Crowdmapping - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 30-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Crowdmapping

One of the most exciting mass movements today is crowdmapping: sharing data collectively to produce a visualisation on a map giving almost-instant information on current events. Crowdmapping produces a picture of events on the ground as they happen by taking text messages and social media feeds together with geographic data to distribute real-time, interactive information on events such as revolutions, wars, humanitarian crises and natural disasters. This new application of social networking can bring fresh insights into events, which can be nearly impossible to cover through traditional methods of journalism where individuals report into a central newsroom. It has the additional advantage of mapping longer-term trends that fall in and out of the news.

Technologies like mobile phones and the world wide web have made it possible for those people caught up in a war or natural disaster to broadcast information from the affected area and for this information to be collected in a way that emergency aid services can use and act on. In a disaster situation the most current information is essential because the needs of, for example, flood victims change minute by minute. It enables response organisations to get an understanding of a crisis situation quickly (thus it is sometimes called crisis mapping), give targeted aid to people most in need and form a network of reliable reporters on the ground to check information going to the live updated map. When an emergency situation arises, a small army of volunteers comes together to collect incoming information and put it on the map. Some of the information comes from official sources such as the United Nations, but the most powerful aspect of data collection is the ability to pull information from Twitter posts, emails and text messages. Once this information is available, volunteers collaborate via the Internet to put data on to a map, which is updated every second to build a comprehensive picture of the scale and severity of the disaster. Volunteers from all over the world translate the messages coming in from the disaster zone into English and plot the information on the live interactive map.

One of the originators of crowdmapping is Ushahidi. The developers of crowdmapping software began the project in Kenya to map reports of violence after a controversial election result in 2008. Later, in 2010 in Haiti, a similar approach of collectively sharing information to help emergency services deal with the situation was adopted. A small team released a free phone number – 4636 – to allow victims of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake to text their requests for medical aid, water and shelter. Over 1,000 workers and volunteers around the globe, contacted via Facebook, translated the messages, mostly in Haitian Creole. They then prioritised and geolocated the requests for help via crowdmapping software. Through this service, emergency response teams were able to save the lives of hundreds of people and send food, water and medicine to tens of thousands. The success of Project 4636 led to the development of crowdmapping when dealing with critical and even non-critical situations.

Most recently, crowdmapping has been used to track violent activity in warzones and areas with uprisings. In one country, when the people rose up against their leader, the United Nations monitored the escalating violence via a crowdmap to provide them with information on what was happening in the country. In another country, rebel fighters reported people who were missing, killed or arrested according to eyewitnesses. Other uses for the software have included the Danish people's attempt to map the extent of CCTV surveillance in their country. Since the project began, 2,220 CCTV cameras have been photographed and verified by journalists. However, not all attempts at crowdmapping have been successful. The attempt to map an uprising in one country was cut short when the authorities took the country offline and, when the Internet was brought back, the crowdmap had been forgotten.

There are other downsides to crowdmapping. According to George Chamales, there are security challenges: it must be ensured that the system stays operational and that the information collated is not misused. Firstly, the lead crowdmap tends to be the one that is set up first and has the most users. Unfortunately, the organisation behind the first crowdmap may not be the best one to manage the complex process of collecting and managing the data. Secondly, there are several platforms for producing crowdmaps including commercial products and open-source projects like Ushahidi. Some have even been developed for a particular crisis such as the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima - all of these have their own disadvantages: commercial software may need to patch bugs in the programme; open source software may overlook security in favour of functionality. The information collected needs to come from trustworthy sources, which are then relied on for more reports; this may make the person sending the report a potential target in war situations. Finally, there is the human element in processing the information, relying on thousands of volunteers to translate, categorise and prioritise the information. There is an obvious risk in giving strangers access to messages generated in dangerous circumstances: messages may be deleted and the sender's identity may be compromised.

While the introduction of any new technology has flaws, George Chamales believes that crowdmapping cannot afford to go through the same maturation as other technologies: the risks to people using it in hostile political situations are too great and could lead to them being arrested or killed. Furthermore, over time the technology may be labelled as dangerous, leading organisations to shun an extremely useful instrument. The answer, Chamales believes, can be found in developing standards through collaboration between IT security experts and the crowdmapping movement. New challenges and issues will arise with each crisis mapped by the people affected, but George Chamales thinks that establishing security standards would be a good starting point to allow this valuable new form of networking to evolve.