Friday, February 18, 2011

Crowdsourcing Human Rights

I have always admired not only the academic work of Christian Davenport (everything I know about repression comes from him and Will Moore), but his data determination.  He went to great lengths to determine how Rwanda's genocide played out, at the risk of being called a holocaust denier for simply stating the truth that more Hutus died than Tutsis.  He then developed the definitive repression website (a site for researchers of repression, not for repressers to pick up tips): www.staterepression.com  (I reviewed that site a while back).  Now, he is trying to get folks to report human rights abuses and direct data his way to crowd-source via this site: https://iii.nd.edu/. 

People wonder how the internet has changed what social scientists do.  Davenport keeps teaching us that we have only scratched the surface.  In addition, he demonstrates how important it is to be patient.  His Rwanda project took quite some time and resources to generate the findings.  This new project, relying on crowdsourcing, is a very much a long-term project as the crowd will take a while to gather.  It will take more than just a minor blog like mine to get enough folks to gather virtually and provide the data that Davenport needs to get the crowdsourcing to work.  Spread the word.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So, are you submitting anything in the latest round of the 'Cash for Thought' competition?