Ranau Earthquake 2015 Crowd-Sourced News

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On June 5th 2015, the district of Ranau was hit by an earthquake registering with a moment magnitude of 6.0. Tremors were felt across the state of Sabah. Eighteen people died on Mount Kinabalu.

In the aftermath of the quake, news that emerged from Ranau was sporadic and sometimes inaccurate. At the time, Kinabalu Coders decided to put together a website to crowd-source incoming news. The website was to be hosted with GitHub Pages, with the underlying database implemented via Google Sheets. The public was invited to share any reputable news that they could find online via Google Forms. The initial site was built in two hours by a team of three volunteers. The link to the site was subsequently shared via social media and word-of-mouth.

Some website specifics:

• designed as a 1-stop feed for verified news events
• relied on crowd-sourced submissions, with mandatory source link
• submissions were anonymous

By 8th June 2015 6:00pm, the site had received 80 submissions. During this time, we only had to remove three items out of this total: two news items were duplicated, and one item linked to disturbing on-the-ground images.

The source code is still available on GitHub. The raw data is also available directly from the spreadsheet.

Based on our experiences, we learned that:

• “no news is good news” is wrong: agencies are just another source of raw data - others will fill the vacuum for better or worse (fake/troll news) if actual data isn't available
• we should trust in the sensibilities of the users: overall, people desired and wanted to share verifiable and reputable news