Crisis Mapping, Open Source, and the Politics of Design
Posted by Sam Haddix on December 3, 2014In early November I was able to attend the 6th annual International Conference of Crisis Mappers, a three day event that featured insightful talks and workshops on a variety of topics ranging from Ebola in West Africa to the Bangladesh Refugee Crisis. Mapping as a discipline is still relatively new to me, so I was unsure of what to expect. What I found was a wonderfully overdetermined mix of political activists, techno-enthusiasts, businesspeople, social scientists, academics, students, and hobbyists from all over the world.
For the average crisis mapper, mapping is not a primary source of income nor is it particularly lucrative. Read against the traditional logic of economic principles, it is difficult to understand what motivates this group of people. Is it altruism? reputation? becoming apart of a greater community? the erotic satisfaction of making something new? More precisely I believe that what motivates the crisis mapping community is the very same complex of braided forces that motivate the open source community. In his book The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber discusses how the interdependent combination of individual interests, economic logics, and social and political structures manage complexity and generate coordination. At the microfoundational level, Weber believes the key motivator for the open source community is the signaling incentive or the desire to situate oneself in an environment that will most efficiently provide a well-informed and critical measure for the quality of ones work, “The signaling incentive should be strongest in settings with sophisticated users, tough bugs, and an audience that can appreciate effort and artistry, and thus distinguish between merely good and excellent solutions to problems.”1 It is difficult to think of a better description for the crisis mapping community.
Crisis mapping, like open source, has thus far remained anti-rival “in the sense that the system as a whole positively benefits from free riders”2 and because effective innovations are shared and adopted by the larger community. Here the ‘system’ should not be thought solely as a shared online realm, but an evolving confluence of operational code, technosystem, ethical conversation, and emerging law that exist both online and through human interaction. Weber goes on to say, “The challenge is to coordinate those contributions on a focal point, so that what emerges is technically useful.”3
This is the fundamental challenge facing crisis mappers today – how to develop at the macro-organizational level. While there has conveniently been a staggered series of crises over the last decade for the mapping community to devote themselves to (the most recent being Ebola), we are beginning to see what is referred to in the grammar of open source as ‘code forking’; or the reappropriation of multiple and inconsistent versions of the code base which cause the various platforms to evolve into different and incompatible permutations.4 In the mapping community this equates to the continued creation of new platforms instead of the continued contribution to existing platforms; a problem that is understandable considering the situational differences between crises.
While the open source community has already successfully grappled with many of the problems now facing crisis mappers, the lessons to be learned are not so easily translatable. For one, although there is certainly overlap, crisis mapping is still relatively small and does not benefit from the long history of standard-setting. More significantly, questions of data set licensing and security in one field may involve entirely different variables and players in the other. One mapper asked, “How happy would we all be if the World Health Organization had an open API [application programing interface] that we could all pull from?” This is where things get tricky. What are the security risks and concerns related to publicly mapping vulnerable communities and filling in missing maps? Can we create secure platforms to share data about vulnerable communities that shouldn’t be made available to the general public?
If the open source community has already discovered useful responses to these questions within its own context, the question becomes: how can we design infrastructure that affords the translation and transmission of useful knowledge between disparate fields?
Crisis Mapping and Design
Crisis mapping concerns many of the same issues that are being addressed in other design fields: universal/connective platforms, good vs. bad data, effective crowdsourcing, questions of ethnography, the incorporation of local knowledge, questions of gender/culture in the creation of services, the design of human-centered tools, questions of scale, questions of flexibility and interoperability, the list goes on. Yet compared with other design forums that I have participated in, these same issues are being developed more productively by the crisis mapping community. I believe that the reason for this is fourfold: first, mapping calls for an engagement with both theory and practice (unlike traditional academia for example); second, every crisis moment provides the mapping community with a new set of immediate time-based challenges in which to prototype ideas and incorporate the lessons learned from previous crises;5 third, if it6 is a question of how to more effectively cross-pollinate discourse, crisis offers a discursive space in which multiple disciplines may come together to explore a common problem. Lastly, crisis possesses an aura of clemency that transcends conventional political policy and bureaucracy (think states of emergency). There is an essentializing immediacy to the precarity of human life (although certainly some lives and geopolitical contexts are privileged over others), and this ground zero moment of the human offers a potential space for radical openness — a whatever gets the job done mentality that is less concerned with the potential ruptures that innovation implies.7 That being said, this aura does not transcend so much as transform the political landscape, inviting an entirely new set of difficulties. Yet perhaps it is within this atmosphere of hyper-politicalization that designers may begin to truly grapple with the complexity that confronts them.
Keynote speaker David Miliband spoke to the difficulty in addressing systemic social problems, “The average refugee is out of their home country for 20 years. You cannot have just a social program, it must also be an economic program. If you want to address sustainability and the longterm you cannot just give people food or winterization kits.” Rather than generating yet another app or contributing to the already ineffective and self-indulgent landscape of humanitarian services, could not designers instead focus their energies on addressing the very structures that afford these kinds of negative feedback loops to occur? Here I imagine design that shifts traditional models of accountability, design that structurally necessitates greater transparency, design that leverages these moments of radical openness for the purposes of radical innovations, and design that addresses fragmentation without appealing to a constructed homogeneity.
How do you effectively map sexual assault in a way that does not make the affected community more vulnerable? How do you make resources accessible to refugees in countries that deny their very existence? Appropriate responses to these have implications far beyond their contexts. These challenges offer a space in which design may continue to critically reframe itself. Designers must look to these contradictions or disjunctions that emerge from the fissures of an ever-accelerating globalized world.
[Note: Image is Eric Fischer’s “Locals and Tourists.”]
1. Weber, Steven The Success of Open Source 142.↩
2. Weber, Steven The Success of Open Source 154.↩
3. Weber, Steven The Success of Open Source 155-156.↩
4. Weber, Steven The Success of Open Source 12.↩
5. For example we can see how the open source platform Ushahidi came to prominence as a result of the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya; or the ways in which we now understand ‘volunteerism’ differently as a result of Hurricane Sandy.↩
6. I have kept ‘it’ purposefully ambiguous, but for the purposes of coherency we could say that ‘it’ is a critical, productive, and praxis-oriented space for the evolution and implementation of ideas and practices.↩
7. Interesting to compare with Weber’s statement, “Internet technology does reduce communication and transaction costs in many situations, sometimes radically. And this does affect in demonstrable ways existing boundaries of organizations and industries – sometimes in a revolutionary way. Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy used the phrase ‘creative destruction’ to describe this kind of process.” Weber, Steven The Success of Open Source 171.↩