Could Crowdsourcing Add Value to Humanitarian Efforts?
Perhaps it could. However, the problem is that nobody who is promoting crowdsourcing currently has presented convincing arguments for that added value. To the extent that it’s a crowdsourcing tool, Ushahidi is not useful; to the extent that it’s useful, Ushahidi is not a crowdsourcing tool. To their credit, this hasn’t gone unnoticed by at least some of the Ushahidi team, and there seems to be something of a retreat from crowdsourcing, described in this post by one of the developers, Chris Blow: One way to solve this: forget about crowdsourcing. Unless you want to do a huge outreach campaign, design your system to be used by just a few people. Start with the assumption that you are not going to get a single report from anyone who is not on your payroll. You can do a lot with just a few dedicated reporters who are pushing reports into the system, curating and aggregating sources.” At least one of the Ushahidi team members now talks about “bounded crowdsourcing” which is a nonsensical co
