How this startup used crowdsourcing to help Japan during the Fukushima nuclear crisis

The Safecast team. Photo credit: The Safecast blog.

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This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Disrupting Japan where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with Japanese entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in Japan gained popularity largely from projects related to the massive 2011 earthquake, the ensuing tsunami, and the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant meltdown. In fact, the founders of some of Japan’s largest crowdfunding and crowdsourcing companies explain that they had to overcome this image of “crowdfunding as a social good” before their startups became truly successful.

I spoke with Pieter Franken of Safecast, one of the earliest examples of widespread crowdsourcing in Japan, on how they grew from a patchwork solution to a bigger organization. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese people were worried about radiation and, despite assurances from authorities that things were under control, remained highly skeptical.

Pieter Franken, co-founder of Safecast.

Franken and his team started Safecast to make sure this lack of information transparency would never happen again. They began building low-cost Geiger counters that people could use to measure their local area for radiation and then upload the data into the cloud for anyone to check.

Here’s my interview with him.

nWhat is Safecast?n

Exactly six years ago in March 2011, we all witnessed the big earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. This was really when Safecast started. The biggest problem was that there was no data on radiation exposure available. So we said, “We must know what is happening in the environment. How can we make this as open and transparent as possible?”

We actually thought that the information would be available but just hard to digest. However, that didn’t really fan out, as we realized that the information wasn’t available. So, we said, “OK. Maybe we can crowdsource the data.” The initial idea was to buy Geiger counters, give them to people, have them collect the data, and then we could publish the results. But shortly after the accident, all Geiger counters sold out worldwide because everybody in Japan needed one.

We then thought that maybe we could do what Google does—a street map view of radiation taken by driving around. So, we did a trial run. We hired a truck driver, gave him a Geiger counter and an iPhone, and we said, “Whenever you stop, just take a measurement and upload it.” So this was kind of the first version.

This is still what we’re doing; we just automated the process.

nWere you hiring affiliates or was it already a crowdsourcing community?n

What makes this true crowdsourcing is that we didn’t direct people to go do anything. People would raise their hands and we would provide them equipment to go measure. We had maybe a maximum of 10 people in Tokyo that were working in the company, but we had way more people in the field.

The people who decided to participate were very varied. We had individuals like ourselves, but we also had companies that were already measuring other things on the streets, and they found our initiative interesting. We also had universities, local cities in Fukushima, and a non-government organization.

nnHow do you maintain data integrity?nn

That’s a fundamental issue. Even if the Geiger counter kits are built in a factory, it is also built by people that soldered them together, so there’s no difference. What does matter is how do you know that the devices are accurate over time? Sensors can go bad and people may have made a mistake building the kit.

So, with the power of the internet, we don’t just measure locations one time. The idea is that multiple people who actually don’t know each other will measure the same area over time, and this allows us to see anomalies.

nAre there other groups that are sharing, using, or contributing to this data?n

Yes. Everything we do is open and is published under a Creative Commons Zero license. You can go to our website and download all the data we have collected over the last six years, which I think is more than 65 million measurements by now.

The most common group that uses our data is local governments/groups that use it to look for hotspots or to confirm for themselves that things are as expected. The second most common are researchers. There are a lot of them doing research on the effects of radiation. We also had a Hong Kong artist that used our data to create a virtual tour of Fukushima. We didn’t know he was doing it because he just found the data and used it. We just found out about him later because he was on the internet.

nYou’ve received criticism from some people. What’s the basis for this?n

I think the polarization that is happening in our society is increasing. This has made people so detached from using data. If you talk about something and it does not fit what someone else thinks, then you must be on the other side.

Some people had very strong opinions about the radiation levels in Fukushima. There were people who thought that everybody would die in Japan overnight and there were people that thought there was absolutely no problem. We had people on the extremes who did not look at the data. They thought they already knew the answer, and both extremes were wrong based on our data.

A lot of people were skeptical in the beginning. If you look at those in the scientific community who have spent their whole lives building super expensive equipment and then you walk in with relatively cheap stuff that actually outperforms this equipment, you’re obviously walking into somebody else’s terrain.

nHas the Japanese government been supportive?n

I would say that in the beginning, they were neither obstructive nor supportive. We kind of worked in our own space. I think now that we have much more interactions, there’s a general interest to understand how we operate and how this works.

nHow will citizen science develop in Japan over the next 10 years?n

I don’t know. We’ve been doing so-called citizen science for six years, but I’ve seen other groups doing things in very different ways. What I’m sure about, though, is that we’re going to see more citizen science-like projects that will increasingly be more successful and more impactful. The reason for this is very simple: the technology that drives it is getting cheaper and the access people have to these technologies is getting better.

nIf you could change one thing about Japan now, what would you change?n

I think it’s a combination of the education system and the attitude toward risk. If Japan can change that, they will have a much better way to innovate. People are way too worried about the downsides of failure, but failure by definition is not good or bad.

Read more from this series here.