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"Crowd Sourced" Information

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Home » Methodologies » “Crowd Sourced” Information

"Crowd Sourced" Information

“Crowd Sourced” information or "Crowd Sourcing" is the use of broad-based collection methods to derive information from the general population. The premise underlying this approach is that individuals in a general population may hold pieces of information that, when collated, may provide information ranging from broad analytical value to specific actionable intelligence. The approach of Crowd Sourcing is rooted in public safety traditions of active community engagement and can be used to facilitate dialogue between public safety officials and at-risk communities, making both responsible for the “co-production” of security.

The preventing violent extremism (PVE) and counterterrorism applications of Crowd Sourcing are numerous. Most notably, perhaps, is the notion that public safety officials can cooperate with citizens in at risk communities to keep those communities safe. This has substantial implications for PVE policy as practitioners can engage with citizens at a grassroots level, to identify issues that impact communities, and more effectively work towards counter radicalization and counter extremism initiatives. 

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4chan Plays Racist Where's Wally to Find the Boston Bomber

This article in the New Statesman shows the potential perils of using crowdsourcing to find terrorism suspects. Hern uses the case of 4Chan and Reddit attempts to discover the identities of the Boston bombers. 

Alex Hern
April 2013
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Charting a New Course: Thought for Action Kit

This resource is a short e-book type document by the pilot project “Charting a New Course: Women Preventing Violent Extremism” led by the U.S. Institute of Peace. The project aimed to engage a discussion on key issues related to the role of women and preventing violent extremism (PVE).

Women Preventing Violent Extremism
2015
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Crowd-sourced information for interior localization and navigation – US Patent 8320939 B1

This 2012 resource is the full public disclosure of a Google patent used for crowd sourced information and data mapping in smartphone devices. Aspects of the disclosure relate generally to the use of crowd sourced information to generate walkable paths through indoor spaces.

Luc Vincent - Google Inc.
2012
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Crowd-sourced Intelligence: Potential and Pitfalls

This very short resource focuses on crowd-sourced intelligence and is the summary of a longer article by leading social media analytics expert Jamie Bartlett and others. The executive summary highlights some of the key points and findings of the research team.

Jamie Bartlett, Professor Chris Hankin, Kevin Savage, and Dr. Harvey Lewis
September 2013
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Crowd-Sourced Sensing and Collaboration Using Twitter

This 2010 article focuses on crowd sourced information and particularly the use of sensing and collaboration applications for crowdsourcing on Twitter.

M. Demirbas, M. Ali Bayir, C. G. Akcora, Y. S. Yilmaz, et al.
June 2010
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Crowdsourced Rumour Identification During Emergencies

McCreadie, Macdonald and Ounis discuss the use of social media platforms, such as Twitter, to track significant events. Emergency response agencies are increasingly looking to social media as a source of real-time information about such events.

Richard McCreadie, Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis
2015
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Crowdsourcing for Cognitive Science – The Utility of Smartphones

This 2014 article focuses on crowd-sourced information on smartphones. The article is based on a large-scale collaborative study by seven researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham.

Harriet R. Brown, Peter Zeidman, Peter Smittenaar, Rick A. Adams, Fiona MacNab, Robb B. Rutledge, and Raymond J. Dolan
July 2014
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Crowdsourcing Freedom: An Interview with David Keyes

This 2015 resource is the transcript of an interview with David Keyes, founder of a Google-funded crowdsourcing platform, which links human rights activists from closed societies with people around the world who can help them.

Sam Harris
March 2015
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Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice

This 387 page 2013 book provides 20 chapters focused on various components of crowdsourcing and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI).  In particular, the chapters in this book explore both the theories and applications of crowdsourcing for geographic knowledge production.

Daniel Sui, Sarah Elwood, and Michael Goodchild (eds.)
2013
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Crowdsourcing Help to Combat Terrorism

This short 2015 online article and video discusses a crowdsourcing portal project by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), aimed to speed up solutions for combatting terrorism.

IdeaConnection
October 2015
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Crowdsourcing with Smartphones

This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the use of crowdsourcing applications on smartphones. The article demonstrates three in-house applications deployed in a novel cloud consisting of over 40 Android devices in a SmartLab at the University of Cyprus.

Georgios Chatzimilioudis, Andreas Konstantinidis, Christos Laoudias and Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti
September 2012
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Decision-Theoretic Control of Crowd-Sourced Workflows

This 2010 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in crowdsourcing workflows.

Peng Dai, Mausam, and Daniel S. Weld
2010
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Extreme Dialogue: Social media Target Audience Analysis and Impact Assessments in support of countering violent extremism. An abridged summary report of findings and lessons learned.
SecDev Foundation
2016
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Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief

This 2011 article focuses on crowdsourcing funding through social media in the event of disaster relief. Social media is increasingly playing a critical role in natural disasters as an information propagator that can be leveraged for disaster relief.

Huiji Gao, Geoffrey Barbier, Rebecca Goolsby, and Daniel Zeng
January 2011
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How Crowdsourcing Can Help Us Fight ISIS

This 2015 Huffington Post article offers brief but informative look into some of the ways that crowd-sourced information has been used by both by ISIS, and the U.S. Government in its fight against terrorism.

Dr. Maha Hosain Aziz
June 2015
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How ISIS Uses Twitter: Analyze how ISIS fanboys have been using Twitter since 2015 Paris Attacks

This resource contains the description and data analysis from a research project conducted by Fifth Tribe into ISIS’s use of Twitter in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris Attacks.

Khuram Zaman
May 2016
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ISIS Has a Twitter Strategy and It Is Terrifying [Infographic]

This resource is an informative, visual and descriptive infographic by Fifth Tribe focused in ISIS’s use of Twitter. The infographic and descriptions in the article were written following the Paris attacks in November 2015.

Khuram Zaman
November 2015
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Lessons from Crowdsourcing the Boston Bombing Investigation

This article details how a public request by the FBI for photos and videos of the Boston bombing scene morphed into a digital witch hunt. The fears, prejudices and suspicions of the crowd resulted in a digital witch hunt with guilt and innocence were based on circumstantial evidence.

Tarun Wadhwa
April 2013
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Mapping Community Engagement with Urban Crowd-Sourcing

This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and geo-spatial mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Desislava Hristova, Afra Mashhadi, Giovanni Quattrone, and Licia Capra
2012
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Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control

This 2013 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and provides a valuable and useful taxonomy and theory for crowdsourcing on social media. The authors provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates crowds, outsourcing, and social web technologies.

Gregory D. Saxton, Onook Oh, and Rajiv Kishore.
2013
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Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing

This article discusses how the Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter.

Kate Starbird, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand, Peg Achterman, and Robert M. Mason
2014
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SmartRoad: A Crowd-Sourced Traffic Regulator Detection and Identification System

This 2013 paper focuses on crowd sourced information and particularly the use of the GPS sensor smartphone application SmartRoad. The authors present SmartRoad, a crowd-sourced sensing system that detects and identifies traffic regulators, traffic lights and stop signs.

Shaohan Hu, Lu Su, Hengchang Liu, Hongyan Wang, Tarek Abdelzahe
2013
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State of the Art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence for counter-terrorism

This is a foundational report and a seminal work in the study of social media intelligence and open source research. The paper reviews 245 papers in a semi-systematic literature review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources.

Jamie Bartlett and Louis Reynolds
September 2015
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Studying Facebook via Data Extraction: The Netvizz Application

This 2013 paper describes Netvizz, a data collection and extraction application on Facebook that allows researchers to export data in standard file formats from different sections of the social networking platform.

B Rieder
2013
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The State of the Art: A Literature Review of Social Media Intelligence Capabilities for Counter-Terrorism

This article is a seminal piece and a foundational resource in the field of social media analytics and open source intelligence by some of the field’s leading authors.

Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller
November 2013
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To Volunteer or to Contribute Locational Information? Towards Truth in Labeling for Crowdsourced Geographic Information

This 2013 article focuses on crowdsourcing volunteered geographic information. The article asks the question, is “volunteered” the right adjective to use for all types of crowd-sourced geographic information?

Francis Harvey
June 2012
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Using Social Media for Global Security

This 2013 book aims to inform government decision-makers, security analysts, and activists on how to use the social world to improve security locally, nationally, globally, and cost-effectively.

R Gupta, H Brooks
2013
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Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake

This 2012 article focuses on crowd sourced information (crowdsourcing) and its use in disaster relief. The article outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used during the Haiti relief effort, and particularly with respect to web-based mapping services.

Matthe Zook, Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton, and Sean Gorman
August 2012
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Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the use of crowdsourcing services with geo-spatial and geo-temporal data.

Laura Diaz, Carlos Granelli, Joaquin Huerta, and Michael Gould
2012
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YouTube is letting users decide on terrorism-related videos

This short 2010 oped is a very early commentary from when YouTube first allowed users to flag content as terrorist related.

Brian Bennett
December 2010
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