First, I want to thank everyone for their support leading to the success of Ushahidi at the Netsquared Challenge (More details here).

Next, I'm delighted to witness the rise of the Peer-To-Peer economy, and the death of the One-To-Many business model. Since time immemorial, information has flowed from one entity to everyone else, hence the one-to-many descriptor. The media industry one of the first victims i.e. newspaper publishers, tv, music and movie companies. As our ability to consume and create different kinds of media surges, old media struggles to stay significant and pay the bills. The same thunderbolt that impacted old media is poised to strike other industries even more disruptively.

Crisis reporting is one of those industries. Often an ultra-sensitive affair, it has had to deal with issues of politics, bureaucracy and authenticity mostly because policy making and crisis situations are joined by the hip. It has always been a one-to-many situation with government/corporate dominated (and manipulated) crisis reporting. Basically we have always had to believe what 'they' tell us about how it happened, how it is being handled and how it will be prevented in future. Things are beginning to change however with the proliferation of social media and specifically the rise of the bloggers.

Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be freeing up information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have safeguarded information release for self-preservation. Behold the rise of Many-To-One and Many-To-Many paradigm shift in crisis reporting.

The posthaste delivery of crisis information as it happens is something we'll begin to see in coming years. As all this data converges we'll have the ability to visualize patterns that were previously indescernible. With this new power policy making will finally return to the people.

While all this seems a bit idealistic, I should point out that this model is not perfect. It should be understood that crowdsourcing is still vulnerable to data poisoning (as my friend Hash pointed out). This is when malevolence is injected into the system. P2P (Peer-To-Peer) systems have often overcome this using their vastness. Try and imagine misleading data engulfed by a sea of reliable information - ultimately the authenticity can be determined by the bigger picture.

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I’m finally back after a 6 month hiatus from blogging and I want to start by addressing a very nagging question but I’ll get to that in just a moment. No doubt you’ve experienced social networking in one form or another (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter etc etc), and if you haven’t you’d better quit living in the 90’s. It’s all about creating and sharing information with friends, colleagues and basically everyone. The last 3 years especially have been witness to an explosive growth in the size and influence of these social networks. “Individuals finally have the power” - wow! (btw, that wow is supposed to be sarcastic).

The proliferation of social networks has led to a new fad… Data Portability. Data Portability is the ability to share information across multiple interfaces and web platforms using open standards. Once the data is accessed, it can repackaged, remixed, right-clicked… you name it. Basically your Facebook profile content for instance could appear on other social sites, and the flickr photos from your phone in return could appear on a google map. The basic idea is to mash together the infinite amounts of shared data (cue the scrolling Matrix code) and attempt make sense of it.

My nagging question is - does it all end? Mashing all this information together has led to an avalanche (more like a storm) of information that we have to deal with daily. For instance a news item can be mashed together with related YouTube links, google maps, flickr photos, message boards, stock ticker information, blogs and what your friends on Twitter think… the list is endless. By the time you’re done reading you’ll know all there is to know about Myanmar.

I have two problems; First can the human mind deal with the coming onslaught of information? Secondly, where does privacy begin and end, or should we just give it up altogether? Personally, I’m afraid that a super machine in the very near future will have the ability to assimilate together all this information, decipher it and draw very precise social patterns for every individual.

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