Crowdsourcing

Paul Lewis:

What best way to get people to help us in our investigative endevours through the internet.

Twitter: Ian Tomlinson

- Paul signed up to Twitter 2 days previously to Ian's death.
- Allowed us to share the investigation with people.
- Motive is an important issue - in this case some by potential injustice.
- Became part of the discussion.
- Lots of people helped break the story.
- Of 20 witnesses only got hold of one person through traditional means - everyone else through Twitter.


Refugee died on aeroplane
BA flight, so less people than G20.
Heavily restrained by three security guards, may have led to suffocation.
Used the internet - get the stories online that are sceptcal in narrative suggesting there's more going on, then ask.
"Does anyone know what happened on BA FLight 77"
Oil field worker in Angolia found it. He was a passenger sitting three seats away from Mbenga, leading to the arrests of the guards.
Doesn't always work.
2 ways: 1. try and don't find info you want, because the crowd has a mind of its own. Can't control the interest of the crowd.
2. We rely on snippets of info that haven't been corroborated and can be wrong. Tweets that spread the death of Gifford - useful and fast, but untrue. Don't have the safeguards in place to stop that happening.

Paul Bradshaw
Helpmeinvestigate
launched in 2009. Was an attempt to use crowdsourcing methods for investigative journalism.
sucess rate 5-20%
How to make investigations work:
1. Alpha user - some who is active and pushes the investigation forward
2. Momentum - a feedback look of results to stop people becoming bored or frustrated
3. Modularisation - investigation can be broken down into small parts
4. Publicness - get people aware of the investigation (Twitter and blogs good)
5. Expertise and diversity in the group - journos, FOI experts, planning issues, photographers, people in the right location, etc.

2 types of crwdsourcing
1. Mechanical Turk (MP expenses)
2. Wisdom of crowds (using diverse expertise)

Legal issues: the whole site couldn't be public (due to moderation).
Need editorial drivers.

Turi Munthe from Demotix
Launched Jan 09
Open platform to load stories - image and video led.
got the picture of tomlinson that was on the fornt of Guardian.
The crowd already functions to an authrotiy structure.
Google engineer in Egypt - NPR verified his tweet (Andrew Carvin - worries about source) - all this made posisble because all got info - so the spped of verifcation is faster.
Iran
we had 2 dozen people sending pictures from the streets of Iran. explosions in a new form of story telling
Twitter few account producing original content
Accessing a v.partiucular demographc with Twitter in Iran - editorial line was compromised by the type of information that was coming out.
You need every demongrpahic to be invlved in social media to get a more accurate view. At the moment it means still getitng reporters on the ground.
Egypt was different, because percentage of those on social networks was higher.
Depth of use acorss several demographics, so a lsightly deeper view.
Egypt was when communication shifted from email to twitter with our users.
public messaging become more common.

Questions:
What about people who don't use social media - how do you deal with the uneveness?

Bradshaw: General issue in mainstream media of vocal minorities, nature ofthe media is it is a vocal minority. Crowdsourcing at least slightly addresses the imbalance. Better than what we had before.

Lewis: If become depednant on crowd-led journalism, will ignore stories that are not of the interest to the crowd. This is dangerous, as sometimes this should be the story that we focus on. We shold be story-led, not methodology-led.
Actually, sometimes don't need crowdsourcing, we need journalists (for example, Wikileaks).
When the crowd can help, use it, but can't tell crowds where to go.

Munthe: less true that big issues can fly under the radar of both mainstream press and web crowds these days. If the are peple that care about it, then people will congragte online to deal with it.
In Egypt when internet died, people had to go intotheir streets to get their information.

Lewis: People who want to disseminate false information will get quite sophisticated about trying to look official and part of the network. In order to verify the passanger, we asked for his boarding pass to be sent to us. It doens't take much or a doctored photographed to pass into a trusted network. Something will go wrong.
Some of the old rules have been forgotten because peple have been seduced by the fast-paced information.
We need to be clear to people when we used unverified information that's what we doing and as whether it's a good thing to be doing.

Question: Should crowdsourcing only be a hypothesis generation tool/starting point?

Lewis: I think how you deal with crowdsourcing depends on what you're doing an the crowd. E.g. undercover policing. Do we set up a crowdsourcing mechanism to tell us more about spies? We couldhave put that template up, but wouldn't have had much of a response - but someone else did it and there is a very detailed list of informaition. It's one-sided becuase it comes from an activist community.

Just being there interacting takes you places you wouldn't have been otherwise. To be effective, you have to have a voice you can't be a coprorate voice. We need to have our identity and express our opinions.

Munthe: Journalists treating audience with more sophistication. People are building stories themselves across several news soruces. They don't identify with brands anymore. the live blog is essentially reporting unstitiched, chronological - it pulls things in. Form of journalism came about because the readers can piece the narrative togethe rthemselves. If turst is ultimate, currency is autheticity.

Bella Hurrell:

Munthe: was done as a trick to get in more reasons, now.