Abstract
Crowdsourced mapping has become an integral part of humanitarian response, with high profile deployments of platforms following the Haiti and Nepal earthquakes, and the multiple projects initiated during the Ebola outbreak in North West Africa in 2014, being prominent examples. There have also been hundreds of deployments of crowdsourced mapping projects across the globe that did not have a high profile. This paper, through an analysis of 51 mapping deployments between 2010 and 2016, complimented with expert interviews, seeks to explore the organisational structures that create the conditions for effective mapping actions, and the relationship between the commissioning body, often a non-governmental organisation (NGO) and the volunteers who regularly make up the team charged with producing the map. The research suggests that there are three distinct areas that need to be improved in order to provide appropriate assistance through mapping in humanitarian crisis: regionalise, prepare and research. The paper concludes, based on the case studies, how each of these areas can be handled more effectively, concluding that failure to implement one area sufficiently can lead to overall project failure.
Highlights
The concept of crowdsourced crisis mapping is perhaps best defined as the provision of services by an international and/or online community, who gather, analyse and map critical information related to disaster-affected populations
While there have been several explorations of crowdsourced mapping (Walker and Rinner 2013; Meek et al 2014) and digital humanitarianism (Burns 2015; Meier 2015), this paper considers the current landscape of crowdsourced crisis mapping and the relationship between Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs) and formal humanitarian organisations
Context It was posited that the context of a crisis will play a significant role in the forming of a response by Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs), and by extension this leads to V&TCs providing support that is not sufficiently context driven and nuanced as professional humanitarians might need
Summary
The concept of crowdsourced crisis mapping is perhaps best defined as the provision of services by an international and/or online community, who gather, analyse and map critical information related to disaster-affected populations. Within the humanitarian sector, crowdsourced mapping has arguably revolutionised the way in which crisis response is perceived, through its ability to enable disaster-affected communities to define the way in which they receive help (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative 2011). Humanitarian organisations relied solely on field responders’ assessments to calculate the relief needs of affected communities., the internet has, arguably, given voice to those in need, allowing them to project their needs to a global workforce of digital responders (Milner and Verity 2013). Moore and Verity (2014), note that nearly 230,000 tweets were gathered and processed within two days of Typhoon Haiyan hitting the Philippines’ in 2013 This does not fall into the fallacy that some data is good and more is better (Junqué de Fortuny et al 2013), as only 800 of these tweets provided emergency responders with relevant, actionable data. While this represents just 0.35% of twitter-sourced information collated by the crowd, the quick sifting of data highlighted key areas of destruction and potentially saved lives
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