1. Crowdsourcing Disapproval
Arup University - Smart Cities - Final Essay
May 2015
Afaan Naqvi
1. Executive Summary
This essay explores whether smart city initiatives can create positive change in a society that has
accepted, but is frustrated by, broken social norms such as littering and the inability to queue in line or
obey traffic rules. Using Karachi as a case city to explore this question, this essay provides insights into
the city’s demographics and socio-economic state, as well as the author’s first-hand experience with the
issues in question.
In search of a solution, the essay analyzes the “state- of-smart” in Karachi, and examines how a
relatively small community of practice (CoP) (Wenger, 2002) might be able to mobilize a social
movement that exposes and improves poor social etiquette. It also looks into the low generalized trust
(Bjornskov, 2006) amongst Pakistani’s as a potential cause of the issues. It borrows insights and lessons
from similar smart social platforms and movements from around the world to outline what a smart city
solution to the issues might look like.
The research and evidence provided in this essay suggest that there is not only a high likelihood that the
issues could be made highly visible in a city like Karachi using mobile Information Communication
Technologies (ICT), but that such a movement could be paralleled to expose city violence and petty
crime as well. Beyond just transparency, however, the essay concludes that success in the form of
improved social etiquette will have to rely on anti-trust punishment (Sasse, 2014) through crowdsourced
disapproval, rather than the cultivation of trusting action (Sasse, 2014).
2. Introduction
Essay Background and Motivation
As someone who grew up in Pakistan, I have had the unique opportunity of personally experiencing the
issues explored in this essay as a child, and then through visits, and social and traditional media channels
as an adult. Growing up in Karachi, I was frustrated by, but used to, people cutting ahead of me in line
and having to watch out for cars driving through red lights. Having since lived in cities where such
behavior is unacceptable, I have become fascinated with understanding why broken social norms are so
intrinsic in Karachi culture, and whether or not smart city initiatives could play a role in repairing them.
Case City
With an estimated population of 23.5 million (Mira, Hussain, et al, 2015) Karachi is one of 36 megacities,
and the largest city in Pakistan. The fact that the last official census for Karachi was carried out in 1998
and estimated the population at 9.3 million (UN Data, 2015) is telling on multiple levels. It not only
shows that the city is simply growing at a phenomenal pace, but it also suggests that after 17 years
without an official census, governance and social infrastructure are having a hard time keeping up.

2. I witnessed the mobile phone revolution in Karachi first hand in the early 2000’s. During this period, the
otherwise stark socio-economic divide in the city became extremely narrow when it came to mobile
phone ownership, which became ubiquitous like no other characteristic of society I had witnessed
before. In 1999, I recall having to dial a number for my family’s illiterate cook on our home land-line to
his family that lived on a rural farm and had walked for miles to reach the nearest accessible phone. This
year, the same cook (still illiterate, but now living with his urbanized family in Karachi, all of whom have
mobile phones) taught me a shortcut on reloading mobile credit on my “chori1
” phone while I visited
Karachi for 2 weeks.
This level of hypermobility (Sasse, 2014) is rampant in Karachi. For anyone that is shocked to learn that 4
billion people own mobile phones but only 3.5 billion people own toothbrushes (Mulligan, 2014), or that
there are 6 billion mobile phones in active use globally, but only 1 billion bank accounts (Gawer, 2014), a
visit to Karachi may not only put this in perspective, it may make the ratios seem skewed in the wrong
direction, as they seem to me.
3. Analysis
Generalized Trust
Growing up in Pakistan, I had always been aware of and exposed to broken social norms. My unfounded
hypothesis as to why these norms were so rampant had always been that people didn’t trust that others
would not cut ahead of them in line, or hold onto their trash till it could be properly disposed, so in
order to not be left behind or make an unappreciated extra effort, they cut ahead in line first, or littered
wherever convenient. The concept and mechanics of generalized trust (Bjornskov, 2006), however, not
only provide evidence supporting this hypothesis, but also help explain why these issues exist, and just
how deep seated and intrinsic they are amongst citizens of Karachi.
Knack & Keefer (1997) identified a correlation between generalized trust and gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita. Knack & Keefer (1997) also state that income inequality and ethnic diversity are also
determinants of generalized trust. A fourth determinant of generalized trust discussed by Zak and Knack
(2001) is religion, with a finding that as a religion variable, ‘… Muslims – are negatively and significantly
associated with trust.’ (P.310 Journal, P.16 article).
For a country with a GDP per capita of only US$ 1,275 (The World Bank, 2015) that is 96.4% Muslim
(Central Intelligence Agency, 2015) the correlations to generalized trust made by Knack & Keefer (1997)
and Zak and Knack (2001) support my experiences in Karachi. Stark income inequality amongst
Pakistanis (Adams and Jane, 1995) would similarly suggest a low level of generalized trust as predicted
by Knack & Keefer (1997). Add to that the provincial and modern-day-tribal nature of many Pakistanis
which makes “ethnic diversity” seem like an understatement, and the Knack & Keefer (1997)
correlations would suggest that Karachi is a place where generalized distrust comes all too naturally to
people.
1
A “chori” (or “theft”) phone is a second mobile phone held by residents of Karachi with the intent of giving up to
thieves in lieu of their more expensive (and often smart) primary mobile phone. With thieves catching on to this
trend, a “chori” phone has often come to mean a second and a third mobile phone to give away when held up at
gunpoint.

3. It is also easy to see how mistrust could breed defection from trusting action (Sasse, 2014) in the
environment described above, creating a domino effect of generalized mistrust. This gives another layer
of understanding into the psyche of the average Karachi citizen, and academically clarifies for me what I
have somewhat known and experienced all along; that in Karachi, most people default to defection,
rather than defaulting to decency (Sasse, 2014 as citied by Molotch, 2014)
Current “State of Smart”
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) estimated in its 2014 annual report that there were
139.9 million subscriber identification module (SIM) cards in active use, corresponding to a national
mobile teledensity of 76.6% (Authority, Pakistan Telecommunications, 2014). For a country with a gross
domestic product (GDP) per capita of only US$ 1,2752
(The World Bank, 2015), where extreme poverty
and the stark divide between the hyper-rich and poor is clearly visible at every city street corner, these
figures echo the ubiquitous nature of mobile communication devices. Recent years have also seen an
acceleration in teledensity growth, with the 2013/14 growth of 9.1% up 35% over the 2012/13 6.7%
growth (Authority, Pakistan Telecommunications, 2014).
The same PTA report, however, estimated the national 2014 broadband subscription density at only
2.07% (Authority, Pakistan Telecommunications, 2014), representing the density of fixed and mobile
internet connections in the country. Though this corresponds to a 39% growth in subscriptions over
2013, it only means 3.8 million internet subscribers overall as compared to the 139.9 million voice
subscribers (Authority, Pakistan Telecommunications, 2014). Therefore, even though it is logical to
assume that cities will tend to have higher rates of voice and internet penetration than these national
averages, it is safe to conclude that the “state-of-smart” in Karachi is currently fairly limited.
Karachi Community of Practice
Despite the conclusion above about the current “state of smart” in Karachi, I find it difficult to ignore an
emergent trend among a group of Karachi residents that seems to be an organic smart city initiative that
doesn’t yet recognize itself as one. Though this tooth-brushing and bank-account-wielding community
represents the 2.07% of the national population with access to broadband (Authority, Pakistan
Telecommunications, 2014), they are a highly passionate, active, and resourceful group from my current
and past social network that seem to be deeply frustrated by broken social norms, and perhaps even
more notably, urban violence and petty crime. I see their social media posts about these issues daily,
which typically include pictures, and incident time and location details. This community circulates and
debates such incident summaries amongst each other, identifying instances of poor social etiquette, the
perpetrators, and establishments and parts of the city to avoid.
The idea of a small but committed group of people that hold a similar set of beliefs and values that
drives them to voluntarily act with a common sense of purpose is a well-documented phenomenon.
Etienne Wenger coined the name ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP) (Wenger, 1999) for such groups. Much
like the concerned and active citizens of Karachi introduced above, Wenger describes CoP’s as ‘groups of
people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they
interact regularly’ (P.1) (Wenger, 2011)
2
Compared to the GDP per capita of a developed nation such as the United Kingdom of US$ 41,781 (The World
Bank, 2015)

4. Before reading about CoP’s and their application and success, I considered the detailed social media
posts from my fairly limited and seemingly insignificant social network about issues in Karachi as an
example of the use of apps to ‘solve… problems of a connected elite’ (Townsend, 2013 P.204) that
would never result in anything more than shared frustrations. However, Wenger (2011) has studied and
documented examples of CoP’s achieving much more than the sum of their parts ever could in sectors
spanning from organizations, government, associations, international development agencies, and most
relevant to this essay, the web and the social sector. Armed with this knowledge, it seems more likely
that with some structure and a clear link to alleviation pathways, this small group of concerned Karachi
citizens could accomplish much more in the mission to expose and alleviate broken social norms. There
is also precedent for the application of CoP’s to participatory Web 2.0 movements (Barth, Rambaldi,
2009) which documents tools and building blocks for a strong and cohesive Web2Dev CoP.
4. Exploring a Solution
Ushahidi
The Ushahidi project in Nairobi Kenya is an example of an online campaign that was able to expose and
create awareness about social issues using digitally networked technologies (Goldstein and Rotich 2008).
In January 2008, following what were generally believed to be rigged elections, tribal and politically
motivated violence spread throughout Kenya (Goldstein and Rotich, 2008). Launched by a group of
Kenyans in Nairobi and outside Kenya, the Ushahidi website was a platform that allowed crowdsourcing
of crisis information in an environment where ‘rumors and uncertainty were dominant’ (P.59 journal,
P.1 article, Okolloh, 2009). As Goldstein and Rotich (2008) describe, the Ushahidi project had within
weeks documented hundreds of incidents of violence that would have otherwise gone unreported,
generating national and international awareness about the situation in Kenya.
Goldstein and Rotich (2008) suggest that many Kenyans providing crisis mapping information to
Ushahidi were doing so as it was ‘the only outlet for frustrated citizens’ (P.6) The Karachi CoP generating
and sharing information about poor social etiquette is similarly reporting on social issues out of
frustration, but doing so without the benefit of a structured platform or mapping functionality. It is also
interesting to note that the Ushahidi campaign was successful despite the fact that (like Pakistanis) less
than 5% of Kenyans have regular internet access (Goldstein and Rotich, 2008). Goldstein and Rotich
(2008) note that in such environments, ‘citizen journalists’ (P.8) can play a critical part in the national
conversation on social issues, much like the Karachi CoP described above is already doing for broken
social norms.
The Karachi CoP is also actively reporting about security issues in the city (Naqvi, 2015). Though also a
“social issue,” it could be argued that security more closely resembles crisis mapping than poor social
etiquette, and so the Ushahidi lessons could also extend to crowdsourcing security information in
Karachi.
The Ushahidi Haiti Project and Similar Spin-Offs
The Ushahidi Haiti Project (UHP) is an example of the successful application of an existing proof-of-
concept for a similar social issue (post-earthquake crisis mapping instead of post-election violence), but
for a completely different geography and environment (Haiti instead of Kenya). In 2010, a group of
concerned student volunteers at Tufts University developed and deployed UHP on a volunteer basis
(Morrow, et al, 2011) The website was set up overnight and within hours had enlisted partners including

5. UN OCHA/Columbia and the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net) (Mackey and Corasaniti,
2010) UHP was successful in collecting 40,000 independent crisis reports, of which nearly 4,000 were
plotted on the site as distinct events (Morrow, et al, 2011)
The creation and uptake of the UHP site is a model for rapid online action, and if the gravity of the
situation in Haiti was a motivator, then the existence of a proven similar platform was perhaps an
enabler. There is no lack of motivation in Karachi, where the conversation around poor social etiquette
is already happening to the point that participants are collaborating rather than competing.
Following Haiti, the Ushahidi crisis mapping platform has been successfully built upon, emulated, and
spun-off to create similar crowd sourcing based event and/or crisis mapping in Chile (Liu et al, 2010),
USA (Mora, 2011), UK (Mora, 2011), New Zealand (Mora, 2011), and as close to Pakistan as India (Singh,
2013).
Trusting Action or Anti-Trust Punishment
To explore whether a smart city initiative can successfully alleviate the issues in question by relying on
trusting action (Sasse, 2014) rather than the punishing of anti-trust (Sasse, 2014), it is useful to consider
the simple yet illustrative examples of littering and queue jumping.
In my experience these happen in Karachi because they are viewed as local norms (Bateson, Melissa, et
al, 2013). I have witnessed the same Karachi citizens that litter and queue jump in Pakistan, stand
patiently in line and dispose of trash in collection bins when abroad, where pro-social behavior (Bateson,
Melissa, et al, 2013) is represented by abiding with the local norms of not littering, and not queue
jumping. Though this phenomenon always perplexed me, especially when traveling to Pakistan from
abroad where the queue jumping starts as early as the overseas departure gate (in the presence of
other Pakistanis), it is studied and documented in detail by Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren (1990). They
found that both injunctive norms (what most others approve and disapprove) and descriptive norms
(what most others do) are determinants of littering decisions. Bateson, Melissa, et al (2013) similarly
concluded that local norms are a determinant on the decision to litter or not, but found an even
stronger correlation to the presence of images and signage of “watching eyes,” representing
disapproval.
Given the injunctive (Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren, 1990), descriptive (Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren, 1990),
and local (Bateson, Melissa, et al, 2013) norms in Karachi of littering and queue jumping (and disobeying
traffic rules), coupled with the deep seated and intrinsic nature of generalized distrust among Pakistanis,
perhaps the single strongest tool a smart city initiative should explore to change and/or alleviate such
behavior, is to generate and communicate peer disapproval.
For example, a smart platform that could crowd-source disapproval on a massive scale, and
communicate it directly to the perpetrators in near real time could be much more effective than anti-
littering signage, or queue barriers. This is because it is easy to ignore such top-down strategies within
the paradigm and comfort of the existing local Karachi norms (Bateson, Melissa, et al, 2013). Though this
solution resembles anti-trust punishment (Sasse, 2014) more than it does trusting action (Sasse, 2014) it
might just be able to deliver the required norm-step-change that could enable trusting action (Sasse,
2014) in the future.

6. Karachi Citizen Journalists and Crowdsourcing Challenges
I ran a survey in April 2015 (Naqvi, 2015) asking my Karachi network (by no means a statistically
significant sample; the survey generated 37 responses) about their unassuming smart city activities. I
found that 97% were highly active on social media, 85% used a smart/data-enabled mobile device in
Karachi, and that 72% had posted about broken social norms in Karachi in the past. Most interestingly,
almost two out of five respondents created such posts at least once a month, each time generating
healthy debate for days through user comments.
If the Ushahidi campaign was a proof of concept for ‘crowdsourcing human rights’ (Goldstein and Rotich,
2008), then it is worth taking some of the lessons learned to explore a solution for “crowdsourcing
disapproval.” Some of these key lessons according to the Ushahidi founder Ory Okolloh are around
issues of verification of reports, creating a simple and effective platform, and creating two-way
information flows within a sharing culture (Okolloh, 2009) Other challenges associated with rapidly
crowdsourcing information as identified by Rahwan et al (2013) are around the mobilization of
participants, and the aggregation and verification of information.
As described in this essay, the Karachi CoP is already having a ‘many-to-many’ (Benkler, 2006 as cited by
Goldstein and Rotich, 2008, P.3) person dialogue about the issue of poor social etiquette in a sharing
environment. They are mobilized organically, through personal beliefs and frustrations, and without the
need for incentivization (Rahwan et al, 2013). Though they are not formally aggregating the information
created, they are using established social media platforms like facebook and twitter to generate data in
the first place, and so aggregation could occur retroactively.
The challenge with verification is born from environments where participants stand to benefit from false
reporting (Rahwan et al, 2013) For example, with a disaster relief platform such as UHP, people could
attract more food and rations sooner through false reporting (Rahwan et al, 2013). In the Karachi
environment, however, false reporting would represent generation of bad news for the sake of bad
news; an unlikely outcome for a CoP that is frustrated by the existence of poor social etiquette in the
first place.
The major missing piece out of the Ushahidi lessons and general crowdsourcing challenges in Karachi
might therefore be an online mobile platform tailored specifically for rapid poor social etiquette
disapproval and communication. With a growth in intensity and frequency of cell phone “snatching”
(theft) and street assaults in Pakistan (Salahuddin, 2014), a parallel platform for petty crime and urban
violence incident reporting would likely have similar, if not even greater traction in Karachi.
4. Conclusion
This essay provides social norm, generalized trust, and “state-of-smart” insights into the case city of
Karachi to explore the viability of a social etiquette improvement smart city initiative. It demonstrates
that communication of disapproval might be a much stronger determinant of social behavior than top-
down initiatives such as signage, queue barriers, and traffic signals. It also identifies an existing organic
movement and CoP that could benefit from a structured, mobile social etiquette reporting platform,
which could result in a more mature and influential smart city initiative capable of improving social
behavior.

7. Given the fairly limited state-of-smart in Karachi, a lower tech opt-in reporting mechanism to such a
platform (such as through SMS reporting) would, however, cast a wider crowdsourcing net.
A parallel smart city initiative for reporting urban violence and petty crime could have similar success in
Karachi. Ironically, cell phone “snatching” (theft) is one of the central concerns in this area,
demonstrating all too well the relationship between mobile phone ubiquity and the stark income divide
that is characteristic of Karachi.
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