Do social media solutions and crowdsourcing have a shelf life?

All photographic rights owned via iStock

There is an important and fascinating governance event taking place in one of East Africa’s most vibrant nations in late October. It is the redo of the Kenyan presidential elections that just took place in August. In a first ever for an African democracy (or perhaps for any democracy for that matter) the Kenyan Supreme court surprisingly nullified the incumbent’s victory, even though it had been calculated by a a fairly wide margin. The justices, adorned in their Colonial vestige white horse-hair wigs, did not allege any criminal wrong doings, but were highly critical of the process and technology used by the election commission (IEBC) for the tabulation of the votes and in a subsequent premature victory announcement.

International observers had marked the original election as largely peaceful, orderly, and apparently free of significant subterfuge. However, both former Secretary of State John Kerry and the Carter Center did point to inconsistencies and irregularities in the counting. Both internal and external observers now ask, can the election process be re-executed a second time this year, without slipping into the wildfire-like ethnic and political violence that so haunted the country in the past? This is a gamble indeed. Supporters of the ruling point out that there can be no long term peace without justice. Detractors point to the significant victory margin compared to the fact that no election anywhere is without some equipment malfunction, workarounds, and incomplete rolls. (Hanging chads and Russian bots anyone?)

One of the more prominent peace keeping drivers in the first election was the Uchaguzi effort. Using crowdsourced information from the field depicting incidents of violence, irregularities, and alternatively orderliness and peaceful behavior, a real time map of conditions was formed, both good and bad. This map and subsequent control room actions was used to garner emergency assets to troubled areas and to portray an aura of oversight. Over 8000 messages were sent in via text, Facebook, and Twitter.

This effort meets the classic definition of crowdsourcing used by Daren Brabham and other academics as a specific call to an online community to deliver precise information to a central repository or organization. What is unique and unknown about the reset, is if ‘the crowd’ will be bored, unmotivated, and de-energized to participate in their voluntary network a second time. Or will the opposite be true in that Uchaguzi may see a surge in data from the field as the stakes are even more pronounced? Violence promoters would like to see a dissipation in the effectiveness of the social media oversight and peace messaging, leaving a vacuum where they could use those same devices and mediums for incitement. “Peacepreneurs” will be advertising heavily ahead of the elections attempting to invigorate the participatory culture. As the organizing institution in this case, Uchaguzi is using an intricate aspect of crowd sourcing typology: Knowledge Discovery & Management. Part of the deciding factor that may determine participation will be around a version of the concept of content curation, as described by Stephen Dale and others. Did Uchaguzi have enough time to find, filter, and validate the information from the masses? I think yes, their technology and reporting performed quite well. Did they then take the additional step of applauding the crowd and educating them as to the importance of their efforts? I am not sure. This last step is not often discussed. It is a different kind of validation. Instead of validating accuracy, it validates the individual’s contribution and personal effort. The crowd has a lot of value in so many applications, we all (practitioners and academics alike) need to spend more effort on recognition and performance attribution in order to educate and thank the crowd for their value. Such actions would greatly extend the shelf life of crowd sourced energy.

We are about to experience a real time lab test as to the duration of participatory based, technologically enabled, information flow interests in Kenya. Tenuous but promising future national prospects are at stake, including life, economy, safety, and liberty.