More info about CrowdMapper

[g8d3]

Hi Andrew,

What exactly does this application do? Does it allow users to put markers on a map to report issues?
I read you a re not supporting it for public, is that up to date?

This may be a dumb question, I am trying to understand, why CrowdMapper uses Amazon Mechanical Turk? Is this for testing purposes? in a real crisis that would not be needed, right?

Regards.

[mizzao]

Hi @juanpastas,

The app was inspired by crowdsourced team-based crisis mapping as done by organizations like the Standby Task Force. We built it to study how to improve the process of real-time collaboration - it both allows for real collaboration but also instruments how people work together. At some point it will hopefully be applied in real deployments as well.

For more information, you might like to check out this talk which I gave at a Meteor Devshop.

We mainly used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit people to use the app for research purposes. In a real crisis, you might want to do this anyway, if the number of volunteers is not sufficient.

Hope that helps,
Andrew