Heather Ford
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This post first appeared on Ethnography Matters on May 1. The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than the same activities in multifaceted spaces like Wikipedia. Researching how Wikipedians manage and verify information…
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This post first appeared on the Ushahidi blog. Last month I presented the first results of the WikiSweeper project, an ethnographic research project to understand how Wikipedia editors track, evaluate and verify sources on rapidly evolving pages of Wikipedia, the results of which will inform ongoing development of the SwiftRiver (then Sweeper) platform. Wikipedians are some…
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First posted at the Google Policy blog. With all the hype around “Big Data” lately, you may be inclined to shrug it off as a business fad. But there is more to it than a buzzword. Data science is emerging as a new field, changing the ways that companies get to know their customers, governments…
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This post first appeared on Ethnography Matters Trust. The word gets bandied about a lot when talking about the Web today. We want people to trust our systems. Companies are supposedly building “trusted computing” and “designing for trust”. But, as sociologist Coye Cheshire, Professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley will tell you,…
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This post was the first in a new category for Ethnography Matters called “A day in the life”. In it, I describe a day at a workshop on online reputation that I attended, reporting on presentations and conversations with folks from Reddit and Stack Overflow, highlighting four key features of successful online reputation systems that…
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First published on PBS Idea Lab During the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake last year, the Ushahidi-Chile team received two reports — one through the platform, the other via Twitter — that indicated an English-speaking foreigner was trapped under a building in Santiago. “Please send help,” the report read. “i am buried under rubble in…
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Patrick Meier just wrote a post explaining why the term he coined, “bounded crowdsourcing” is ‘important for crisis mapping and beyond’. He likens “bounded crowdsourcing” to “snowball sampling”, where a few trusted individuals invite other individuals who they ‘fully trust and can vouch for… And so on and so forth at an exponential rate if…
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Cross-posted from blog.ushahidi.com As Ushahidi ethnographer, my job is to do on-the-ground research on users’ experience with our technology in particular contexts. Something that we’ve been thinking about a great deal as we develop SwiftRiver is the process of verification, the ways in which technology and society work together to create useful, trustworthy and actionable…
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Cross-posted from PBS Idea Lab Wikipedia articles on breaking news stories dominate page views on the world’s sixth-largest website. Perhaps more importantly, these articles drive the most significant editor contribution — especially among new editors. In the first three months of this year, English Wikipedia articles with the most contributors were the 2011 Tucson shooting,…
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Cross-posted from Ethnography Matters xkcd’s Updated Map of Online Communities I arrived in Nairobi last night after an absence of about five years. As I left the plane through the walkway, I took a deep breath and inhaled the familiar southern African smell that I always miss so much living in America. I walked through…
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