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ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the co-founder of Stand By Volunteer Task
Force, Mr. Patrick Meier. (Applause.) PATRICK MEIER: Thank you very much for your
time. I just have a few minutes here to just to share some stories with you. But as you
just heard from this previous panel, large humanitarian and development organizations
are facing mounting global challenges. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens around the world are feeling
increasingly alienated from their own institutions. At the Stand By Volunteer Task Force, we actually
believe we can change this using maps. The Task Force is a global volunteer network
of over 800 volunteers from more than 80 different countries around the world. These mapsters,
as they call themselves, have been trained in digital mapping technologies. And I want
to share with you just three very quick examples of how these individuals are changing the
world, one map at a time. The first begins during the early days of
the crisis in Libya last year. The United Nations had very little information as to
what exactly was happening, so they asked the Stand By Volunteer Task Force to create
a live, crowd-sourced social media map of the situation in order to better inform their
humanitarian relief operations. The map, which went live just a few hours later, looked something
like this. A few weeks after the map was launched, as
we continued working on this map, a high-level U.N. official emailed the Stand By Volunteer
Task Force to thank them for their efforts. And in particular, their efforts allowed for
a greatly reduced information overload; more manageable and adjustable output in the form
of an interactive map, which is far more intuitive; and ultimately, better situational awareness
and better decision-making with respect to this particular crisis.
A few months later, the escalation of the crisis in the Horn of Africa displaced a massive
number of IDPs into Somalia's Afgoye Corridor, so UNHCR approached the Stand By Task Force
to ask us to basically try and identify what the population estimate might be in that particular
area. So mapsters used this Tomnod platform to crowd-source the geotagging of IDP shelters
– informal temporary shelters – using high-resolution satellite imaging. And the
way it worked was this imagery would be sliced up in very small pieces, each of which could
then be analyzed one by one by individual volunteers who were part of the Task Force.
The result – well, if you were within 120 hours, mapsters tagged over a quarter million
features and about 4,000 images. And this led to a triangulated estimate of about 47,000
shelters, a figure that UNHCR could then take to estimate the IDP population in the Afgoye
Corridor. Just a couple weeks ago, AID activated the
Stand By Task Force to crowd-source a geotagging of a massive economic growth data set. The
project here, and the purpose of this project, was to better understand and evaluate the
geographical impact of over 100,000 individual private loans that were granted by USAID's
Development Credit Authority program. Now, AID has been spending a lot of time already
putting its own data online and making it available to others, but they realize full
well that open data does not necessarily equal accessible data or actionable data. And this
is where digital volunteers have a pivotal and instrumental role to play. They can take
these data sets and turn them into actionable, open data.
And so that's what we did. Mapsters both offline and online got together to basically geotag
the heck out of this data set. And while AID had expected this to take something like over
60 hours or so, these mapsters basically processed this information in less than 16 hours – processing
over 2,000 records, which basically is the equivalent of no fewer than 10,000 data points,
in 16 hours – over the space of half a weekend, not even an entire weekend.
Pretty extraordinary, and definitely new and novel collaboration for USAID, and one that
will definitely continue. It caught the attention of the White House, Raj Shah and so on. And
one of my favorite quotes from a participating volunteer was that, hey, I haven't felt like
this since the food drives back in college. People want to be engaged. They want to be
engaged. If you provide them with a means to be engaged, you'd be surprised how effective
a crowd can be in terms of partners. Now where do we go from here? AID will be
releasing the entire data set in just a matter of weeks, with associated maps as well. And
it's important to focus here on the impact. This is all nice, you know, inspiring – but
what is the impact? Now we have a far more targeted data set to do even more targeted
lending. For the first time, thanks to this data set, we can actually start to evaluate
the transnational impact of these private loans. We can identify gaps, hopefully catalyze
better coordination between our organizations as well as donors, and ultimately better serve
the entrepreneurs themselves. So I bet you're wondering, well, you know,
how do I get to be part for this new frontiers of development – because these mapsters
are really the ultimate Jedis, right – (laugher) – of online digital volunteers. So all you
really need to do is just send us an email. We'd love to have you on the team, because
in this day and age, it really is going to take a global digital village to push the
frontiers of development. Thank you very much. (Applause.)