[LINK] Crowdsourcing

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

"The Role of Crowdsourcing in Areas of Limited Statehood."

 <http://irevolution.net/2011/04/03/icts-limited-statehood> 


. "Because of it’s geographical size, high degree of corruption, and 
reliance on an extraction economy, governance by government in Russia is 
often weak and ineffective. 

Russian political expert Liliya Shevtzova goes so far as to claim that 
the current regime is an imitation of governance. 

The Russian 2010 wildfires demonstrated the limited capacity of the state 
to provide effective emergency response. 

Information technologies, and crowdsourcing platforms in particular, 
fulfill the gap of the limited statehood."

Colleagues in Moscow used the Ushahidi platform to create a "Help Map" 
during the forest fires. They also set up a call center to facilitate 
communication between those who needed help and those who were offering 
it. 

<http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/08/02/russia-crowdsourcing-
assistance-for-victims-of-wildfires/>

While I knew this had been one of the most stunning examples of citizen-
based crowdsourcing initiatives in Russia, I hadn’t thought through the 
deeper political implications. 

Not only were citizens helping themselves because of Russia’s limited 
statehood, they were actually taking over functions of the state, which 
the map made very explicit. 

Gregory noted that some Russian citizens went out to buy firefighting 
equipment, with their own money, to combat the fires themselves. Many 
official fire stations didn’t even have the basic equipment needed to 
respond. 

In some ways, these efforts laid bare and indeed exposed the Russian 
regime as an "imitation of governance." (snip)

Moreover, any resulting map is often not as profound as the social 
capital generated between the dozens, often hundreds, of people 
collaborating on a live crisis map. 

In turn, this social capital facilitates mass collective action. 

As Scott notes, "this transformative power resides not in the map, of 
course, but rather in the power possessed by those who deploy the 
perspective of that particular map." 

In many ways, therefore, the Ushahidi platform is a social-capital and 
collective-action generating technology.

--

Cheers,
Stephen