The Premise of Local Information: Building Reliable Economic Indicators from a Decentralized Network of Contributors

This paper describes the design and implementation of Premise, a mobile-phone based platform for gathering reliable, quantitative data through on-the-ground networks of local contributors. Founded in 2012 and currently operating in 34 countries, Premise provides small incentives to ordinary citizens to collect high-quality data, and develops statistical algorithms to aggregate millions of individual contributions into reliable economic indicators. Our focus is on the deployment and scale-up of Premise's operations in Nigeria and Liberia, two contexts that highlight the diverse challenges involved in launching a crowd-based data collection platform, ranging from the recruitment and retention of motivated contributors, to the automatic detection of statistically aberrant data. The goals of this paper are thus twofold: first, to provide transparency into the operations of a new platform of growing prominence in the development community; and second, to highlight key lessons learned that can inform future design and deployment of novel methods for data collection and synthesis in developing economies.