Resources
Crowdsourcing social change is not a new concept. Movements across the country have gathered resources, intelligence, strategy, execution and even fundraised from communities that has been impacted and concerned. However, digital tools are now reinforcing and accelerating the impact. Any kind of positive social change cannot be complete if it does not have involvement of the people. Crowdsourcing is the only and sustainable way to approach social change and it is exciting to see how technology is making this an everyday reality.
An extract from the New York Times :
“Crowdsourcing is the practice of engaging a ‘crowd’ or group for a common goal- often innovation, problem-solving or efficiency. Crowdsourcing can take place on many different levels and across various industries (social and government). Thanks to our growing connectivity, it is now easier than ever for individuals to collectively contribute- whether with ideas, time, expertise or funds- to a project or cause. This collective mobilisation is crowdsourcing”
Crowdsuit is the very first crowdsourced litigation company founded by Ben Kinney in Chicago, USA. He found out that many telecom industries and mobile phone companies are charging unnecessary fees to their complacent customers. Customers were not able to complaint against these telecom companies since they sign a contract in the beginning that would hinder their rights to fight and class action suits. So the main aim of Crowdsuit is to help phone customers seek legal redress against phone companies even when they cannot file class action suits. Crowdsuit has proven that this method helps to bring customers together to fight back against injustices by some of the largest companies in the world.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/crowdsuit#section-overview
There are several other movements that had taken place around the globe since Crowdsourcing acts as a key to face real challenges by connecting different voices, that builds into a community that can combine and open up the fields of opportunity for new solutions.
A platform called Ushahidi introduced Harassmap which helps to provides women with a way to document incidences of street harassment. They voluntary come up in online platforms to speak about those incidents thereby helping to highlight its impact. These discussions has turned out to be provoking and is one of the most talked about initiative.
The Ladies Finger, a women’s zine based in India, partnered with Amnesty International to support its Ready to Report campaign, which is aimed at putting an ease for survivors of sexual violence to file a police complaint. Using social media and through word of mouth, it asked the community if they had experiences to share about reporting sexual assault and harassment to the police. Using these crowdsourced leads, The Ladies Finger’s reporters spoke to people willing to share their experiences and put together a series of detailed contextualised stories. They included a piece that evoked a national outcry and spurred the Uttar Pradesh government to make an arrest for stalking, after six months of inaction.
Women Under Siege a global project by Women’s Media Centre investigates how rape and sexual violence is used in conflicts. Its Syria project crowdsources data on sexual violence in the war-torn country. Like HarassMap, it uses the Ushahidi platform to geolocate where acts of sexual violence take place. Gathering together these data is a step towards making sure that incidences of sexual violence aren’t forgotten or ignored, and may eventually be used to bring perpetrators to justice.
In 2011, Take Back the Tech, an initiative from the Association for Progressive Communications, started a map gathering incidences of tech-related violence against women. Campaign coordinator Sara Baker says crowdsourcing data on this topic is particularly useful as victims/survivors are often forced to tell their stories repeatedly in an attempt to access justice with little to no action taken on the part of authorities or intermediaries. Rather than telling those story multiple times and seeing it go nowhere, the initiative gives people the opportunity to make their experience visible (even if anonymously) and makes them feel like someone is listening and taking action. Crucially, the data gathered through Take Back the Tech’s efforts is actively used in its advocacy against online violence against women, and it works with local partners to make sure it feeds into country-based advocacy too. For women’s rights organisations focusing on the digital space, this kind of data can be invaluable, helping them unite people facing violence online.
Across the country, LGBTQ Americans shared their hopes, fears, and ideas. Instead of taking surveys and individual responses on pre-determined issues which are time consuming, leaders set up an initiative to explore the concerns on the minds of everyday LGBTQ people, particularly those whose voices often go unheard by an open-ended conversation essentially crowdsourcing the future of the LGBTQ movement. Our Tomorrow: a digital grassroots campaign engaged LGBTQ people across the country in a conversation about the future of the movement. This coalition also engaged people through their interactive website ShareOurTomorrow.org
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-hattaway/crowdsourcing-the-future-_b_9759290.html
A platform called Movements connects dissidents in closed societies with individuals around the world with skills to help. According to Movements, crowdsourcing the fight for human rights is a new solution to an old problem thereby combining anyone with a skill — artists, writers, journalists, translators, technologists, PR experts, policy-makers and more can connect directly with human rights activists in closed societies.
https://movements.org/en/movements/about-movements/about-movements/
Delhi-based Amba Azaad recognised that many women in her personal networks were having bad experiences with gynaecologists in India. With the help of her friends she had put together a list of gynaecologists who had treated patients respectfully in a site called Gynaecologists We Trust. As the site says, “Finding doctors who are on our side is hard enough, and when it comes to something as intimate as our internal plumbing, it’s even more difficult.” The initiative uses a simple Google Docs sheet, and focuses on the positive, rather than the negative; patients are encouraged to write down only gynaecologists with whom they have had good experiences, rather than doctors to avoid. As with many of the other initiatives in similar spaces, it relies on contributors being trustworthy and submitting accurate data, as anybody can contribute.
Ushahidi a forum, was developed in the wake of the disputed Kenyan elections of 2007 as a way of reporting eye-witness accounts of violence across the country. People could text the volunteers of Ushahidi, who would display the reports through Google Maps.In 2010, the team from Ushahidi released Crowdmap, a crowdsourced version of the platform, which allows people to “check-in” with their location and add relevant reports and information. Crowdsourced crisis mapping aims to harness the streams of information that flow through social media to provide response organisations and other interested parties with near-real-time, categorised, and geolocated data.Such explosion of user-generated content through social media can be leveraged to assist first-aid responders and humanitarian organisations in the wake of natural disasters, crises and violent conflicts
http://theconversation.com/crowdsourced-crisis-mapping-how-it-works-and-why-it-matters-7014
Masooma Ranalv in October 2015 initiated the crowdsourced movement against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in India. She started a petition on Change.org to gather more public support for her fight to ban FGM in India. An issue that hardly made news in India soon was being widely reported and several organisations stepped up to join her in her movement.
