Can this platform be used to report the disability issue? It will make the
problems of the disables more sensitised
Renuka E,
Section Officer,
ICT Centre for Visually Challlenged,
CHMK Library,
University ofCalicut,
Malappuram Dist.,
Kerala.
::13/06/2011 URL:
http://www.thehindu.com/2011/06/13/stories/2011061362171600.htm
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Front Page
The power of the collective online
Vasudha Venugopal
CHENNAI: They call it the power of the collective to make cities observable and
its residents responsive. Individuals from different parts of the country
are collecting and collating up-to-the-minute information using the social
media, especially Twitter.
This story began with a couple of tweets and discussions on midnight power cuts
and unplanned interruptions, and Ajay Kumar, a software engineer and NGO
worker, created http://powercuts.in/early May. Reports started pouring in,
mainly through Twitter. In the first 24 hours, the hash tag reached more than
98,000 people with over 1,57,000 impressions. Sorted into categories of
'planned,' 'unplanned,' 'good news' (indicating no power cuts) and 'voltage,'
there
are more than 15.55 reports the site receives in a day on an average.
While moderators incorporate the updates from Twitter, information received
through the smartphone applications updates the map automatically. Gurgaon was
the first place where power cuts were mapped, says Mr. Kumar, but the moment of
pride was when people of the villages of Jharkhand and Jammu responded.
People volunteer for data crunching and technical help through an open Google
document. Suggestions include pitting this data against diesel prices and
farm output and comparing the billed units with the consumed units to figure
out how much electricity is being stolen.
This is the latest instance of crowd-sourcing - getting a group of people to
provide data on a particular subject. Internet analyst Clay Shirky refers to
"cognitive surplus" - the shared, online work done with spare brain cycles.
"While people are busy editing Wikipedia, by posting to Ushahidi they are
building
a better, more co-operative world," he says.
"Infrastructure issues are taken for granted in our country. This initiative
will prompt people to think about the excessive money spent on imported
invertors,
and wake [them] up to what others are facing," says Nikhil Pahwa, editor and
publisher, Medianama, who is supporting the initiative.
The Ushahidi platform, which provides free software for information collection,
was first used to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya in 2008.
The platform works well for information with a spatial component, but users
like Mr. Kumar are aware of limitations. "The website's original purpose leads
to it's collating all information. We are trying to customise the data display
for the last few hours or so."
A similar mapping exercise, Mobile Telco #Fail, maps mobile network problems in
India, while the recently launched spamcaller.in seeks to collect reports
of spam of all sorts, including lottery scams, outdated offers and false mobile
connections.
The tricky part is sustaining participation, says Mr. Kumar. "Only a few users
provide reports, and there is a dearth of committed moderators and technical
help. And it is possible only if people have access to twitter when there is a
power cut."
Another crowd-sourcing initiative on Ushahidi, the Bangalore security map
http://bsm.mod.org.in/ was launched this week. It seeks to understand how
citizens
perceive security in the city by asking questions about their insecurities and
pins responses on a map. This joint project of the Centre for Study of Science,
Technology and Policy (CSTEP) and MOD, an international collective of
architects, designers, researchers, curators and practitioners based in
Bangalore
and Berlin, has 18 reports now.
Behaviours of people and poorly handled infrastructure issues comprise most of
the reports, says Jayanth R., researcher, CSTEP.
The sample space in such cases can be non-representative. "The many reports
from South India may just mean more people are reporting," says Mr. Kumar.
Getting
people to collect information using the platform and to analyse the data is an
intensive process. Data is crucial to sound policymaking, says Mr. Jayanth.
"These reports, by themselves, are not indicative of anything; they need to be
collated with more sensible data to make sense," Mr. Kumar says.
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