Hybridized Public-Private Data

Free or low-cost online tools are empowering citizens to do more than donate money or blood: Now, they can donate, time, expertise or even act as sensors. In the United States, we saw a leading edge of this phenomenon in the Gulf of Mexico, where Oil Reporter, an open source oil spill reporting app, provided a prototype for data collection via smartphone. In Japan, an analogous effort called Safecast grew and matured in the wake of the nuclear disaster that resulted from a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011.

Open source software and citizens acting as sensors have steadily been integrated into journalism over the past few years, most dramatically in the videos and pictures uploaded after the 2009 Iran election and during 2011’s Arab Spring.