How Crowdsourcing Helped Iranians Beat the Censor

I read a fascinating article in Newsweek today about a 25-year-old computer programmer who created crowdsourcing software that broke the grip of Iran’s censors after the disputed 2009 election.

The programmer, Austin Heap of San Francisco, developed the software, called Haystack, to open up social networking sites the Iranian government was blocking, such as Twitter and Facebook, to allow people on the ground in Iran to organize inside the country and communicate with the world.

People in Iran can run Haystack on their computers. It directs the requests from the computers in Iran through servers elsewhere in the world, hiding them in a stream of innocent-looking traffic and protecting the identities of Haystack’s users.

Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, a group of digital activists doing cutting-edge work in crowdsourcing and open-source interactive mapping, was quoted in the article about how the software unlocks the advantage a swarm of people have over a repressive government: speed.

“The technology variable doesn’t matter the most. It is the organizational structure that will matter the most. Rigid structures are unable to adapt as quickly to a rapidly changing environment as a decentralized system. Ultimately, it is a battle of organizational theory,” he said.

Meier’s organization began as a volunteer-produced website created in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election. As a tool, Ushahidi—which means “testimony” in Swahili—collects eyewitness reports sent in by e-mail and text message and places them on a Google map to create a temporal and geospatial archive of events.  Since its development for Kenya, the open-source technology has also been to:

• Shape the disaster response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, saving thousands of lives
• Map violence in eastern Congo
• Expose election tampering or voter intimidation in places like Burma and Sudan
• Track pharmacy stockouts in several East African countries
• Record xenophobic violence in South Africa
• Monitor elections in Mexico and India

So far Haystack is only serving Iran, but Heap said in the article that he hopes Haystack will unleash citizen swarms on other repressive regimes.

“We will systematically take on each repressive country that censors its people. We have a list. Don’t piss off hackers who will have their way with you,” he said. “A mischievous kid will show you how the Internet works.”

What do you envision crowdsourcing and citizen swarms being used for in the future? Please share your ideas below.

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