January 2010 Archives

Urgent Crowdsourcing: Ushahidi and Social Media In Times of Crisis

By Nick on January 21, 2010 3:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Crowdsourcing, or taking tasks like reporting and journalism usually performed by one designated person and outsourcing the task to the public, has become a major facet of the political media landscape. A great example of this effect was Iran's Twitter Revolution, in which Iranian citizens reported updates about violence following an election and kept the world informed about the view from the street. However, crowdsourcing has limits - language and web accessibility being two major factors that can prevent information from being disseminated efficiently or comprehensively. However, a new open-source project is looking to circumvent these limitations, and is changing the way that the world looks at the potential of social media.

Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The central goal of the platform is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. "[The Ushahidi Engine is] extraordinarily impactful because 1) it visually translates data into a cognitively efficient communication form and 2) it's interactive in both directions-you can get information and you can post new," explains Dr. Pamela Rutledge at the Media Psychology Blog. 

Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi's roots are in the collaboration of citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence & peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web & mobile phone. After an initial boom of 45,000 users signing on in Kenya, the developers of Ushahidi realized that there was a dire need for a platform based on it which could be used in other disaster scenarios around the world.

"Our goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect & visualize information," explains the Ushahidi website. "The core platform will allow for plug-in & extensions so that it can be customized for different locales & needs. The beta version platform is now available as an open source application that others can download for free, implement & use to bring awareness to crisis situations or other events in their own locales... Organizations can also use the tool for internal monitoring or visualization purposes."

Usahidi is open-source and non-profit - if you're moved or inspired by their work, please consider supporting them with a monetary gift or by volunteering to help develop the engine.

This blog post originally ran on the YouJustGetMe Blog.

The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs: A Dispatch from Psychster Labs

By Nick on January 20, 2010 4:21 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In many offices, Fridays are casual day. However, for Psychster's offices in Seattle and Portland - and for people nationwide interested in the ways that people behave online and off - Fridays mark a much more exciting occasion than just getting to wear jeans. The occasion is the weekly Psychster Labs call - a think tank of researchers, social media gurus, and others who understand that people are people whether online or off.

In our last call, we pored over the 2007 special issue of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication together.  Although some things have changed in the three years since the special issue was released, it's actually an added intrigue to mark time by reading these articles as well as examining their still-relevant lessons. A great example of this effect came from our study and discussion of Writing for Friends and Family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs by Michael Stefanone (University of Buffalo) and Chyng-Yang Jang (University of Texas, Arlington).

In the past, the only people who got to widely broadcast information about their lives were celebrities - after all, going on the Johnny Carson show is a pretty fantastic means of disclosing things about yourself to a wide network of people. However, with the broad-based communication tools of social media available to virtually everyone, is Perez Hilton correct in asserting to YouJustGetMe's own Nick Mattos that in the modern setting everyone will be "famous" to fifteen people?

In their study, Stefanone and Jang took a hard look at personal bloggers - folks who maintain an online presence analogous to an offline diary on a site like LiveJournal or Blogger. This study was conducted in 2007 - right about the time that the social networking savvy were switching from personal blogs to things like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. Jang and Stefanone set out to discover what personality traits personal bloggers possessed, and what sort of effect the blog had on the offline social networks of the bloggers themselves.
Before talking about the research findings, it's worth it to define a central concept of the study. Social scientists often talk about people's "ego-centric networks" - an academic term for the cloud of friends and acquaintances that you know which, if diagrammed, would have you at the center and lines connecting you to other people in your life. Some of these ties are more tenuous, or "weak" - for example, a friend you only talk to occasionally, or don't reveal much about yourself to. Other ties are "strong" - you both know a lot about one another, and feel a sense of intimacy with each other. Strong ties, or close relationships, are quite "costly" - they involve a great deal of time, involvement, and risk to develop. You have to expend yourself significantly more to cultivate these relationships!

Returning to Jang and Stefanone - the researchers identified, fairly unsuprisingly, that folks who maintained personal blogs had personalities with high levels of extraversion and high levels of self-disclosure. However, somewhat less logically, the bloggers were significantly "closer" to larger groups of friends. The bloggers were actually using a very "cost-effective" means of disclosing information about themselves to strong-tie ego-centric networks - in other words, they were actually deepening their existing friendships!

This has a fascinating implication: in this  era, people who are both extraverted and who possess a high level of self-disclosure in their personalities now have access to "cost-saving" tools that enable them to develop and maintain more close friendships than the average person would have in the past. In other words, the average person's circle of friends can be bigger than the average person's circle even twenty years ago! 

Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the exciting topics and stimulating discussion that occur every Friday as part of Psychster Labs. Interested in joining us on the frontier of technology and the social sciences? Apply to participate in our weekly Psychster Labs calls!

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