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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

P
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

C 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 Effort Expectancy Social Influence Facilitating


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

  14
 
 

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

  15
 
 

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

  16
 
 

                                                                                                                                                                                                
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
40
Ibid., p. 15
41
Rogers (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:2223057
3~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

  17
 

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

  18
 

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

  19
 

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

  20
 

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

  21
 

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

  22
 

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).

  24
 

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.”

  25
 

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

  26
 

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

  31
 

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.

  34
 

                                                            
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)
71
Summary 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

  35
 

                                                                                                                                                                                                
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)

  36
 

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

  37
 

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,

  38
 

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

  39
 

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