This paper summarizes a system called “Taarifa” which is a
location-based application built to allow citizens in communities to
report public health, waste and other issues. In this paper the authors
describe the Taarifa project from initial ideas until deployment.

The paper goes on to describe the hackathon and the decision to fork the
ushahdi platform. The effort won the London hackathon resulting in
interest in continuing the effort and deploying in Uganda. It describes
its initial experience in Uganda and highlights especially the issue of
a lack of smartphones and also mobile connectivity problems that exist
because some components of the app can’t function when offline. They
note that new versions will try to resolve this problem. They close by
describing how there is expanding interest in the app and the need now
to more formally organize to continue to support the application.

Overall, the paper is an interesting case study of the deployment of the
app, but it is very descriptive and appears to have thought mostly about
the technology rather than organizational issues around its deployment.
There are interesting questions about potential uptake that are more
social science questions than technical ones that are not really
addressed here.

Larger comments

In the literature review section there is the point on “…but nothing to
the experiences of using [crowdsourced] data.” I don’t think this
statement is correct. There is a significant list of literature at
Cornell University’s Citizenscience.org (see
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/references) that might have
some useful citations for you. I know too that there have been papers on
ushahidi for example although I don’t know of them off-hand. I encourage
you to dig a little deeper in your literature search.

This is a paper that describes the evolution of an app to help in
developing countries and describes some of the technical aspects of the
app and its evolution. But technology can only go so far – there are a
lot of assumptions here about implementation that require human and
organizational infrastructure. There is little said about what kinds of
data were reported in the Ugandan case and then how that data was used.
Also, the data submitted must be reviewed somewhere – a backend database
where the crowdsourced data is stored, but the paper doesn’t really
describe this at all. I imagine some data reported may not have been
very useful. So what happens to that data? Who reviews the incoming data
and what process determines what is done with it (workflow)? And given
it sounds like the app is very generic in what people can submit, how is
that handled? Reporting trash needing to be picked up in a road might go
to a different public sector manager from a report of a public health
issue.  And are the localities in Uganda capable of evening handling the
response to these?

It would be useful to reflect on these questions some in the paper.

Good luck as you continue on this project and congrats on your progress.

Smaller Comments

In the literature section there is a number of ?? and strange citations.
I can’t tell whether those are citations removed to conceal the authors
or it they are incomplete references the authors forgot to fix. Also on
page 4 – “Addref???”

Where are Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 you reference?