You Are Here
Using Crowd-sourcing to Map Crises
Crisis mapping is an emerging field that utilizes technology to geolocate, aggregate, and disseminate information using visually dynamic maps. The practice is relatively new, coming to prominence after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Crisis mapping uses social media and crowd-sourced information to elevate maps to a new level.
From Idea to Interactive Map
Mainly operating with the use of open-source technology including, OpenStreetMap and the Ushahidi platform, crisis mapping is creating a way for people to understand and interact with their surroundings. From local to global issues, crisis mapping offers context and understanding in real-time to developing comprehensive and interactive maps.
A crisis map begins with an idea or need. Anyone has the ability to create a crisis map. Volunteers, or crisis mappers can gather information and plot points on maps from Google, Bing, Yahoo, or OpenStreetMap. Many citizen journalists and witnesses have utilized mapping technology to provide a map relaying key geographic data in a crisis.
Calling on data from SMS, email, phone calls, and social media, volunteers, or crisis mappers, plot points on an interactive map. Maps can vary from city clean up, as seen with Snowmageddon in the United States to a city-wide effort to report on terrorism, seen in the Mumbai Blasts.
The central vein to all of these maps is the crowd-sourced information and participation of citizens on the ground. Crowd-sourcing is essential to creating an interactive and dynamic map that relays important information during a crisis. Sifting through information, translation, geolocation, mapping, categorization, and finally reporting are all important steps in the crisis mapping process, and they are all done by volunteers.
A Not-So-Distant History
For several thousand years, people have been using maps to understand their surroundings. Maps help to explain where we are and help to contextualize our world. According to Marta Poblet and Pompeu Casanovas, crisis mapping is often associated with a geographic information system, or GIS. Through the use of maps, “GIS is a way of visually presenting, analyzing, and managing data and statistics”.
The term Public Participation GIS or PPGIS was coined in 1996 and “cover[ed] a specific geographical context (North America), and for a particular purpose — how GIS technology could support public participation for variety of possible applications”. This public participation is often called “neogeography”. Sophia B. Liu and Leysia Palenm from the University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Computer Science report that participants, or neogeographers, “use and create their own maps, on their own terms, by combining elements of an existing toolset”. But, citizen cartography did not become widely used due to the technological barriers and lack of understanding around GIS equipment.
Crisis mapping, as it is known today, followed soon after Google released Google Earth in 2005. Prior to Google Earth, geographic information systems were often expensive and the maps produced were usually proprietary after their completion, according to Patrick Meier, Director of Social Innovation at Qatar Computing Research Institute. The access to a free and easy to use mapping platform revolutionized the way average citizens utilized maps by lowering the barriers to entry, chiefly availability and accessibility.
Crisis Mapping in the 21st Century
Crisis maps now have the ability to create a layered experience that offers real-time data to support and inform society. The process of creating a crisis map relies almost exclusively on crowd-sourced information from SMS (text messaging), Twitter, the web, other news sources, and RSS feeds, then organizes the information into an interactive map to assist people in understanding the realities of a situation.
The stories that crisis maps reveal can vary widely. From voter fraud and governmental corruption to sexual harassment on the streets to natural disasters, crisis mapping is offering citizens the opportunity to contribute to a growing body of data to create interactive and dynamic visual maps.
In 2007, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative was launched to “examine the impact of crisis mapping, geospatial and crowd sourcing technologies to prepare, mitigate, and respond to emergencies”. But, it wasn’t until the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that crisis mapping was implemented in a catastrophic natural disaster. The process of mapping was being tested as each SMS was sent out. Much was learned about the utilization of crisis maps following the 2010 disaster. Haiti serves as a starting point to understand crisis mapping as it is often being used today.
Mapping in Action: An Haitian Case Study
In 2010, a group of students and faculty from the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University deployed the Ushahidi platform to aid in humanitarian efforts following the Haitian earthquake. This implementation of crisis mapping proved an invaluable tool in disaster relief. Roughly twenty-six hours after the earthquake devastated over 60 percent of Port-au-Prince, a Ushahidi platform was set up and a volunteer team assembled to scour the internet for on-the-ground information from those affected by the earthquake.
Through the aggregation of tweets, posts, and SMS messages to the Ushahidi platform, volunteers began mapping the information. This information included buildings that were destroyed, people texting their location to be rescued, survivors sending requests for supplies needed, and a variety of other vital data first-responders needed to save lives.
Prior to the earthquake, neither Google Maps nor OpenStreetMap was suitable for the mapping task. The maps consisted of minimal information about Port-au-Prince. Though OSM did not, at the time, have a useful map that would enable volunteers to plot crucial locations, the open-source organization solicited the help from its international network of volunteer mappers. Hundreds of mappers made over 1.4 million edits to the OSM map of Haiti in 25 days, according to John Crowley, a consultant with the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.
A crucial piece of the Haiti crisis map response was the translation and interpretation of the text messages being sent in via the dedicated 4636 phone code. Soon after the earthquake, it was apparent that the majority of the cellular towers were undamaged. This allowed the Tufts volunteer group to set up a dedicated sms service with FrontlineSMS and a host of other actors to allow those affected by the earthquake the ability to connect with the outside world.
The SMS code sent messages directly to the Haiti Ushahidi platform. The Haitian diaspora community then donated their time to translate SMS messages being sent so that volunteers could understand and plot relevant information. This effort led rescuers and other aid workers to the people in need.
Critiques of Crisis Mapping
The response around the use of crisis mapping in Haiti sparked a more serious conversation around the usefulness of the technology to respond to humanitarian crises. There were many lives saved in Haiti, but larger questions around privacy and verification were raised.
One of the major critiques is the issue of privacy and data collection. Is it legal or ethical to publish peoples’ text messages, emails and personal information?
Other valuable questions must also be considered analyzing this field. How do we verify the accuracy of the information? What is meant by “crisis”? What is the scope of crisis mapping? How do we comb through vast amounts of data to find the relevant information? Who finds the maps useful?
In crisis situations, it is now more common to have multiple crisis maps pop up, how do users rally around one map to make it useful? What groundwork must be in place in a given location for a crisis map to display information that matters? What training must an organization or group need to create an effective crisis map?
There are many thought leaders and academics pursuing answers to these questions. A vibrant community discussion can be found at crisismappers.net. The aforementioned Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is also dedicated to finding answers to these questions. Citizen mappers are coming up with solutions to the technological and ethical questions that surround crisis mapping through trial and error. Not every map works or contains essential information. The emerging field will continue to grow and delve deeper into issues of chief concern as crisis maps become more frequently used.
Final Thoughts
Crisis mapping is a tool only as useful as the community that supports it. Relying heavily on crowd-sourced information and volunteer participation makes this at best, a dynamic mapping tool that offers valuable information to affect the lives of the users. At worst, the map could reach few people, have little engagement, and ultimately prove irrelevant.
A map is only as good as the information it conveys. This tool, when used in tandem with an engagement plan, will prove useful to the people and organizations that use it. Crisis maps can help to tell a more textured story in times of crisis, political unrest, or even in times of social change. The most useful applications of this method will be when those that are crowdsourcing find meaning in the noise of the internet and siphon out the information that is useful to a group of people.
For journalists, crisis mapping continues to prove a difficult tool to use. The lack of verification and vetting on many crowd-sourced maps could leave journalists uneasy about their usefulness. A comprehensive verification process has been seen on some maps, but not all meet the standards to which journalists are expected to abide. Joanna Plucinska at the Poynter Institute reports that crowdsourcing and crowd mapping will become a more widely used tool for journalists as “the challenges of verification faced by crowdmappers aren’t that different from the challenges most reporters face”.
Outstanding Examples
Crisis mapping has proven to be a valuable tool in addressing crises worldwide. There are many exceptional examples of crowd-sourced crisis mapping. Here are a few:
Ushahidi
Platform for crowdsourcing crisis information
Though this example is not a map, many crisis maps originate on the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi, Swahili for “testimony”, is a company offering an open-source platform used to gather crisis information from the public via social media, email, and text messaging. Initially developed as a tool to report violence in Kenya following the 2008 elections, Ushahidi has since transformed into a leader in crisis mapping. The non-profit “make[s] smart decisions with a data management system that rapidly collects data from the crowd and visualizes what happened, when and where”. The staff at Ushahidi often say that Ushahidi is only 10 percent of the solution, it must be coupled with offline engagement.
Syria Deeply
The crisis in Syria has been watched by millions around the world. Syria Deeply has evolved into a comprehensive source on the conflict that began in March 2011. The editors at Syria Deeply use the Ushahidi platform to display refugees and casualties of the war. The data comes from well vetted sources like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Violations Documentation Center in Syria.
Reclaim Naija
Reclaim Naija is a Nigerian election incident report system that seeks to empower individual Nigerian citizens to report voter or election fraud, human rights abuses, and governmental corruption to “promote electoral transparency, accountability and democratic governance through citizen action, social mobilization and policy advocacy.” This is an exceptional example of a crisis map due to its clearly defined goals, citizen engagement, and over 30,000 incident reports.
Women Under Siege
Women Under Siege is crisis map documenting sexualized violence in Syria. The goal is to make the violence visible and create a historical record for future prosecutions. This project works with Syrian activists and journalists to bring the reality of the situation in Syria to the world.
