Heat maps to aid community groups

[james_turton]

I built these crowdsourced live heat maps for the recent looting sprees (you can view example data in Gauteng under "suspicious or criminal activity").

https://zahotmap.live

I thought afterwards that they could continue to be valuable to South African communities. The app is free and open source, I created it for the benefit of the public. It relies entirely on reports from the public for data, there is no (planned) central data administrator who updates the database or verifies reports.

Source code repo.

GitHub - jnturton/hotmap: A crowdsourced heat map

A crowdsourced heat map. Contribute to jnturton/hotmap development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[WAslayer]

So the data used to update the map is sourced purely from Joe Public with no verification of the report to ensure it is in fact accurate..?

I like the idea, but in this day and age of fake news, verification of reports for accuracy is an unfortunate necessity..

 

[james_turton]

So the data used to update the map is sourced purely from Joe Public with no verification of the report to ensure it is in fact accurate..?

I like the idea, but in this day and age of fake news, verification of reports for accuracy is an unfortunate necessity..

Ja, purely from Joe Public and there will be noise. Some mitigations against noise are

1. Unlike for clickbait, fake political news, phishing, etc., there is generally no reward for deliberately sending a bogus report here.
2. Report sending is rate limited per sender (I chose max 5 reports every 24 hours to start).
3. Reports of the same observation in the same place can be listed by clicking there. This lets you set your own skepticism threshold e.g. "in my experience when there are N or more reports in the same place then it checks out".

All that can of course only go some way, and such heat maps can only ever be approximate rather than authoritative. The trade off is that they can remain near real-time without any running cost because there is no back office doing verification.