Crowdsourcing

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/9182869 w=600] What you see here is the world response to the earthquake humanitarian crisis in Haiti. What you see here, each flash, is someone, somewhere in the world, going into OpenStreetMap.org, looking at aerial/satellites images, identifying features and adding them to the free map. If you want to learn, here I screencasted one of my edits back then as part of the Crisis Camp. After just 12 hours, and over the following days a large number of additions to the map are made with many roads (green primary, red secondary) added. Also many other features were added such as the blue glowing refugee camps that emerge. ...

Today is my last day as a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies. The Program, and the extension I got, is now complete after 101 days. I knew about it like one year ago, and I decided to apply for it. Back then, I could not find much info or public feedback from former fellows. There is a great official webpage with lots of info, but I wanted real feedback from people. Here is mine, for the next to come, and everyone else. ...

-Background and authorship info- Part of the Mirzayan fellowship was to propose topics on which to write a policy paper. This is the topic I submitted and 10 other fellows joined. This is the result of 2 weeks of work. Some of the authors requested their authorship to remain internal to NAS. Therefore, I am not including names besides mine. Also you will note many similarities with my individual brief, in which I concentrated into the subtopic of Crowdsourcing development. ...

With the burgeoning use of Internet and mobile phone technology, user-generated content (UGC) has emerged as an innovative means of sharing data. In the last decade, subscriptions to mobile phones rose from 18% to 97% in the developed world, and from 1% to 45% in the developing world. Internet subscriptions increased 10-fold in the last 10 years, reaching now 20% of the world population. Facebook—launched in 2004— now has over 500 million users (half of users, ~5% of the world’s population, access Facebook every day). Twitter has grown to 100 million users worldwide since beginning in 2006. In 2010, Twitter hit 50 million tweets per day—an average of 600 tweets per second. UGC has shown promising advances in a broad variety of fields (e.g., epidemiological surveillance, crisis response, and e-governance, among many others). ...