Friday, November 15, 2013

Crowdopolis w. 46

What we have done

After realizing some issues and identifying our goals (thanks to the midcrit presentation critics!), we decided to contact the “Biased” group in order to get information about their methods of dealing with bias - the news bias detector. We learned about their idea and moved our project task away from the problem of filtering the data automatically, as the “Biased” project will cover it.  

In order to get a qualified data we approached five people with a broad questionnaire. We asked one journalist, two bloggers and two active online users about their web habits and their attitude to the citizen journalism in its current stage and their thoughts about its future.

We also scanned citizen journalism websites, projects and mobile applications to get inspired and understand what is the best design and content choice for Crowdopolis.

This gave us an opportunity to narrow the subjects and approach to the crowdsourcing on Crowdopolis according to the people’s needs, as we described in the “Changes within the project” part. 

We worked on a storyboard for a final presentation, formulating the overall scenario and scope as well.


Problems encountered

We realized the need to clarify the exact subjects and exact audience of Crowdopolis. While it would be perfect to create a citizen journalism platform for everyone and everything, it is impossible to cover all possible issues in a framework of this project. Theretofore, we will concentrate on particular scenarios, still of the broad range.


Changes within the project

We decided to concentrate on the particular subjects, narrowing it to the live coverage of the situations when people have a better access than journalists, know the ‘inside’, and when the number of eyewitnesses turns quantity into quality, such are: 
- conflict situations (military, crime, agression, riots);
- extreme situations (hurricane, explosion, fire, people dying/flying);
- situations including people crowds (strikes, protests, festivals, concerts, conventions, elections).

These are the events where Crowdopolis’ crowdsoursing tools can be REALLY useful!


What we will do

We will continue to work on the website prototype and accumulate information from both online users and citizen journalism experts in form of an open-ended interviews and a survey. It will help us to evaluate our ideas on the prototype development.

1 comment:

  1. Very good. I especially like that you decided to narrow down the coverage of crowdopolis to extreme situations as you described. I agree that these are the type of situations where it could be really useful.
    Good work there! Keep it up!

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