1. Crowd-Sourcing: Favorite Spots In Tigertown
1.1 The Importance of Crowd-Sourcing
Have you heard of phone apps that give you the location of accidents and police locations? Apps such as Waze utilize a free GPS system in which users tag the location of accidents, police, and traffic as they drive. This is one use of crowd-sourcing -- hich means using the public for collectively gathering data.
While this is a convenient example to avoid police tickets, crowd-sourcing can be very beneficial to empower communities for the greater good. This is especially true when a disaster like a hurricane or flooding occurs.
In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the Atlantic Coast, a group of students in Franklin High School in New Jersey developed a crowd-sourced map that identified open gas stations in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The project, called Mappler, helped the millions of Northeast residents struggling to find a gas station that was not out of power and not sold out of gas.
Let's look at the results:
- Are you surprised by the responses? Are there any places unexpected?
- Can you tell what are some common places of interest? How did you arrive to that conclusion?
- Who was the first person to finish the survey?
In the new screen that appears, click the Mapping Your Tiger Town Memories survey.
- The Analyze section will show you some visualization tools available to you to analyze the results of your survey.
- The Data section will display the responses geographically and in a table format that you can export to other programs such as Excel.
Once all of your classmates have filled out the form, you can see the results by logging into the following web page:
Click the Sign In button and enter the Username and Password that has been given to you.
2. Crowd-Sourcing Exercise: Your Favorite Place at Clemson
Now you get to see crowd-sourcing in action by entering your own data. In your computer, open up a browser (Chrome or Mozilla), and go to this web page: https://arcg.is/01KSba.
Fill out the form on your screen and when you are done entering all the information, click the Submit button.
