Ever since the Haiti Earthquake I’ve heard two primary concerns regarding crowdsourcing and the use of volunteered geographic information in humanitarian operations that can be summed up as follows: “the 'crowd' might be of a lot more help processing data rather than creating it” and “how accurate or precise are crowdsourced data?” I hope to answer (or at least shed some light) on these two important questions with a pilot project that I’m spearheading at USAID with my colleague Stephanie Grosser.
USAID wants to understand the spatial distribution of some of the Agency’s economic growth activities to better understand their impact and look for synergy with other USAID programs or other development agencies. However, one of the datasets we have contains non-standard geocoding information in a single block. Unlike your typical database that parsed out the various aspects of location (think of any online order form where you fill in your street in a separate form from your city) this database lumped them all into one field. Taken together this means that many of these records are not machine readable.
That’s where the “crowd” comes in. For the first time, USAID is partnering with online volunteer communities (the mighty Standby Task Force and the venerable GIS Corps) and the public at large to fix this data set. Think that’s not very sexy? Well let me tell you, you’ve never seen cleaning bad geocoding look so sexy. We’ve developed a custom application that sits on top Data.gov to allow the crowd to move from just looking at data, to actually processing it. Part of the project is a post processing quality assurance process. All of our methodology, workflow, and details regarding the countless legal and organizational challenges will be released as a cased study on June 28th at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The goal is to set an example – a practical example – that other organizations can learn from or follow. Oh yeah, we’re doing all this at the staggering cost of zero.
Interested? I hope so. Follow what’s happening on my personal Twitter account or the more official @USAID_Credit. You can find us on FaceBook, or subscribe to our open data listserv to receive updates straight to your inbox.
