The day after - lessons learned from my crowdmap experience

Late on Monday night, I wrote a short post on my blog in anticipation of the crowdmap I'd just set up for BBC London which I hoped would provide a useful service the following day during the Tube strike.

It's now Wednesday and I can write, while still feeling slightly shell-shocked from the experience, that, all in all, I'm very pleased with how it went.

I want to use this post to reflect on some of the things that worked, some of the things that didn't work as well, and some things I will do differently if the next scheduled Tube strike goes ahead.

The bottom line was that lots of people saw it: 18,860 unique visitors, and 39,306 page views from 55 countries. Of these, 13,808 were from the UK, 3,863 from the US, and I can't get over the fact that we had two people from Bermuda, one person from Uruguay and nine from Kenya, the home of the Ushahidi platform. The power of social media never ceases to amaze me.

We posted 202 reports yesterday. About 50 were sent directly to the map from the audience, either via the web form or the specific SMS channel we set up. The rest of the reports we took from Twitter - either tweets in the #tubestrike stream or replies to the @BBCTravelalert account.

I can't stress enough that getting the reports up wasn't easy because of the time pressures. Every report, whether it was sent directly or not, had to be physically approved. Nothing went straight up onto the map.

Yesterday, I was ably assisted by Abigail Sawyer who works for the World Service and who wanted to see how the platform worked and how it might work in a global context, and for two hours during the evening rush hour by Emma Jenkinson, a producer from BBC London who was drafted in as emergency help. We also had help from Steve Phillips, the BBC London transport reporter who was Audiobooing, appearing on TV, and updating Twitter like a mad thing.

During the two peak times, we were monitoring the SMS console, three Twitter streams (#tubestrike, "tube AND strike", @BBCTravelalert), Audioboo, emails and the BBC London Facebook page.

For each report we needed to add or check:

1) A clear headline

2) A description - which, if it was from Twitter, we were cutting and pasting

3) The official time stamp (which frustratingly never stayed connected to the actual time, so drop-down menus had to be used each time)

4) The geo-location by putting in the location box and waiting for the map to find it (we soon learned that if you just put in Waterloo it defaulted to Waterloo in Canada, so we had to write Waterloo, UK)

5) The category (Tube, train, bus etc)

6) The verification status (we only ticked the verification box if the report had been supplied by our own reporters. We realised we couldn't even verify information from the Transport for London website as commuters were contacting us and saying the TFL information was not up to date).

Only then could we finally approve it and put it on the map.

Phew. Quite a process.

If you had an event which wasn't so time-sensitive or fast-paced, it wouldn't have been such an issue, but at times we were mopping sweat off our brows, feeling slightly under pressure - especially as we saw so many people tweeting about us from around the world!

That was the process.

In terms of things we learned along the way ...

1) I had originally chosen Google Maps as the default mapping tool, but halfway through the morning rush hour we heard from Harry Wood who encouraged us to use Open Street Map, a free, editable map of the whole world, created by volunteers. It is not-for-profit and apparently started in London. We quickly changed the settings with one click and were immediately amazed at the improved quality of the map. It was much more accurate.

2) Although we needed to use the inbuilt time stamp, we also realised people needed to quickly see on the map itself (rather than having to click through) when information had been sent. So at lunchtime we started each headline with a time stamp that we typed in.

3) At lunchtime, we had collected 90 reports, but realised they were quickly going out of date. We therefore deleted all of the earlier reports and started afresh, although we did manually input all station closures, which we realised was the key bit of information people were looking for. One major problem, however, was that by early afternoon word had spread and I saw people tweeting 'good idea, shame there isn't more information on the map'. So I was torn between trying to make the map look impressive and it actually being useful!

Things I wish we could have done:

1) Publicised it more beforehand. This was a crowdsourcing initiative but we didn't talk to the crowd early enough to encourage people to take part, and to then show how it might be helpful. For obvious reasons, this was very much an experiment and the BBC was slightly nervous about shouting about something that hadn't been tried and tested. As a result, I only published my short blog post on Monday night and we started tweeting about it on Tuesday morning - that was it. So the fact that we got the results we did is pretty amazing (I'd say, modestly!).

2) I wish we could have had more time to thank people and to let people know we'd used their information on the map. I did it a few times when I got a chance and, unsurprisingly, we saw those people posting more reports.

Things I'd encourage Ushahidi to think about:

It feels churlish to make suggestions to the platform when I think it's amazing and I wouldn't have the skills to make 1/100th of the site, but, as someone who used it under pressure in this situation, here are a couple of suggestions:

1) It would have be useful if there'd been a scrolling news bar at the top so we could have put out topline information which we knew everyone could see by just going to the map. Something like 'the Circle Line is suspended' or 'the roads are really starting to build with traffic' was very hard to map. There's no one spot on the circle line (for those who don't know, it's a Tube line which runs (mostly) in a continuous circle!).

2) It would have been great to have added more information to the first speech bubble which appeared when you clicked on a dot - for example, a photo, an Audioboo, more detail etc. I don't think everyone was always clicking through to the next page.

3) A way to visualise the time stamp more clearly from the map would have been great - for instance, the brighter the colour, the more recent the report. It was a shame to have to delete earlier reports.

4) A way to differentiate between good and bad news. Most of the information we were reporting was negative - Tube line suspended, traffic jams etc. Sometimes, we got tips or advice about how to avoid the problems, and it would have been great if we could have shown those in a different way.

Overall, we created a map that at many points during the day was more accurate than the Transport for London website, and which was a live and updated version of what was happening out on the streets of London. And, most importantly, it was built by the people of London.

If more people had known about it and understood how to upload reports, it would have been even richer and even more useful and accurate.

While I don't wish another strike on anyone, I secretly hope there's another one so we can take crowdmap for another test drive.