As I was doing some reading for tonight, I came across one enterprise that has a unique approach to untangling the chaotic interactions between society, policymakers & other enterprises at the various geopolitical levels. The company, Rhiza Labs, approached the H1N1 pandemic with a controlled crowd sourcing approach similar to what Google might do using crowd-sourcing to generate content for any of its products.

They basically took the static CDC/WHO maps that Caitlin linked along with the news stories that Hiro mentioned and combed that with real-time, user-sourced swine flu data to produce a comprehensive data set. They partnered with a bioresearch firm, Recombinomics, which allowed them to ‘validate’ the data to ensure the uniqueness and accuracy of each report. This ‘controlled’ crowd sourcing approach I think is what made this project so successful because the data was reliable & useful in decision-making.

Amazingly, just 5 weeks after they launched the FluTracker site, they had 4 million unique site visits from 200 countries and 5k flu reports of 30k reported flu cases. What was most striking is that the Rhiza Labs data was estimated to be 4-7 days ahead of the CDC & WHO data which as most of us noticed was slow & inaccessible to most people.

Another aspect that made the FluTracker so useful to its various users was the ability it gave users to customize maps and create user-defined visualizations that had meaning to them in the context of their local communities. For example, unlike the CDC maps, using the FluTracker site, a user could zoom in and create a custom-map based on data from the state of Mass or Suffolk County for example. When combined with mobile apps on phones, it was even possible to gather data on the 20 closest Flu cases and their proximity. Users have data more accurate than any crowd can generate and more complete than any expert can gather.

I think the take-away from all of this is that this same human-centered design principles extend beyond just H1N1 to any ‘pandemic’ or shifts in technology plates. Any organization, regardless of platform, can implement this controlled crowd sourcing approach to generate high-quality data for any emerging challenge. This technology could easily be adapted to provide early warning about potential threats, unearthing the small 3 inch shifts in tectonic plates before they inevitably slip.

In the context of the earthships from last week, I can definitely see this being used as an organized repository not only to graphically show the prevalence of earthships in urban areas but also to track where legislative changes conducive to the building process have already been made as well. This collective data presented in something like the Rhiza maps could hold great influence when approaching decision-makers to change key legislation or convincing businesses to diversify into this new area.



FluTracker:
flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

Deploying a Pandemic Tracker in <48hrs
www.rhizalabs.com/about/clients/flutracker-insight/

PopCity Article:
www.popcitymedia.com/innovationnews/h1n10506.aspx