We love this TED lecture by Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky on crowdsourcing information for a better world.
He talks about the Ushahidi crisis mapping platform, started in Kenya in January 2008 to report incidents of post-election violence, and now used in Mexico to identify electoral fraud, in Washington to manage snow clearance and in Haiti following the disastrous earthquake.
The global contribution to platforms like Ushahidi, as well as writing and refining knowledge bases like Wikipedia and making what Shirky refers to as ‘LOLcats’ amounts to 1 trillion spare waking hours per year.
Shirky calls this the cognitive surplus.
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