got geoint?

Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? We hope everyone enjoyed the little taste of spring — and tomorrow is the first official day of spring — that we had this week on the east coast. For this week’s FFT post, we thought we would tackle the idea of GEOINT being in the “hands of the people.” Yesterday, we covered an “everyone-as-an-informant” mapping and tracking application called Ushahidi , which made us think…will GEOINT truly be a democratic thing in the future? We will be relying on crowd-sourced data “from the people” to find our enemies? Possibly. The technology and applications are out there.

History of Democracy
Not that our readers need a quick civics lesson because the concept of democracy is something we all know very well. That said, how could we do a FFT post and not feature a definition from Wikipedia? So, here we go. Democracy is a political system in which all the members of the society have an equal share of formal political power. In modern representative democracy, this formal equality is embodied primarily in the right to vote. The history of democracy — the history of empowering people by giving them a say in their political entities — traces back from its origins in the ancient world to its re-emergence and rise from the 17th century to the present day. Read more here.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. A project director at the National Health Museum in Washington, DC, Menashe was putting together a series of interactive kiosks devoted to potential pandemics like the avian flu. An exhibition designer had created a plan for the kiosk itself, but now Menashe was looking for images to accompany the text. Rather than hire a photographer to take shots of people suffering from the flu, Menashe decided to use preexisting images – stock photography, as it’s known in the publishing industry. OK. So, this Wired article came out in 2006 (kind of an old story), but it was spot on about crowdsourcing being the next big thing. Read more here.

Crowdsourcing the N.C.A.A. Tournament
There are 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. Yahoo has built a new tool for this year’s tournament intended to determine which of these results are most likely. Called Predictalot, it is a prediction market that allows users to bet on any outcome. It then continuously regenerates the odds of each outcome based on people’s bets. Using prediction markets to guess the likelihood of future events is not new; solutions to various problems relying on the wisdom of crowds are increasingly common as better computing tools are developed to refine the predictions. Read the full NY Times blog here.

How to Make Crowdsourcing Sustainable and Productive
In just four years, crowdsourcing has moved from a newly-coined term to an increasingly common practice. Now some Web heavyweights, from Digg.com to Wikipedia, approach a variety of tasks by enlisting the wisdom — and work — of the crowd. Scott Belsky, founder of a creative services company called Behance, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, director of design and user experience for Digg.com, believe it’s time to outline some principles and dispel some misconceptions for the crowdsourcing era. At South by Southwest Interactive they outlined what can make a crowdsourced project work and what can make it fall apart. Read the full Poynter article here.

Windows 7 Was Totally My Idea
Many believe that the next level of consumer product development will be completely influenced by customer feedback. Many companies track all discussions in Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels and use this input to enhance their products. Kind of an “influenced by the people” product development approach. Well, we have all seen the “Window’s 7 Was Totally My Idea” takes this idea of consumer feedback and points to upgrades being based on ideas from actual customers. The problem is that PC are problematic and MACs just work – it’s that simple. Apologies for the insertion of the editorial staff’s personal opinions about MACs versus PCs…we have no intention of offending PC people. We are just saying that you will be more productive, happier, healthier and better looking with a MAC….oops there we go again.

John Lennon’s “Power to the People”
The late, great John Lennon needs no introduction. And, here’s his 1971 song “Power to the People,” which seemed appropriate for the times. Happy Friday!

Tags: Crowdsourcing, Democracy, Friday's Food for Thought, GEOINT, got geoint?, John Lennon, John Lennon Power to the People, People-Led Movements, South By Southwest, United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation