Living with Technology
For over six years I was the Chief Technology Officer for a large defense contractor. While there, I often wrote about technologies and how they impact our jobs and lives. When I finally made the decision to work full time for our business, Cabin Digital, life became really busy. Now that we are stable and growing we talked about me starting a technology blog at Cabin Digital and “Living with Technology” was born.
My personal guidelines – these will be my observations and hopefully relevant to a wide audience. This isn’t a forum for advertising or product reviews; rather it’s a forum to share ideas and observations around technologies you use or maybe don’t even know exist. I will try to keep the blog regular with a post every two weeks.
In this first installment I want to talk about Crowd-Sourcing and Situational Reports.
When I “say” those words some might immediately have examples but I suspect many may not be able to explain the concepts or give a good example…
While doing some chores with my boys and driving up I95 I hear my oldest son’s phone say “There’s a hidden officer on the left”… Sure enough a few seconds later in a turnout is a police car…
That audio catches my attention and just then it says “There’s a stopped car on the right” and again there’s a car with a problem on the right. I ask him the name of the mobile app and he tells me it’s “Waze” (https://www.waze.com/). He tells me his Scoutmaster uses it… I know our scoutmaster and he’s a shuttle bus driver so it’s at least worth looking at as he’s always driving in traffic.
Of course I download Waze and start playing around. It’s pretty cool and not a traditional mapping tool; in fact its mapping function isn’t too good. Each user of Waze is a potential contributor of information. In the pure form we call this “crowd sourcing”. There are no qualifications to become a “traffic reporter”, just join and you can post info.
Ok, that’s good, but with so many knuckleheads in the world do you really want a system where anyone can post? Won’t it fill up with garbage data? It might, if you didn’t add the critical Crowd Sourcing feature of cleansing. Waze also asks users to confirm things so if you pass by a site that supposedly has a stopped car and it’s now gone you give it a tap and with a few others reporting the notice is removed. The “crowd” is the source. Sure each person is a contributor but the system allows things to be added, confirmed, and removed with reports from multiple users.
This is the very core of Crowd Sourcing – no observer or reporter can be everywhere all the time. The Army had a motto a while ago “Every Soldier is a Sensor”… well for Waze “Every Driver is a Sensor”.
Even if you want to fool Crowd Source systems, it takes quite a bit of work. If someone provides false reports the system looks at your reporting record and decides if it should post the data or wait for others to report the event for confidence. Even if posted, if other report it’s no longer true, the data is quickly removed. So if a Waze user decided to post a whole bunch of phony police car sightings to slow traffic, it wouldn’t work or last for very long. As long as other users also report those police cars are not there… That’s the strength of Crowd Sourcing – something I call “Truth Centering” the system tries to center on the truth – well more accurately the system tries to center on the belief of the crowd. If they all believe the black car on the side of the road is a police car then at the moment it’s a police car.
Ok so if that’s what Crowd Sourcing is all about then what’s a Situation Report?
A SitRep is a short, timely, and relevant report. It provides you tactical information you need right now or at least fairly soon. As you drive down the road knowing where there is traffic, stopped cars, police cars, accidents, etc. are all parts of a SitRep. The key is focus. For you, the things that really matter are the things on the road in the direction YOU are travelling. For me, it’s probably different things as I’m likely on a different road, at a different time, in a different direction. So a SitRep has to be relevant to a specific user. That’s the trick, filter lots of crowd source data to give you what you need. In this case, Waze takes the accumulated data and then provides you a stream of data based on where you are and the direction you are heading.
Ok, so Waze is a cool app… so what?
Imagine if more and more things become Crowd Sourced – The news is becoming more instant reporting, you could know how long the lines are at each Kings Dominion ride line in real time, or what the true wait is at a restaurant. Crowd Sourcing is inexpensive – since the users are often the sensors they provide their observations for free and hence you can “afford” to have lots of sensors! Cabin Digital couldn’t afford to monitor every road with staff, but using Crowd Sourcing you can do things too big and too expensive to be done with traditional business patterns…
I expect you will see many more Crowd Source services in the next few years and it wouldn’t surprise me to see a new service based entirely on Crowd Sourcing emerge soon…
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