perfect instrument, and in Nepal’s case faced challenges of both accuracy and participation. As Richard Mather cites, “Participatory maps based only on community perceptions … have certain limitations, including their lack of reliability as a means for establishing the scale of areas (the size of features is often portrayed to reflect subjective importance rather than physical scale) or as a means of determining boundary information.”85 In addition, a desired outcome of PGIS in Nepal has been to engage non-literate individuals, women, and marginalized groups, but participation by women had not yet reached desired levels. Due to traditional community social structures, broad representative participation is hard to achieve, though the cohesion and organization of these rural communities is critical in forming and managing a Forest User Group. Imperfect participation reduces legitimacy, and therefore threatens project effectiveness and empowerment. Strong bias is introduced when the main respondents are traditional leaders, while women and people of lower status remain underrepresented. An additional problem stems from the lack of specificity or accuracy of crowdsourced information. “It is arguable that GIS and indigenous spatial knowledge may be inherently incompatible because of a dichotomy between the reductionism and ultra-precision of digitized geo-data, and the fuzziness, ambiguity, and synthesicity of 'natural language' spatial knowledge.86 Minang and McCall also posited that there are deficiencies in ways that information is stored and communicated in the context of traditional community management, and that data is rarely quantified, making analysis more difficult.87 Despite inaccuracies and sampling problems however, the trend of PGIS in Nepal has good implications for local economies and livelihoods, forestry conservation, and broad-based collective political mobilization.

Lessons Learned – Limitations and Sources of Bias in PGIS in Rural Communities

Significant barriers to inclusive data aggregation arise when sourcing from the rural poor, who may be non-literate and likely have very limited access to and knowledge of technology. Indigenous knowledge may be difficult to incorporate into modern GIS systems, as evidenced by the experience of Nepal in community forest mapping. Social standing and education can precipitate bias in crowdsourcing in traditional communities, especially for strongly technology-reliant data aggregation. Governments and implementing partners should work to achieve representative balance in places where it is uncommon, to avoid having innovations become a tool of the elite alone.88 The Nepal case illustrates the difficulty of

 

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keeping women involved in the participatory process; main respondents should not be exclusively more educated, adult and senior males.89 Crowdsourcing with technology on a nationwide scale would also necessarily introduce urban-bias. It is important for implementing organizations to identify and minimize bias through appropriate levels of technology as well as socially-minded models which broaden citizen engagement. In many cases, communities can work with third parties or the government to create paper maps, which can then be digitalized and published online by government or development partners. The key to participatory forestry mapping is having the broadest participation possible, identifying resources areas of interest, creating a forum for negotiation and dispute resolution, and fostering sustainable practices.

Finally, conflict sensitivity is important not only in recently post-conflict states; unfortunately, ethnic divisions commonly permeate civil and economic relations long after a conflict has ceased. Leadership aligned with certain groups over others can affect the distribution of resources, legal protection, and prioritization of social services and development benefits. Severity of social divisions, the number of disparate groups, political majorities and minorities, and historical disenfranchisement may also affect sampling and participation. Although much more evident in Sudan’s case for example, conflict sensitivity cannot be overlooked in a fragile state context.

2.5 Elections Monitoring in Guinea – Crowdsourcing with Mobile Technology for Transparency and Civil Rights

In 2009, a crowdsourcing and citizen reporting platform was established by the civil society group Alliance Guinea, in the aftermath of massacres, mass rape, and political suppression carried out by soldiers loyal to then president Dadis Camara.90 Only after Camara left office did Guinea begin to reestablish democracy, however on shaky foundations and amid much public tension, skepticism, and fear. The atrocities committed under Camara’s direction occurred on September 28th, 2009, and Alliance Guinea was founded the next day in response. The main objectives of Alliance Guinea are to promote transition to full democracy by providing a platform for information sharing and advocacy, and serving as an informational resource for international agencies, analysts, human rights groups, and activists. In addition, Alliance Guinea was established in part to provide a crowdsourcing system for citizen reporting on elections, and due to Camara’s unexpected removal from power, it served to do just that. After many months and several delays, a relatively transparent and free election was held on September 7th, 2010.91

Based on the Ushahidi platform and following the success of Ushahidi’s implementation in response to post-election violence in Kenya, Guinée Vote 2010 Témoign,92 was the primary contribution of Alliance Guinea. Using a combination of SMS, email, web form, and twitter aggregation system, Guinée Vote 2010 Témoign (GV10) collected information on the electoral process. Both positive and negative incidents were categorized in eight ways: violence, harassment, campaign events, polling stations, ‘what went well,’ counting and results, and voting material problems.93 Between the launch of the program and late November, 2010 after the election, GV10 had collected over 2,000 reports from around the country. The associated map indicates that participation was generally widespread and more concentrated in areas with higher population density, which may suggest an encouraging trend of unbiasedness in representation.

 

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GV10 was erected under the auspices of democratic, participatory, and multiethnic engagement in the national political process, in partnership with the African Elections Project, an independent elections monitoring and information group,94 the National Independent Election Committee, and major telecom companies.95 In terms of the critical governance factors for crowdsourcing, several key elements were present to make GV10 operable. A central information platform was provided, and participation was made widely available through a variety of mobile technology options. Every citizen with access to a phone was able to text-in reports. However, GV10 also falls short in many critical areas for effectiveness: it did not have sufficient moderators, or the capability to verify the majority of reports; did not have the means/authority to respond to any reports; was sometimes at the mercy of government in terms of access to mobile communications; and was exposed to potential measurement error and “poison data,” e.g. people committing false reports to record in order to discredit a competing group or politician.96

The posture of state authority in Guinea and its will to suppress GV10 through various means has been inconsistent. After the massacres, aimed at peaceful demonstrators protesting Camara’s rise to power via coup d’état, the government was not in a strong position to block SMS services and other communications infrastructure, due in part to uncertainty over leadership and intense international pressure. However, mobile communications services were blocked for a short while, though amid widespread public outrage they were quickly reactivated.97 The massacres, later coined ‘Bloody Monday,’ also marked one of the earliest and most significant instances of mobile telephone cameras used to broadcast information about human rights abuses in Africa, though suppression of information and confiscation of cameras and mobile devices followed.98 More recently, in the wake of the more successful 2010 election, the government again blocked SMS services, after reports of violence breaking out in response to initial results.99 This action severely hampered the ability of GV10 to collect reports from concerned citizens. It is clear that the Guinean government, whether military in character or not, has perceived mobile communications and crowdsourcing as threatening to general stability as well as to the domestic and international legitimacy of the government.

Another fundamental question is whether or not crowdsourcing data for an election constitutes elections monitoring, or if genuine elections monitoring requires that data be actionable and that some intervention can take place if needed, based on that information. In short, does the efficacy of the data and coordinating institutions inform whether the task at hand is ‘citizen reporting’ or ‘elections monitoring’ in a technical sense. As a discipline, elections monitoring involves trained monitors, deployed to polling stations to report structured information back to the monitoring body. Furthermore, elections monitors are there to instill a stronger sense of procedure, discourage intimidation, and deter fraud and irregularities.100 Citizen reporting, and the presence of a system such as GV10, may serve to empower citizens and encourage better government behavior, deter fraud, and make those who may disrupt elections more cautious. But the argument can also be made that as an informal process with limited capabilities to respond to allegations of tampering, intimidation, or worse, citizen reporting is not a replacement for formal elections monitoring. Nonetheless, the two disciplines are highly complementary, and more crossover between the two could yield better results. In particular, it would allow for better triangulation of monitoring data from official sources by crowdsourced data. For example, if GV10 included data provided from independent elections monitors, citizens and agencies would have more structured and verifiable information with which to design interventions and political or advocacy campaigns.

 

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Guinée Vote 2010 Témoign demonstrates that Guineans are interested in broader participation in governance, more transparency, and more consistent democratic rule. Furthermore, this case suggests that the posture of the government vis-à-vis civil society activities, coordination and crowdsourcing makes a difference, and that institutional and technical linkages to crowdsourced information must be made to ensure the efficacy of such an effort.

2.6 Kenya Open Data and Huduma – A Paradigm Shift for Governance in Kenya?

In July, 2011, the Government of Kenya officially made available its statistics and data on government spending, health and poverty indicators, public service delivery101 including primary schools, and much more. By releasing its data to the public, the Kenyan Government has opened the possibility for developers, statisticians, civil society groups, and researches, to analyze, engage, and criticize state management, budgeting, and welfare in entirely new and empirical ways. It has also opened its doors to evaluation and criticism more than ever before; a break from the longstanding stereotype of unapologetically insular government systems in Africa. With significant support from the World Bank and the Mapping for Results program of the World Bank Institute, Kenya has taken the first steps towards empowering citizens through openness of information. A desired outcome of the open data initiative is to crowdsource independent developers who can create new and useful tools, applications, and analyses 102 for institutions, companies and the general public, making use of new resources to hold government more accountable. Ideally, greater transparency through open data on government spending, parliamentary proceedings, and public service delivery could also have a dampening effect on corruption in the country.

Several elements of governance for crowdsourcing present themselves in this new environment of openness and the types of data made available. Self-selection of participants is evident, as citizens with expertise in statistical analysis will be motivated to make use of raw government data. Other applications being built around or in concert with the open data initiative will cater to broader segments of Kenyan society. A central platform for information dissemination, Kenya Open Data functions as a neutral hub for citizens of all kinds to use. While it is yet unclear how timely, accurately or consistently data will be provided by the government, all of these steps are encouraging. Of course, observers and Kenyan citizens alike hope sincerely that the government’s new commitment to transparency will breed self-correcting behavior, and contribute generally to increase quality of life and responsiveness of government to the needs of the people.

So far, there has been significant demand for data; a hopeful trend for proponents of crowdsourcing new applications and uses of government data for improvement of governance and development. As of August 17, 2011, there had been over 100 individual requests for specific datasets, often accompanied by brief justifications or proposals for new application development. Though the result of opening data in terms of new, useful applications has yet to be seen, it is encouraging that the government has recognized the demand for data and responded appropriately. However not all sections of the Kenyan government were equally supportive of this move.

But there are efforts to even go one step further and offer government response to citizens’ public service delivery complaints modeled after the US-community service SeeClickFix. In concert with the Kenyan Government’s new open data initiative, an Ushahidi-based crowdsourcing platform called Huduma103 has been launched in February 2011 which employs an SMS, email, and twitter reporting

 

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system to allow citizens to submit reports on infrastructure needs, supply or utilities shortages, and other problems with government services and conduct. There are six categories for reporting: education; governance; health; infrastructure, water and justice. Contributions can be submitted anonymously, but showing the location of the sender. Several Kenyan ministries have attended the launch of Huduma,104 but the extent and quality of their participation and willingness to adopt Huduma into their operations has still to be proven. Huduma has been scheduled to become fully functional nationwide in August, 2011.105 However, by mid-September 2011, out of more than 3000 reports submitted by citizens, only 12 were assigned to one of the six basic categories and none of those assigned had been resolved. Still as a first step, the citizens who produced their reports can see them published online on a central platform. It will be interesting to follow, how these reports, that make specific local issues and needs for the first time visible to the global public, will be handled by the government.

2.7 Avaaz – Crowdsourcing Political Pressure on a Global Scale

Avaaz.org, launched in 2007, is an international campaigning tool to generate support or pressure around international and transnational issues, to influence governments and institutions to act in the interest of human rights, peace, environmental protection, and other causes. Fragile state governments such as Sudan, Syria and Burma are prominent campaign targets.106 A strong example of universally participatory crowdsourcing, as anyone with an email address and an internet connection can participate; the issues that Avaaz takes on are identified (in part) by member polls taken on a yearly basis.107 Anyone can become a member, log-in and sign an Avaaz petition, in a show of issue-solidarity with others around the world. There are ongoing campaigns to end violence afflicting the people of Darfur in Sudan,108 to stop the abhorrent practice of ‘corrective rape’ in South Africa,109 and many other affronts to basic human rights. By demonstrating that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide can collaborate and have meaningful, effective collective voice, Avaaz has in a way revolutionized the way that people think about difficult international issues.

Many of the issues that Avaaz campaigns for are highly emotionally charged, and carry significantly broader resonance in the developed world than in developing countries. The vast majority of Avaaz’s membership is found in developed countries. The map provided in 2010 when Avaaz reached 5 million members (currently there are over 9 million, as reported in August 2011), shows concentration of people with internet access, access to wealth, access to consistent and good health care, and other indicators of high levels of development. To illustrate the point, after major campaigns in 2009 including an online petition against violence, disease and hunger in Zimbabwe; an online petition against the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks; and an online petition against the Anti-Homosexual Bill in Uganda, citizens of the countries’ whose interest is represented by the campaigns are significantly less active in them than are non-target or more developed countries. For example, in 2010, there were 398,798 Members from Canada (1.2 % of the population), while there were only 1,293 Members from Nigeria (0.0008 % of the population). 110 111

While this fact in no way diminishes the point that Avaaz genuinely does crowdsource public

sentiment to provoke political change, it does indicate that the self-selection aspect of Avaaz’s online petitions (in-country demonstrations are much a different story) attract those with ample stability to be concerned with “what is affecting others,” and less “what affects me.” It can thus be seen as external complement to in-country campaigns, as well as ‘speaking out for the oppressed’ and creating

 

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international pressure where internal opposition is being silenced (e.g. Sudan, Syria), which of course is particularly relevant to the fragile state context. A similar, albeit smaller role is played by online Diaspora networks, such as the Facebook group “Sudanese in support of Sudanese protests”, only to mention one out of many examples.

Web-based activism has been the subject of pointed criticism, despite its apparent benefit to international causes, crowdfunding for disaster relief, and successes in changing legislation, pressuring the United Nations, and becoming a major player in progressive international campaigning. Some of the most consistent criticism of Avaaz is that it makes activism too easy. The term ‘clicktivism’ has been coined, in reference to the facility of participation from a distance and at little personal cost, for regular people engaging in serious international issues. But despite criticism, Avaaz has shown to have a real impact and show the value of collective voice. It is completely funded by its membership and has thus shown to be a powerful tool for crowdfunding. The organization’s budget for 2009 was $4,328,357,112

with which it carried out several campaigns and made significant charitable donations.

As expected of a crowdsourcing tool, when browsing the Avaaz site, one does not see a high diversity of political views, but rather international mainstream opinion with a western bias. However there is no geographic barrier to participation, which means that whether in the majority or minority of a realm of political thought, a citizen has the choice to participate.

Taking all of this into account, Avaaz is generally not a resource for start-up political movements in the developing world or anywhere; not useful to organize movements on a small scale, and not useful for introducing entirely new issues to the general public. The focus issues which Avaaz campaigns for range between being widely known among internationalists, to veritable ‘household name’ conflicts, crises, chronic abuses of human rights, and environmental issues. But Avaaz does have grassroots appeal; its strength derives from its immense membership and the power of collective action and petition. In this way, Avaaz represents crowdsourcing for political action in the broadest sense possible.

2.8 Other Emergent Applications of Crowdsourcing for Economic Development and Good Governance

Crowdsourcing is not only useful in directly addressing governance issues as presented above. It can also indirectly influence governance by increasing market efficiency as well as by offering additional income sources thus empowering small-scale producers and poor workers. These types of crowdsourcing could offer an acceptable entry point to crowdsourcing for fragile state environments even when initiatives that directly aim at governance issues are blocked by authoritarian governments. In addition, crowdsourcing can be used merely in its capacity as a cost-effective tracking and monitoring tool by donors and development program implementers.

Crowdsourcing market information

Better awareness of market prices reduces low-income farmers’ risk when deciding whether to plant a particular crop as well, as where to sell it. mCollect is a Trade-in-Hand initiative started in 2006 by the International Trade Center with the intention of fostering a pro-poor value chain integration by enhancing export opportunities and trade throughout West Africa.113 Using crowdsourcing, mCollect makes it easier for the information collectors to gather domestic prices straight from the local agricultural

 

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markets. Afterwards, the information is distributed via SMS to interested farmers and businesses in the region. mCollect has been implemented in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Liberia. Another Trade-in-Hand initiative, Mobile Marketplace, offers a virtual marketplace to small-scale producers by enabling them to advertise their products via mobile phone to wholesalers and exporters. This greatly expands opportunities to connect buyers and sellers beyond farmers’ or traders’ immediate locales.114 TradeNet/Esoko, Resimao, and Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) by the Grameen Foundation are similar programs in Africa that aim to collect and make market data and agricultural information, crowdsourced from farmers, available on the web and via mobile phones in order to enhance market efficiency.

txtEagle - Generating Additional Income for Low Income Populations

Based on the concept of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk,115 txtEagle is a mobile phone based system which enables a crowd of mobile phone users to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their mobile phones for corporations. The corporations pay these ad-hoc workers either in airtime or mobile money. The tasks range from translation, transcription, marketing surveys, and software localization on their mobile phones. txtEagle was established in 2009 and provides an additional source of income to rural and low income populations in Kenya and Rwanda.

Universities for Ushahidi

Turning reactive crowdsourcing in crisis and disaster response into a proactive tool for community engagement and development is the aim of many activists and development agencies alike. The United States Institute of Peace explores such options in cooperation with Ushahidi in the form of a program called Universities for Ushahidi (U4U), involving community projects to be established on the basis of crowdsourcing. Program themes range from women’s empowerment to strengthening transparency and participation of local political processes, such as ensuring a voice for community needs and providing checks and balances for their implementation.116

Crowdsourcing for Monitoring and Evaluation

Beyond tracking human rights abuses and monitoring elections, crowdsourcing can also serve as complementary monitoring and evaluation tool for development and humanitarian programs evoking a direct feedback loop from their beneficiaries. This is of particular interest in fragile states, where access to target areas and unbiasedness of national partners is rarely guaranteed. Doubts regarding crowdsourced processes concerning the validity and representativeness of data neglect to appreciate the fact that each selection of survey or focus groups, of training participants and local partner organizations, deals with similar criticism. Although it cannot provide perfectly unbiased sampling, crowdsourcing has the potential advantage of being open to anyone with access to a mobile phone. Where organizations need to have situational awareness, they rely on ad-hoc sources available, which equally facilitate questioning of the objectivity and credibility of the respective information. Crowdsourcing platforms have already installed methodologies to cross-check information, minimizing the possibility of error or abuse.

 

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                                                            53 Duval (2010), pp.29 54 Rahemtulla, H.A. et al. (2011), The Synergistic Use of Authenticated and Crowd-Sourced Data for Emergency Response, http://globesec.jrc.ec.europa.eu/workshops/valgeo-2010/presentations/session-3/Jackson_Rahmatullah_val.pdf 55 Fletcher Students Use Information and Communication Technology to Provide Critical Assistance, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy website, http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Hitachi/~/media/Fletcher/Microsites/Hitachi/UshahidiHaitiStatement.ashx 56 From the Fletcher School Situation Room, “Is it life or death?,” Ushahidi website, http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/26/life-or-death/ Retrieved September 2011 57 Robertmunro.com Retrieved September 2011 58 Crowley, John and Chan, Jennifer (2011), Disaster Relief 2.0 – the Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and UN Foundation-Vodafone Foundation-UNOCHA 59 Noula website, http://www.noula.ht, Retrieved July 2011 60 Mission 4636 website, http://www.mission4636.org/history/, Retrieved July 2011 61 Hofmann, Nicole A. (2011), ), Interview with Nicole A. Hofmann, Independent Consultant for Conflict Prevention, Crisis Mapping & Peace-Building, Standby Task Force Task Team Coordinator, engaged in Media Monitoring / Analysis Team for Libya Crisis Mapping and Coordinator Media Monitoring/ Report Team for Alabama Recovery. 07/07/2011 62 Meier, Patrick (2011), Presentation at panel discussion: From Crisis to Community: Mapping as a Peacebuilding Tool, United States Institute of Peace, June 2011, http://www.usip.org/newsroom/multimedia/audio/crisis-community-mapping-peacebuilding-tool, Retrieved July 2011 63 Social media data as well as public media were analyzed by crowdsourced volunteers, instead of ‘call-in’ by people on the ground, as had been the case in Haiti. 64 According to the UNOCHA Libya crisis mapping Lessons learned Report 2011 (§ 39), there were problems only with 5 out of 500 volunteers. 65 Ibid. (§9) 66 Hofmann, Nicole A. (2011), ibid. 67 Hofmann, Nicole A. (2011), ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 The Standby Task Force (2011), Libya Crisis Map Deployment, http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/libya-crisis-map-report, September 2011 70 UNOCHA (2011), (§3,4) 71Summary of Sources provided by Margunn Indreboe Alshaikh – UNDP Sudan CRMA Replication & Policy Coordinator and the author’s own experience 72 CPA = Comprehensive Peace Agreement, established in 2005 and officially ended with the declaration of independence of the Republic of South Sudan 9 July 2011. 73 The success of this Working Group at the national level has led to the set-up of a regional IMWG for Darfur and now an independent one in South Sudan. 74 McCall, Michael K. & Minang, Peter A., (Dec. 2005), Assessing Participatory GIS for Community-Based Natural Resource Management: Claiming Community Forests in Cameroon, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 171, No. 4, p. 342 75 Mather, Richard A., (May, 2000), Using Photomaps to Support Participatory Processes of Community Forestry in the Middle Hills of Nepal, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 155 76 Osha, Jen & Weiner, Daniel, Participatory GIS - A Paradigm Shift in Development?, Directions Magazine, Dec. 2006, http://www.directionsmag.com/articles/participatory-gis-a-paradigm-shift-in-development/122968 77 Gautam, Ambika P., Webb, Edward L. & Eiumnoh, Apisit (Feb 2002), GIS Assessment of Land Use/Land Cover Changes Associated with Community Forestry Implementation in the Middle Hills of Nepal, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 22, No. 1, p. 63 78 Ibid. 79 Maraseni, Tek Narayan, Cockfield, Geoff, & Apan, Armando, (2005) Community Based Forest Management Systems in Developing Countries and Eligibility for Clean Development Mechanism, Journal of Forest and Livelihood, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 4, http://eprints.usq.edu.au/568/1/Livelihood_Paper-Final.pdf 80 Gautam, Ambika P., Webb, Edward L. & Eiumnoh, Apisit (Feb 2002), p. 65 81 Ibid. p. 66 82 Mather, Richard A., (May, 2000), p. 154-161

 

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                                                                                                                                                                                                83 Ibid. 84 Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal, http://www.fecofun.org/home/index.php 85 Mather, Richard A., (May, 2000), p. 154 86 McCall, Michael K. & Minang, Peter A., (Dec. 2005), p. 343 87 Minang, Peter A. & McCall, Michael K., (Apr. 2006) Participatory GIS and local knowledge enhancement for community carbon forestry planning: an example from Cameroon, Participatory Learning and Action, No. 54, p. 86 88 McCall, Michael K. & Minang, Peter A., (Dec. 2005), p. 344 89 Ibid. 90 UN: Guinea military junta leader Camara responsible for massacre, reported by the Christian Science Monitor, Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, December 21, 2009 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2009/1221/UN-Guinea-military-junta-leader-Camara-responsible-for-massacre, Retrieved August 2011 91 Guinea Sees Big Turnout in Presidential Run-off Poll, BBC News, Nov. 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11705147 Retrieved August 2011 92 French for ‘witness’ 93 Guinée Vote 2010 Temoign, website, http://www.allianceguinea.org/ushahidi/, Retrieved August 2011 94 African Elections Project, website, http://www.africanelections.org/aboutus.php, Retrieved August 2011 95 Crowdsourcing Election Monitoring in Guinea with Mobile Technology - Samhir Vasdev, Global Mobile (Blog), 6/22/10, for the NDN http://ndn.org/blog/2010/06/crowdsourcing-election-monitoring-guinea-mobile-technology 96 Ibid. 97 Guinea Blocks Citizens from Sending SMS Messages, Alliance Guinea, website, Nov. 2010 - http://www.allianceguinea.org/2010/11/guinea-blocks-citizens-from-sending-sms-messages/, Retrieved July 2011 98 Bloody Monday, Report by Human Rights Watch - http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/12/16/bloody-monday, Retrieved August 2011 99 Guinea Blocks Citizens from Sending SMS Messages, Alliance Guinea, Nov. 2010 - http://www.allianceguinea.org/2010/11/guinea-blocks-citizens-from-sending-sms-messages/ 100 Cutting through the Hype: Why Citizen Reporting isn’t Election Monitoring, MobileActive.org, May 2010, http://mobileactive.org/cutting-through-hype-why-citizen-reporting-isnt-election-monitoring 101 Huduma, website, http://huduma.info/ 102 Kenya Open Data, website, http://opendata.go.ke/ 103 ‘Huduma’ is the Swahili word for service. 104 SODNET, Update on Huduma, website, July 2011, http://www.sodnet.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=139%3Ahuduma-a-step-ahead-in-the-journey-of-reforms&Itemid=1 105 Kenya Open Data Initiative: A Developer Perspective, Afrinnovator.org (Blog), July 2011 http://afrinnovator.com/blog/2011/07/20/kenya-open-data-initiative-a-developer-perspective/ 106 Avaaz.org, website, http://www.avaaz.org, Retrieved September 2011 107 Avaaz.org, About, website, http://www.avaaz.org/en/about.php\., Retrieved August 2011 108 Avaaz.org, Sudan: Enough is Enough, http://www.avaaz.org/en/sudan_enough_is_enough/?slideshow, Retrieved August 2011 109 Avaaz.org, South Africa: Stop Corrective Rape!, http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_corrective_rape_6/, retrieved August 2011 110 CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/index.html, Retrieved July 2011 111 Avaaz Membership Map, May 2010, http://www.avaaz.org/en/5_million/?press 112 Avaaz – Expenses and Financial Information, 2009 Fiscal Year, Retrieved August 2011 http://www.avaaz.org/en/avaaz_expenses_and_financial_information, retrieved August 2011 113 Livingston, Steven L. (2010), Africa’s Evolving Infosystems – a Pathway to Stability and Development, Africa Research Center for Strategic Studies, Research Paper No. 2, Washington DC, http://africacenter.org 114 Ibid. 115 One of the first successful large-scale commercial crowdsourcing marketplaces, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provides a platform for computer programmers to co-ordinate a crowd of workers to perform tasks that computers are unable to do yet, such as translating, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. The workers can browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment. 116 USIP Events page, http://www.usip.org/events/crisis-community-mapping-peacebuilding-tool (01.08.2011)

 

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PART III Recommendations for Donors – Applying Crowdsourcing and Interactive Mapping for Socio-economic Recovery and Development in Fragile States

“The default position for many people working in ICT4D is to build centralized solutions to local problems – things that ‘integrate’ and ‘scale.’ With little local ownership and engagement, many of these top-down approaches fail to appreciate the culture of technology and its users. (…) My belief is that users don’t want access to tools, they want to be given the tools. There’s a subtle but significant difference. They want to have their own system, something which works with them to solve their problem.”117

Crowdsourcing requires massive contributions by volunteers. Yet processes driven by volunteers are less predictable and less controllable than formal processes, which in a fragile state context can support the credibility of information rather than undermining it, but certainly poses the question; is institutionalizing crowdsourcing always the best option or even if it is possible at all? Fragile states can be characterized by a lack of trust in public institutions. Therefore ownership of the crowdsourcing process becomes a key issue, both on the side of government and on the side of potential users. The willingness and personal engagement of volunteers is based on a vision or specific objective that an official donor or government institution may not evoke in the population. An initiative that is perceived to be externally driven, will only work in an emergency, crisis, or similar short-term context. However, donors can play a pivotal facilitation role. The analytical tool for assessing crowdsourcing success factors presented in PART I, applied to a particular project design, can provide guidance in this regard.

There are meaningful ways in which donors can maximize the impact of crowdsourcing for better governance in fragile states. Exploring the role of donor and government institutions in reactive and proactive crowdsourcing, the focus should first be on creating awareness amongst officials to foster an understanding of the opportunities arising through this new mechanism. Crowdsourcing tools first need to be acknowledged by a wider group of professionals and become a valid input to guide decision-making for those institutions. Rather than establishing separate crowdsourcing mechanisms in isolation from initiatives on the ground, official institutions need to find ways to cooperate with the existing online communities and harness their potential to provide information and facilitate crowdsourced processes. The principle for the use of country-systems in partner countries is equally applicable to civil society mechanisms, including traditional as well as modern virtual forms. In order to transform reactive crowdsourcing into proactive peacebuilding, democratization, and development programs, community engagement is indispensable to ensure transition from short-term projects to sustainable processes carried out due to broad-based ownership118. Of course, donors can provide funding or technical advice to the setup of crowdsourcing initiatives by local institutions or groups.

In a fragile state context, one crucial contribution by donors can be at the level of the enabling environment. Donors are well equipped to help increase the political space for crowdsourcing by presenting the opportunities and advantages of crowdsourcing and interactive mapping to government authorities, taking the government’s interests into consideration with regards to the potential of crowdsourcing for improved development planning, reduction of transaction costs, added value to e-government services, increased aid transparency, and improved relations with the public. Donors can thus

 

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suggest incentives to governments to support, or at least, to permit, crowdsourcing processes. Donors possess the convening power to bring all major stakeholders to the table.

In addition, donors could offer financial incentives for local governments to collaborate, such as performance-based investment funds. The performance of local government’s implementation is being monitored and evaluated by a civil society crowdsourcing mechanism.

The cases of Nepal and Sudan demonstrate that donor-supported offline participatory mapping continues to play an important role in breaking-down ethnic-social divisions, engendering inclusiveness and thus conflict-sensitivity in community recovery and development planning. The process of collaborative governance and decision making is a factor in mediation and conflict prevention that cannot be overestimated. After the map has been agreed on, the mapping results can be digitalized by donors or governments and thus made available to the public. Furthermore, participatory mapping can be used as a training process for communities and authorities which at a later stage, and can be enriched by using mobile phone-based crowdsourced tracking of development progress by local community members. An innovative design of the planning process combining traditional one-time participatory community mapping for planning and evaluation with continuous mobile interactive mapping for tracking and monitoring creates (a typically absent) feedback loop to and from the local level. Such a process design can help increase social capital and prevent the emergence of parallel institutions, e.g. crowdsourcing by youth versus offline representation by traditional leaders. Crucial conditions for success are to design the intervention as a process, not a project, and to allow the data generated through participatory mapping and crowdsourcing to guide overall planning decisions. The inductive approach used in Sudan is an example of how mapping categories were developed by stakeholders, instead of being dictated as given by the facilitators. Planning data generated through such processes can legitimately inform state-level and national development and poverty reduction strategies. In general, platforms that start at the community and locality levels, e.g. for collaborative community planning, seem the most promising, since their lower initial level within government reaps higher immediate benefits and presents a lesser political threat to government leadership.

The cases shown in PART II outline the opportunities for donors to advocate for governments to share information with the public, for fostering inclusive access to telecommunication, the importance of prevention of harassment of crowdsourcing activists, and the criticality of linkages with civil society and the private sector for the inclusion of population groups hitherto subject to the digital divide. Such advocacy could be part of the political dialogue within a budget support program or another significant multi-donor program. The willingness of donors to gather and share their data, to make them publicly available through an open-aid mapping process with crowdsourced feedback loops involving beneficiaries, can be an important incentive for governments to become more open from their side. Ideally, crowdsourcing initiatives for development will be closely linked to an open government program, as attempted by the Kenyan government.

However, open government programs cannot be donor-driven, but need to possess strong ownership by the government leadership in order to have a chance of success. Last but not least, by means of their reputational impact, donors can significantly increase critical success factor by creating linkages and trust of a crowdsourcing initiative, especially in a fragile state context where strong initial government support may at times not be an option. Through supporting local crowdsourcing activities,

 

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donors as well as international campaign platforms such as Avaaz can link interactive mapping with other media and thus help drawing the eyes of the international community and mainstream media on human rights violations and other important issues. The sheer potential of doing so could discourage abuses, prevent conflicts and increase government accountability in the future. If the situation develops into a crisis, donors can support through providing technologies, systems and external support that help protect crowdsourcing activists and platforms from government abuse, as shown in the case of Libya.

In fragile state contexts, crowdsourcing can be made more difficult by government regulations and actions, but it can also draw more attention and motivations from the crowd, especially if there are otherwise limited options to express opinions. As the early experience has shown, crowdsourcing and GIS-based interactive mapping are already widely used practices of citizens within fragile states. Whether they will have a significant impact on governance depends largely on how governments relate to the phenomenon. Embracing its potential, especially for participatory development planning and monitoring of issues by citizen, could increase governments’ accountability and ultimately legitimacy, while trying to stifle crowdsourcing initiatives could contribute to further destabilization of regimes. 

                                                            117 Banks, Ken (2009), A glimpse into social mobile’s long tail, January 2009, www.frontlinesms.org 118 USIP - United States Institute for Peace (2011): From Crisis to Community: Mapping as a Peacebuilding Tool. Panel discussion 17/06/2011. http://www.usip.org/newsroom/multimedia/audio/crisis-community-mapping-peacebuilding-tool, Retrieved in July 2011

 

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