After all, crowdsourced maps are often an easy way to put visuals on a web page and show what’s happening in places that reporters or rights activists can’t or don’t get to. But this doesn’t mean media organizations or advocacy groups can slap together an online map and people will automatically start sending reports. Many crowdsourced reporting projects are unfortunately short lived, attracting few reports and having little impact.

HarassMap has won several awards for mapping incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt. onMedia takes a look at what the organization has learned since it launched in 2010.

HarassMap‘s goal is to make sexual harassment no longer acceptable in Egypt. The independent initiative combines community outreach programs with a digital platform that lets people report sexual harassment either directly on the HarassMap site or via Facebook, Twitter, email or text message.

The HarassMap founders decided to use an sms-based system as it gives people without access to a computer the chance to report harassment. Even back then, nearly everyone in Egypt had a mobile — the country’s mobile phone penetration rate in 2010 was 97 percent.

The initial idea of the platform was to create a “safe space” where people could anonymously talk about harassment, said Noora Flinkman, the head of marketing and communications at HarassMap. Sexual harassment was then (and still is) a relatively taboo topic in Egypt and there were virtually no other initiatives addressing the problem. At the same time, the map would provide a tool to show the reality and scope of the issue.

Filling a need

“When we launched our reporting system, it crashed because we had so many reports,” Flinkman told onMedia via Skype from Cairo.

After this first torrent of messages subsided, the site began to regularly receive around 40 reports a month. For the HarassMap founders, the information was a “gold mine” on a subject about which there had been very little research.

In the first year, the initiative collected nearly 700 accounts (to date, they have just over 1,300). It analyzed the data, which revealed that women in both rural and urban areas were victims of harassment, that it wasn’t restricted to particular areas in cities, social background or age, and that it took place independently of what women were wearing or their nationalities.

The knowledge was then used by outreach volunteers when they went out to talk to people in the streets. It also informed the initiative’s anti-harassment campaigns.

“These reports were definitely really, really important,” said Flinkman. “We wouldn’t necessarily have had this type of information as quickly and in the same way if we hadn’t had the reporting system.”

At the same time, the site received 76,000 unique visitors in its first year, showing there was a real interest in finding out more information on the subject. The media, both in Egypt and internationally, reported on the site, increasing its profile.

Ups and downs

However, the number of reports received by HarassMap has slumped over the past year to around just five a month.

According to Flinkman, there are two main reasons for this. When HarassMap started, no one else was really using such a platform to document sexual harassment and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter weren’t as popular. Now, many groups are addressing the issue and people often use these groups’ Facebook accounts to share stories.

Earlier in 2014, the organization ran a campaign to encourage more reporting, which did result in a boost.

But as a result of these ups and downs, HarassMap is now evaluating how they should develop the platform.

The next step

One possibility may be for HarassMap to act as a so-called aggregator, to use the site as a place to collect stories on sexual harassment coming from multiple media platforms and organizations. This would allow the mapping of information without people having to know about HarassMap specifically or having to send a report directly to them.

Another possibility is to create an app to simplify the reporting itself.

“We don’t have the best way of reporting; we don’t have the best system or the most beautiful map and the most user-friendly reporting,” Flinkman said. “Creating new ways of reporting that are more sexy can also give people an incentive to send us information.”

Such as app could also ask for different kinds of reports. Currently, HarassMap only collects incidents of sexual harassment from victims. One option to extend this might be to ask for reports where bystanders or witnesses have intervened. That would add another layer of information.

What they’ve learned

Flinkman stresses that it’s vital for organizations to have a strong sense of their goals before they start.

“We spent years analyzing the issue in Egypt – the different dynamics, what had already been done, what had not been done, what seemed to work, what doesn’t work,” she said. “This is why it took us years to actually launch: we did a lot of planning.”

And then while organizations are up and running, a “key part of the work” needs to constantly appraising strategies, programs and activities, especially since the digital world changes so rapidly.

“You need to have this constant process of evaluating and analyzing yourself,” she added. “That’s the most important thing.”

ALSO SEE

Innovative journalism and advocacy projects
Tweets help visualize information density of African cities
Crowd reporting puts the squeeze on traditional journalism

Author: Kate Hairsine, edited by Kyle James

Photo: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images

Critics of using social media to crowdsource news argue that people on the street aren’t objective and that their impressions of an event can’t be trusted. But in this guest blog post for onMedia, journalist Ranty Islam argues crowdsourcing is a key journalism tool that stems from a tradition older than the media itself – the bustling marketplaces and squares that have been used for information exchange since time immemorial.

There’s no truth. Only best guesses. The trend to use social media to crowd verify news is a reminder of how people have always shared and used information. To be useful, facts have to be reliably true enough. And this is the basis of oral traditions which have been around for centuries, if not millenia, in every culture. It’s also the basic operating principle of crowdsourced news verification. Both tap into a collective memory that surrounds any time and place where people are present to witness an occurrence.

So when news agency Storyful polls its network via social media about the veracity of a YouTube video claiming to document government crimes in the Syrian war, this isn’t too different from medieval town squares where storytellers and bards passed on news collected from battle fields or royal courts far away. Your Storyful dashboard and the square only really differ in the size and speed of the network. This means today there are more checks and balances in place to hopefully lessen the number of false judgments.

When it comes to crowdsourced news verification, a knee-jerk reaction from newsroom veterans often sounds something like this …

“How can you trust the subjective testimony of individuals who may be biased or even actively pursuing an agenda, who do not know how to research or cross-check information and who are not journalists?”

The answer is: you can’t.

Image – (CC) Gavin Llewellyn/Flickr

But instead of asking just a few John Does grinding their own ax, you are able to ask hundreds or even thousands of individuals with the click of a button, you will get many different views. These competing perspectives and variety of biased perceptions will ideally drown each other out. Let’s call this ‘noise’. Because they have all witnessed the same event, however, some sort of common theme will surface. Let’s call this the ‘signal’.

The parallel with telecommunications can be pushed further. To get a better ‘signal’, you need a greater input, larger sampling and more exposure. Similarly, the bigger the crowd, the better are your chances of sniffing out a common thread, i.e. a verified version of an event. (Also take a look at the Verification Handbook that’s just been released by the European Journalism  Centre.)

However, there are at least two caveats here. To start with, ‘verified’ does not mean it’s ‘true’. If a piece of news has been crowd verified, it just means there is a higher probability it conveys something that has really happened, and therefore is more likely to be true. It’s a best guess, but not the truth. The second issue is that there may be some systemic distortions. In some places, for instance, particular segments of society are less likely to be Facebook or Twitter power users simply because they don’t have regular internet access, can’t afford a smartphone or are less tech-savvy. If these strata of society additionally hold views that are very different from, let’s say, those of articulate, social media savvy, smart-phone wielding urbanites, we have a problem. Verifying news by just polling Twitter users under these circumstances would introduce a selection bias – when ideally more and different channels need to be used.

If these problems can be kept in check though, there’s no reason to believe crowdsourced news verification is less reliable than traditional journalism. In fact, it may score better. The Arab Spring playing out on the streets of Cairo or the fighting in Syria are examples of how crowd based reporting and verification can break news and provide vital background information before traditional journalism.

On the other hand, traditional journalism has been undoing itself. Its often stated commitment to truth, impartiality, objectivity and professional scrutiny are increasingly difficult to maintain in a world which is becoming faster and more complex by the day and where those who are traditionally reported on, now talk back.

A social media-ted public makes itself heard in a way that can naturally be harnessed by crowd-based reporting. But is also forces traditional journalists to act more transparently. It is much harder to buy into the objectivity of foreign correspondents today once you know they draw on their own mere handful of informants. Even a decade ago, this fact may have gone unnoticed.

And impartiality is at long last revealed for what it is: a fiction. Twenty years ago, the likes of the New York Times and the BBC were unquestioningly trusted as authoritative sources of unbiased information. In the massively interconnected world of today they are mere instances (albeit important ones) of a particular culturally and historically conditioned vantage of the world from North of the Equator and West of Greenwich.

This then, is where crowd based reporting really comes into its own. In contrast to traditional journalism, it puts together its story from those who are living and experiencing it rather than those who are observing it. And in a couple of decades from now, the notion that a few professional, trustworthy institutions can reliably inform people about the world will be viewed as an odd historical aberration – wedged, as it is, between centuries of oral traditions and the 21st century take on the same thing.

Ranty Islam is a digital anthropologist and an editor at DW for Global Ideas, a leading, award winning multimedia program covering climate protection and biodiversity around the world. Follow Ranty on Twitter: @2ranty