Chapter 6: Putting the Human Crowd to Work Mathew Ingram is an award-winning journalist and media consultant who has spent the past two decades writing about business, technology and new media as well as advising companies on their social-media strategy. He is currently a senior writer with the San Francisco-based blog network GigaOM1, where he writes about the evolution of media and web culture. Before that, he was the first-ever communities editor - specializing in social-media development and strategy - for the Globe and Mail, where he developed the newspaper’s approach to online comments, pioneered its Facebook page and launched dozens of writers and editors on Twitter. He tweets at @mathewi2. The idea of crowdsourcing verification of news events and emergencies isn’t really that all new - the crowd, broadly speaking, has always been a crucial part of how the news is formed and understood. It’s just that social technologies like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others allow us to engage in this kind of shared decision-making process on a much larger and broader scale, and they allow us to do it faster as well. That’s not to say there aren’t flaws in this process, because there are - but on balance, we are probably better off than we were before. Just think about how facts and news events were established in the not-so-distant past: When a war broke out, a hurricane struck or a bomb exploded somewhere, there were often few journalists around, unless they just happened to be there. Sources on the ground would relay the information to a news outlet and then the painstaking process of verifying those events would begin, based on interviews with witnesses, phone calls and so on. Now, we are just as likely to find out about news - particularly sudden, unpredictable events like earthquakes or mass shootings - on Twitter, within minutes or even seconds of their happening. And instead of just one or two observations from bystanders and witnesses, we can get hundreds or even thousands of them. Some of them are likely to be erroneous, as we saw with the bombings in Boston and other similar emergency situations, but overall a fairly accurate picture can be gradually assembled of what occurred and how - and it happens faster than ever. Here’s a look at some of the best practices for the emerging practice of crowdsourced verification, as practiced by innovators like Andy Carvin, a former senior strategist at NPR, and others. 70