Patrick Meier (PhD)
Patrick is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for crisis early warning, humanitarian response and resilience. Presently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute. Previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping & Early Warning and served as Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi. Patrick holds a PhD from The Fletcher School, a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from Stanford & MA from Columbia. He was born & raised in Africa.
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Topics
- Big Data
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- Crowdsourcing
- Digital Activism
- Early Warning
- Humanitarian Tech
- iRevolution
- Mobile Banking
- Satellite Imagery
- Social Computing
- Social Media
- Ushahidi
Popular Posts
- Why USAID's Crisis Map of Syria is so Unique
- Crisis Mapping Syria: Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human Intelligence
- How to Lie with Maps
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Latest Posts
- Why USAID’s Crisis Map of Syria is so Unique
- Using E-Mail Data to Estimate International Migration Rates
- Rapidly Verifying the Credibility of Information Sources on Twitter
- The Most Impressive Live Global Twitter Map, Ever?
- What Percentage of Tweets Generated During a Crisis Are Relevant for Humanitarian Response?
- Crowdsourcing the Evaluation of Post-Sandy Building Damage Using Aerial Imagery
- What Was Novel About Social Media Use During Hurricane Sandy?
- The Limits of Crowdsourcing Crisis Information and The Promise of Advanced Computing
- MAQSA: Social Analytics of User Responses to News
- The Best Way to Crowdsource Satellite Imagery Analysis for Disaster Response
- Six Degrees of Separation: Implications for Verifying Social Media
- Accelerating the Verification of Social Media Content
- Could Twitris+ Be Used for Disaster Response?
- Innovation and the State of the Humanitarian System
- How People in Emergencies Use Communication to Survive
- How Civil Disobedience Improves Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa)
- Crowdsourcing Disaster Response in Iran: How Volunteers Bypassed the State
- Crowdsourcing Community-Based Disaster Relief in Indonesia
- Using Rapportive for Source and Information Verification
- Could Social Media Have Prevented the Largest Mass Poisoning of a Population in History?
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My Tweets
- PatrickMeier: RT @ogleearth: Pakistan bill criminalizes mapmaking. It's a clumsier version of controls already in place in China t.co/5Pz0wIDn
- PatrickMeier: +1 RT @cairnsim: Really interested to see where new @ReliefWeb Labs goes: t.co/M0u9stBs Next gen humanitarian tech.
- PatrickMeier: Now Tweet This: How News Organizations Use Twitter t.co/MwOaxQ0K
- PatrickMeier: Measuring Twitter Quakes: The Twicalli Scale t.co/tTLEHglK | Is twitter traffic a good proxy to estimate magnitude of earthquakes?
- PatrickMeier: Is skepticism about quality of crowdsourced info due in part to the misplaced belief that institutions produce perfect data?
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How Civil Disobedience Improves Crowdsourced Disaster Response (and Vice Versa)
When Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office following widespread protests in 2001, he complained bitterly that “the popular uprising against him was a coup de text.” Indeed, the mass protests had been primarily organized via SMS. Fast forward to 2012 and the massive floods that re-cently paralyzed the country’s capital. Using mobile phones and social media, ordinary Filipinos crowdsourced the disaster response efforts on their own without any help from the government.
In 2010, hundreds of forest fires ravaged Russia. Within days, volunteers based in Moscow launched their own crowdsourced disaster relief effort, which was seen by many as both more effective and visible than the Kremlin’s response. These volunteers even won high profile awards in recognition of their efforts (picture below). Some were also involved in the crowdsourced response to the recent Krymsk floods. Like their Egyptian counterparts, many Russians are par-ticularly adept at using social media and mobile technologies given the years of experience they have in digital activism and civil resistance.
At the height of last year’s Egyptian revolution, a female activist in Cairo stated the following: “We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” Several weeks later, Egyptian activists used social networking platforms to organize & coordinate their own humanitarian convoys to Tripoli to provide relief to Libyan civilians affected by the fighting.
The same is true of Iranians, as witnessed during the Green Revolution in 2009. Should anyone be surprised that young, digitally savvy Iranians took the lead in using social media and mobile technologies to crowdsource relief efforts in response to the recent earthquakes in the country’s northern region? Given their distrust of the Iranian regime, should anyone be surprised that they opted to deliver the aid directly to the disaster-affected communities themselves?
Whether they are political activists on one day and volunteer humanitarians on another, the individuals behind the efforts described above use the same tools to mobilize and coordinate. And they build social capital in the process—strong and weak ties—regardless of whether they are responding to repressive policies or “natural’ disasters. Social capital facilitates collective action, which is key to political movements and humanitarian response—both on and offline. While some individuals are more politically inclined, others are more drawn to helping those in need during a disaster. Either way, these individuals are already part of overlapping social networks.
In fact, some activists may actually consider their involvement in volunteer-based humanitarian response efforts as an indirect form of nonviolent protest and civil resistance. According to The New York Times, volunteers who responded to Iran’s deadly double earthquake were “a group of young Iranians—a mix of hipsters, off-road motor club members and children of affluent families [...]“. They “felt like rebels with a cause [...], energized by anger over widespread accusations that Iran’s official relief organizations were not adequately helping survivors [...].” Interestingly, Iran’s Supreme Leader actually endorsed this type of private, independent delivery of aid that Iranian volunteers had undertaken. He may want to think that over.
The faster and more ably citizen volunteers can respond to “natural” disasters, the more backlash there may be against governments who are not seen to respond adequately to these disasters. Their legitimacy and capacity to govern may come into question by more sectors of the population. Both Beijing and Iran have already been heavily criticized for their perceived failure in responding to the recent floods and earthquakes. More importantly, perhaps, these crowd-sourced humanitarian efforts may serve to boost the confidence of activists. As one Iranian activist noted, “By organizing our own aid convoy, we showed that we can manage ourselves [...]. We don’t need others to tell us what to do.”
In neighboring Pakistan, the government failed catastrophically in its response to the devastating cyclone that struck East Pakistan in 1970. To this day, Cyclone Bhola remains the most deadly cyclone on record, killing some 500,000 people. A week after the hazard struck, the Pakistani President acknowledged that his government had made “mistakes in its handling of the relief efforts due to a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the disaster.” The lack of timely and coordinated government response resulted in massive protests agains the state, which served as an important trigger for the war of independence that led to the creation of Bangladesh. (Just imagine, SMS wasn’t even around then).
Given a confluence of grievances, “natural” disasters may potentially provide a momentary window of opportunity to catalyze regime change. This is perhaps more likely when those citizens responding to a disaster also happen to be savvy digital activists (and vice versa).
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