Power of the People: Crowdsourcing Design to Support International Nuclear Safeguards Verification Activities

From games, to start-up businesses, to social and environmental activism, mobilization of the public towards a common goal has flourished in recent years. The technology platforms for participating in societal mobilization campaigns continue to become more accessible and user-friendly via a plethora of online applications and optimization for mobile devices. Among the diverse and continuously growing number of fields represented in crowdsourcing campaigns, nuclear nonproliferation has even found a foothold with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ Geo 4 Nonpro project to crowdsource overhead imagery analysis of site of nuclear proliferation interest. Yet the collection of this data by special interest groups differs significantly from the incorporation of such data as part of an international nuclear nonproliferation verification regime. In this paper, we describe a taxonomy to guide the design of crowdsourcing to support international nuclear safeguards verification activities. While there are many options available for designing a crowdsourced activity, we find ourselves restricted in practice where we try to balance the advantages of the ‘wisdom in the crowd’ that can bring a wide variety and volume of crowdsourced work with great velocity while prompting questions over the validity and reliability of the crowdsourced product as well as the responsibility to the crowdworkers in what their role could be in international treaty verification.