Welcome to the tipping point.
Can you feel it?
The pace of change has just accelerated tremendously.
Specific, purposeful collaboration around a shared goal drastically accelerates the pace of change.
The Crisis Mappers community that I co-Founded with Patrick Meier has been an amazing social phenomenon to observe since October 2009. And it is only one of many initiatives unwittingly contributing to the kind of change that has led us where we are now: that critical point of a hyper-exponential curve.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Tetration
Right now, we are just starting to round the bend.
In other words, this is just the beginning. Specific, purposeful collaboration around a shared goal drastically accelerates the pace of change. Useful forms of interconnectedness move us into the future. Fast.
The International Network of Crisis Mappers is one such loose federation of highly skilled, motivated individuals from all around the world, that volunteer when and where we can in order to make a difference. Creating a real-time crisis map is often the shared goal around which volunteers coalesce. Our group also interacts and uses the wealth of the community to help solve problems, find new sources of data, and facilitate effective response.
We email one another on the Crisis Mappers dedicated google group. We open shared documents and pour information, links, and datasets in them. We open multiple Skype chats and continually add other contacts who might help us solve problems. Skype chats are truly the conduit of our constant communication with one another, and these sessions contain thousands of lines of text. Using these tools, we solve problems related to crises on the other side of the world. Mappers share virtual laughs, tears, and high-fives of encouragement with one another, in order to cope with this high-stress, real-time environment. Any any moment, several Skype chat windows are open. Today, a few are dedicated to the 24-7 monitoring of Libya for the Crisis Mappers Standby Task Force, whereas others are tailored to respond to today’s earthquake & tsunami in Japan & the Pacific.
Crisis Mappers usually operate very far from the crisis context, but we are nevertheless fully engaged in crisis mode as we work together. It turns out that it may make good sense to outsource some of the work traditionally done on the ground to communities of practice, like Crisis Mappers and our friends at Crisis Commons.
The increased pace and quality of response to needs, questions and inquiries on the Crisis Mappers google group has truly been amazing to watch. Over 1,400 people have subscribed to this google group as of today, up from 100 members in October 2009. However, I’m still always surprised when someone’s “ask” is highly specific, technical & difficult, yet the useful responses still start pouring in, sometimes even within a matter of minutes. Often, a virtual downpour of responses floods our inboxes & it is difficult to keep up with the volume of communication. But to the person who has made the ask, the shower of reponses may feel like a gift.
For a sample of this kind of collaboration, see the Executive Summary I created documenting the inquiries and responses during our mobilization around the earthquake in Haiti.
Like face-to-face networks, we have collectively learned how to operate with one another remarkably well. The modes of community practice, shared norms, and positive spirals of cheerfulness and helpfulness that have emerged are really inspiring. Rising levels of trust within the community may be in part traced to shared drinks in New York, Kampala, or Cleveland, or meetings on a bench on the DRC/Rwanda border. However, most of the positive energy informally governing our community of practice has emerged from our friendly virtual chats & emails.
To conclude, creating a real-time crisis map is often the shared goal around which volunteers coalesce. However, the map is not the issue here. The extra value comes from the new connections and synergies themselves that have emerged as a byproduct of our concentration.
I’m writing a book chapter with my colleague Sophia B. Liu that I’m very excited about. Just last night we put the finishing touches on the paper. We ended our piece on From Cultures of Participation to the Rise of Crisis Mapping in a Networked World with these words, and it seems apt to end this post in this way:
…new friendships and synergistic partnerships often abide even after the crisis fades. Synergistic new projects emerge that otherwise would have never coalesced. These new partnerships accelerate the pace of change across a vast number of issue-areas, and their cumulative effect is immeasurable. The relationships themselves end up contributing the most meaningful, lasting value in a changing world. And it is only the beginning.
Looking forward to what is to come,
Jen Ziemke
Note: This is my first blog post, so bear with me as I learn the ropes. Please come back soon to learn more about what I’m teaching in the world’s first academic course on Crisis Mapping; my research on conflict, violence, and civil war; or to engage with the International Network of Crisis Mappers. Let’s help define the new, nascent field of Crisis Mapping together.
We've just completed our very first trial run of the Standby Task Volunteer Force (SBTF) Satellite Team. As mentioned in this blog post last week, the UN approached us a couple weeks ago to explore whether basic satellite imagery analysis for Somalia could be crowdsourced using a distributed mechanical turk approach. I had actually floated the idea in this blog post during the floods in Pakistan a year earlier. In any case, a colleague at Digital … Read More
