Tony Frazier, senior vice president for government solutions at DigitalGlobe, has outlined his views on the impact of crowdsourcing on innovation and learning in the geospatial intelligence sector.
Frazier wrote in a blog entry posted Thursday that the company’s Tomnod community and USGIF GEOINT Hackathon competition are indicative of crowdsourcing’s disruptive role in the market.
He noted that Tomnod has facilitated volunteer support for emergency response while the hackathon has opened the GEOINT field to students and other new audiences.
According to Frazier, DigitalGlobe’s new GeoHIVEÂ crowdsourcing community works to enable the public to participate in the analysis of satellite imagery in response to current events.
“We want to harness the power of automation and crowdsourcing to convert our raw imagery into actionable observations that help the U.S. government and its allies to protect our national security interests,” he said.
He added that community members will receive payment for successful projects and virtual coaching from DigitalGlobe’s GEOINT professionals.