Crowdsourcing: ‘It’s About People Creating Change Themselves’

May 24, 2011 -- With the help of members of the Sudanese diaspora living in the United States, the World Bank and Google recently organized a “mapathon" to document locations and infrastructure in South Sudan. Aleem Walji, Innovation Practice Manager, World Bank Institute, sat down with YouThink’s Mamata Pokharel after the event to talk about the potential of crowdsourcing to create change.

Q: Could you give us a little bit of insight into the relevance of crowdsourcing for development?

A: I think community mapping is a really powerful example of crowdsourcing in development terms. There are many parts of the world that are clearly not mapped—we don’t know the names of towns, we don’t know where the schools and hospitals are, but the people who live there do.

They know exactly what’s in their town, community, or backyard.

The notion that people who live there know best what’s happening around them is the driving insight behind creating maps through communities. The partnership we are doing with Google and the U.N. around building a map of South Sudan is saying that if you can put geocoders and people who know and live in South Sudan in the same room, the quality of the maps we produce is going to improve.

We just heard examples of aid workers going to certain African countries, and asking about villages that people there have never heard of, because they are looking at maps that have not been updated for 80 years. By involving communities, using their knowledge to build a map, and giving the map back to the communities, we will have more credible, and more useful information.

That is not only crowdsourcing but crowdvoicing and partnership.

Q: What are the technologies that are helping remote communities participate in these efforts?

A: The most powerful technology is the technology that is most widely distributed. I still think that radio, for example, which may not be a very cutting-edge technology, is still one of the most important technologies in the developing world because it reaches people.   

One of the most interesting examples of where I have seen high-tech and low-tech coming together is   in Uganda, where a radio station is broadcasting questions like: “Where is the worst pothole in Kampala?” People are texting in their answers using their cell phones. The radio station then takes those answers gathered from a few hundred people and broadcasts it to hundreds of thousands of listeners.

These two technologies in particular are powerful today, not because of the tool themselves, but because of how widely penetrated they are.

60% of adult Africans now have access to a mobile phone, and it is the fastest growing region in the world in terms of penetration. The phone is moving from the ear to the hand—and so you can now share and create data around local issues. You can tell somewhere whether there are medicines in the clinic, whether teachers came to class, whether there is food in the village. There is the opportunity to access, as well as create new kinds of information.

Q: What starts off a crowdsourcing project—is it the technology, the existence of a problem, the people?

A: People who care about real problems that affect them is a good place to start; it’s about people creating change themselves. Frankly none of these technologies matter if you don’t have engaged citizens.  You can give people the technology, the information and the data, but if they don’t have the power to act collectively for social change, nothing happens.

I like to use the metaphor of fuel, engines and drivers – you can have lots of cars and lots of fuel, and if you don’t have drivers, the cars can’t drive themselves. But when you have an army of people who are equipped to drive with vehicles in place, and you give them fuel, which is data, information, they can go far. But it starts with engaged citizens with the will to change things. With resources in their hands, they can go very far.

Q: What are the demographics of these volunteer technologists? Is it a lot more younger people?

A: Much of change is driven by younger people. When you look at many countries we care about, for example in the Middle East, more than 65% of the population is under 26.

You are talking about societies that are going to remain young for decades. These are people who are searching for employment, searching for meaning. They can be vectors of positive change in a society or they can become disillusioned and become sources of instability. If you can give people hope and opportunity, they become vectors of positive change.

Much of the volunteer technical community is young. When you go into a room full of mappers, these tend to be people who wear blue jeans not button-down shirts. They tend to be people who are just out of university, who have an appreciation of the problems of their societies, and if properly channeled, can become solution providers.

The Apps for Development competition we recently held was exclusively crowdsourced solutions, and participants were largely young people.

So I think the question is: how can we unleash the creativity of these enormously talented and energized young people? This is the group that is going to lead us forward and this is the group that is a majority in most of the countries we care about.

Q: You have the technology, you have the volunteers. What is it that the World Bank adds to this equation?

A: I think what the World Bank brings is an ability to be focused on the problems in the world that matter. We have a presence and understanding of the problems in many different countries. We can bring people together from the government, private sector and civil society in a way that is very constructive.

One of the most important and powerful things we can do is to create the venues, the bridges, the opportunities to bring together developers with development experts. When those two communities get together, you sometimes get very unexpected and powerful results.