There’s a lot of hype about the use of both commercial satellite imagery and crowdsourcing for verification activities. Well, I decided to put those two hands together and build a website with Jeffrey and Catherine (it’s why you haven’t heard from me in forever). Welcome to www.geo4nonpro.org!
The idea is to invite a “curated” crowd of experts who will annotate and comment on satellite imagery. We’ll roll out a new campaign each month and provide fresh batches of satellite imagery, you provide the opinions. So far we have North Korea’s Punggye-ri and some of Myanmar’s DDI facilities up. We’re also going to give you some new stuff. Depending on the site, we may offer layers of images from different dates, bands of non-visible light, or even address breaking news or an emerging crisis. We’re also going to be pressing hard on social media to hear what you want in terms of sites and imagery. We’re not made of money (NONprofit, remember?), but we’ll try to get you what you want. Check us out on Twitter @geo4nonpro and use the hashtag #geo4nonpro to get our attention.
So who is an “expert”? Well, we have quite a few of the usual suspects in terms of policy wonks, but we’re also soliciting rocket scientists, architects, hydrologists, and more. The public and press can watch the action unfold on the public facing website, or even apply to become an expert member themselves. Not sure if you’ll fit in? Apply and we’ll follow up with you.
At the end of the year, we will compile results on who participated, how they were incentivized, and how they fared. We have an internal CNS red team that’s doing its own analysis on each site. We want to see if the crowd does better than the in-house experts. We’ll try to learn from our successes and failures, and lay out best practices and challenges for future imagery crowdsourcing efforts. This is a pilot and we hope to raise more funding to improve the user interface. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or frustrated with the site, reach out to us! We’re really friendly, and hardly ever bite.