The Rise of the Citizen
There was a nip in the air that sunny morning with a stream of people hovering around the tourist booths of Pier 39 in San Francisco. If you cross the stalls to the clearing facing the sea you could see ferries leave for Alcatraz. Amidst the hustle of the season, I noticed a young bloke strolling around with his Sony digital camera clicking pictures and occasionally shooting what seemed to be short videos of the scene around him. I also noticed that he seemed to be speaking into what appeared to be a bluetooth device (smart phones were really not that commonplace back in 2008). He seemed to be recording his voice into the microphone. This seemed new to me. Was he a reporter? Law Enforcement? He certainly didn’t seem to dress that way!!
Well, he was a Citizen Journalist, our first Citizen. CNN had seen the writing on the wall ahead of time and had launched its site — iReport with much fanfare way back in 2006. The site was meant to encourage ordinary citizens to submit their own footage and stitch together their own narratives about events that were occurring around them. The site did see some success initially but was eventually outgunned by the blitzkrieg of Social Media.
The tide came in during the Arab Spring of 2012, when twitterati literally exploded with young Arabs having finally found their voice and a platform that heard their cries, unlike the state controlled media. While it may not have upended mainstream journalism, as quite a few thought and hoped it would, it was indeed a refreshing addition to the news feed.
All you needed to be a citizen journalist was a camcorder, an attached mic and an internet connection, and you could then project to the rest of the world. In other words, you needed only 3 things — the technology, the platform and the intent. Technology was purchasable (or in these days rent-able), the platform was social media (free) while the intent was building up all along, waiting for the first 2 to become affordable.
While the first citizen emerged from the need to find a voice, the next citizen arose from the need to have unfettered access to information. The big data revolution that has been flooding our digital devices since the mid 2000's resulted in a tidal wave of data that had become too monstrous in size for analysts to work with. This was the much needed break that Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) needed, to be taken seriously in the industry after years of being cooped up in universities or labs.
Machine Learning or the science of allowing machines to learn without being explicitly programmed made a grand entry but with very high entry barriers. Its practitioners needed to be knowledgeable in a wide spectrum of Math related disciplines which included Statistics, Probability, Linear Algebra, Multivariate Calculus and by the time you had gone though all the above, you would probably have forgotten why you began this journey in the first place!! Throw in a few easy-to-learn programming languages like Python or R and the cauldron starts to boil, albeit months after you first lit the flame.
The product that emerged from the cauldron was called a Data Scientist. He/She could pour through large data-sets, shuffle it, model it, generate snazzy graph’s out of it and make impressive predictions that till then would have taken a lot of time and effort in doing. Oh !! Did I also forget to mention that the role was also one of the highest paid in I.T.?
The rush to evolve into this new role had begun. However the younger workforce found it much easier to transition career than experienced I.T. professionals did. Even seasoned I.T. professionals still spend sleepless nights trying to brush up Mathematics (they thought they had happily buried at sea decades ago) just to remain relevant and not miss this wave.
The demand for Data Scientists had begun to spike, but firms were not wiling to wait for prospective students/employees to spend a year or 2 doing their masters on this subject at John Hopkins, Harvard or Berkeley before they could be monetized.
Enter the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC’s) and before you know it, courses on Data Science were available a dime a dozen on platforms such as Udemy, edX, Coursera, etc .. Around about the same time, hackathons began to gain critical mass with sites such as kaggle pulling in the masses who wanted to experiment with data and compete while learning. The result of this amalgamation was a crowded space that looked something like Old McDonald and his farm.
The role that emerged out of this digital farm was the Citizen Data Scientist. The citizen data scientist, just like his precursor needed 3 things. The Technology, which was now freely accessible and downloadable from the internet, the platform — which was now being provided by Hackathons and cloud automation platforms and the intent — which accompanied these 2 in large numbers.
Needless to say, neither the citizen journalist nor the citizen data scientist are experts in their respective fields. In fact, quite a few professionals regard these citizens as amateurs trying out their shiny new toys. What they do excel at are the ability to use the tools and platform given to them effectively to either echo their voice or present their findings in a unique way.
The dawn of 2020 might see the 3rd citizen, a rather reluctant citizen emerging on the stage brought about by the onslaught of the Coronavirus. The death toll has just crossed over a million cases and at the rate it’s spreading, predictions are that this could be just the beginning. Medical staff are stretched thin globally with hospital supplies being ramped-up continuously so much so that the focus now is on containing the rate of the spread, oftentimes referred to by the phrase flattening the curve.
With thousands needing to be tested in the developing world and even more falling ill, Paramedics is clearly the need of the hour. With medical staff working 24*7 shifts in some countries, qualified personnel are clearly lacking. A Paramedic, in short provides emergency medical care to people outside a hospital setting. Well, we now live in a world where a growing majority lie unattended, waiting for any kind of help.
A Citizen Paramedic could be one who has undergone training as a paramedic and First Responder. He/She could be given a kit and instructed on how to conduct testing for the covid-19 virus. This could certainly take a tremendous load off the Medical Fraternity. As the Citizen Paramedic becomes smarter, he/she may even be empowered (based on certain restrictions) to administer selected drugs (on a need basis) to patients, especially if they are located remotely in far-flung places where doctors without borders are unable to tread.
However, unlike the other 2 Citizen’s, the Citizen Paramedic would most likely be restricted in his/her ability to administer treatments. The medical profession after all is one with extremely high entry barriers and definitely not one where you can sit through couple of weeknights watching curated learning videos on youtube or your favorite learning channel to come up to speed.
Nevertheless, certain online learning platforms have already risen to the occasion. The online MOOC — EdX has already put up a full page on its new programs meant for tackling the covid pandemic both for medical professionals as well as academics. Quite a few of these programs are for free. Expect more of such programs to be rolled out by the other online platforms in the days ahead.
What remains to be seen is whether there would be any takers for these courses and more importantly whether graduates from these courses would be trusted by private hospitals or the government to be deployed on the field. Healthcare is a rather delicate field for all the write reasons. Nonetheless, these are still early stages and one should not hesitate to use all the tools available at our disposal to fight a menace this diabolical.
The Citizen Journalist and Citizen Data Scientist bubbled up to the surface due to the opportunities that presented themselves at the time. The Citizen Paramedic may not be an option at all, it is in fact the need of the hour, a necessity. The time for the Citizen is truly here.
