Tomnod

» see tomnod.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The premise was that a satellite can photograph more of the planet than anyone can look at. DigitalGlobe's constellation produced imagery faster than any analyst team could read it, and automated detection in the early 2010s was not good enough to be trusted with the question of whether a particular gray smudge was a boat. So Tomnod cut the imagery into small tiles inside a browser and let anybody in the world tag what they saw. The name is reported everywhere as Mongolian for big eye, which suits a site whose logo was two eyeballs.

It came out of UC San Diego around 2010, from four people: Shay Har-Noy, Luke Barrington, Nate Ricklin and Albert Yu Min Lin. The method had been proven first on Lin's search for the tomb of Genghis Khan, which ran on a National Geographic site before Tomnod had a name, and which drew more than 10,000 contributors who placed 2.3 million tags across 6,000 square kilometers of Mongolia. They did not find the tomb. The interesting result was that the crowd worked at all. DigitalGlobe bought the company on 8 April 2013 for $4 million, mostly cash.

Then a Boeing 777 disappeared.

~ the chronicle ~

~ march 2014 ~

Malaysia Airlines flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on 8 March 2014 with 239 people aboard and stopped communicating less than an hour later. Within days DigitalGlobe had retasked satellites over the search area and Tomnod opened the imagery to the public. On 11 and 12 March the site went down under the traffic, at a reported hundred thousand visits per minute, and the team spent those days rebuilding capacity rather than searching.

The final numbers are extraordinary for a website almost nobody had heard of two weeks earlier. More than 8 million people took part. Maps were viewed over 98 million times. Around 650,000 objects of interest were tagged across a search area that started at 24,000 square kilometers and grew by another 14,000 as the aircraft's possible path was revised toward the Strait of Malacca and the southern Indian Ocean.

None of it found the plane. Twelve years on the wreck has still not been located, and the debris that has been recovered washed up on African and island coastlines far from anything anyone tagged. What the campaign demonstrated was a social fact rather than a technical one: millions of people, given a concrete task and a real emergency, will sit and read satellite tiles for free.

~ what it did the rest of the time ~

The plane was the exception. Most of Tomnod's work was disaster response, which is duller and more useful. When Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in November 2013, DigitalGlobe's FirstLook was collecting imagery before landfall and had more than 19,000 square kilometers of it within four days, with Tomnod volunteers marking damaged structures for the responders who had to decide where to go. The same pattern ran after the Nepal earthquake in April 2015.

I did not tag a single tile on this site, including during the weeks in 2014 when the news was wall to wall and joining would have cost nothing. That is not a regional distance for once. It was open to anyone with a browser, in any country, and I read about it instead of opening it, which is what most of the world did with most of these campaigns. The eight million were the exception, and they were eight million because an airplane full of people was missing.

~ after the volunteers ~

Maxar, which DigitalGlobe became after merging with MDA in October 2017, had been building a replacement since about 2015. GeoHIVE does the same job under a corporate name, and it is still running at geohive.maxar.com today, still crowdsourcing, including the Antarctic seal counts sometimes wrongly credited to Tomnod. Nobody at Maxar ever published a reason for ending the older platform.

The exact day is not documented anywhere reliable. Wikipedia gives 1 August 2019 with a citation that does not support it, and the trade press implies 2018. The archive settles the year at least: tomnod.com was serving its normal site on 1 May 2019, and by 3 January 2020 the address returned a short page reading "Tomnod Has Retired" over one line, "Volunteers, thank you for six years of support", above a copyright notice that still said 2018. Today the domain does not resolve at all. No squat, no lander, nothing at the other end of a name that eight million people typed in one week.

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