I recently took part in a stimulating panel discussion on crowdsourcing organised by Fresh Media. The event held in Vancouver on October 6 brought together media, art and technology, with Leigh Christie (executive director and co-founder of the eatART foundation), David Ascher (CEO of Mozilla Messaging) and myself on the panel.
For those who couldn’t make it, here is the text of my opening remarks.
Photo by Matthew Malka
I want to start by talking about how notions of the crowd have changed.
Almost 100 years ago, scholar Robert Park characterised the crowd as an unthinking herd. He wrote about the crown as a place where individual thought and action became subsumed to mob mentality.
Today, we are here talking about how collective action can be, or seem to be, intelligent; how distributed, dispersed groups of people can work together.
What has changed?
Part of the answer lies in the development of social software enables self-organization without a hierarchal structure.
Web 2.0 technologies create an infrastructure that allows geographically dispersed individuals with common interests to connect and collaborate over the Internet without any central coordination.
The implications for journalism are potentially revolutionary.
Crowdsourcing and journalism
Journalism developed as a profession where the journalist was firmly in control. They decide what is news, how it is reported, written and delivered. The prevailing dogma in journalism has been, and in many cases, continues to be ”we write, you read”.
Web technologies allow citizens and community groups to perform some communication functions that were previously controlled by media institutions.
Participatory and collaborative media flattens reduce the hierarchical structure of owners, producers and audiences of established media.
However, the predominant approach in newsrooms is to see the audience as source for news and as source for interpretation. The audience remains largely excluded from journalistic process.
That said, news organisations are exploring more collective, collaborative approaches, often around the edges of their news operations.
(This is the topic of a book I co-authored, Participatory Journalism in Online Newspapers: Guarding the Internet’s Open Gates, due to be published by Wiley-Blackwell next year).
News organisations are trying out a broad range of experiments to tap into citizens’ knowledge. In news, crowdsourcing allows journalists to steer the audience by asking for data, analysis or help to cover events or issues.
Approaches to crowdsourcing
There are three broad layers.
The first is general observation. This involves collecting data from people about things they come across in their daily life, and then aggregate the information. The news organization is tapping into the eyes and ears of its audience.
For instant, the BBC often asks its audience to report on bird sightings in Britain to compile a map. And a couple of years ago, a Belgian newspapers turned to its readers to help it map cycle paths in the country
The second is breaking news. In this case, newsrooms ask audiences to send in their photos, video or eye-witness accounts, usually in cases of breaking news.
The first major examples of this were the Asian Tsumani of 2004 and the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London. This has become routine when it comes to breaking news.
More recently, both the CBC and The Globe and Mail integrated content from the audience into their coverage of the G20 protests in Toronto in June to provide a broad picture of what was unfolding over the weekend.
The third is investigative work. Here, a journalist enlists the help of readers analyze information, crunch numbers or pore over documents.
The tasks of sifting through piles of documents is divided among the audience. The journalist’s role is to collate and analyze the findings.
The most prominent example of the value of this approach was Talking Points Memo (TPM) and the firing of US attorneys by the Bush administration three years ago.
The site posted thousands of documents released by the US Department of Justice, turning to its readers to sort through it all and highlight potentially valuable material. Talking Points Memo received the prestigious Polk Award for its reporting.
More recently, The Guardian in the UK adopted a similar approach with documents about MP expenses. It has posted 458,832 pages of documents. So far, more than 221,00 reviewed by some 27,000 readers.
Coordination without control
These examples of pro-am collaboration involve, to a certain degree, the journalist directing the crowd.
But we can also see examples of the power of the crowd without central direction. Most prominent example of this is Ushahidi, the website set up in 2008 to map citizen reports of violence following the Kenyan president election.
Today, networks like Twitter allow crowdsourcing to happen on a distributed, asynchronous manner, with individuals acting independently yet collectively at the same time.
I want to illustrate this with a David and Goliath story, except in this story, Goliath was brought down by thousands of Davids, all working separately without any central coordination.
It involves a $2bn multinational company called Trafigura that was accused of dumping toxic waste off the shores of the Ivory Coast in 2006. The company has been using the courts to fight the accusations for years.
In October last year, The Guardian was banned from reporting the contents of a parliamentary question relating to the toxic dumping allegations. The super injunction meant the newspaper couldn’t report the question, who asked it, who might answer it or where to find the question.
It was the first time journalists were prevented from reporting proceedings in parliament. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger sent out a short tweet in frustration, saying the “Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?”
Rusbridger’s tweet set off a Twitterstorm, as people tracked down the question, published the links to it as well to a a 2009 UN report on the dumping. Trafigura became a trending topic on Twitter as the topic was discussed throughout the network.
Less than 24 hours after the superinjunction, Trafigura backed down. The legal effort to gag the media had been blown away the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web.
Trafigura had turned to the courts to silence critics.But as Rusbridger noted; “A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”
An army of thousands of Davids contributed to Trafigura’s defeat, without being told what to do or how to do it.
They were able to do this as we have a digital infrastructure that enables individuals anywhere in the world to come together around a common cause and work together, without any central coordination or direction.
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