“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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This 2010 article focuses on crowd sourced information and particularly the use of sensing and collaboration applications for crowdsourcing on Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This 2010 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in crowdsourcing workflows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and geo-spatial mapping using OpenStreetMap (OSM).
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.
This article discusses how the Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the use of crowdsourcing services with geo-spatial and geo-temporal data.
This short 2010 oped is a very early commentary from when YouTube first allowed users to flag content as terrorist related.
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