CrisisMappers

4Feb

Harassmap in Canada

How often can you say that you are proud and excited that your government funds something? The International Development Research Corporation (IDRC) funds many important technical, research and social entrepreneur groups that I respect and admire. This includes Citizen Lab based at University of Toronto and Harassmap, a social entrepreneur and civil society group based in Egypt.

Today I had the great opportunity to meet the visionary Rebecca Chiao of the Harassmap Team. After two years of admiration and professional correspondence, it was an exciting exchange about program management and mapping strategy for online and offline campaigns. The Harassmap Team are leaders mentoring others in over 19 countries including Bosnia, India, Syria and more. Their Ushahidi deployment is one of the most successful deployments of the software. As such, I frequently recommend that new mappers review blog posts, videos and annual reports from the Harassmap team.

Rebecca is touring Canada to share the Harassmap story.

You can hear her stories in person:
Toronto: February 5, 2013
The Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk Centre for International Studies
1 Devonshire Place, University of Toronto.
Register at http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/events or watch the live webcast .

Ottawa: February 6, 2013: 10:00 a.m. to noon
Lecture: “HarassMap: Social Mapping Sexual Harassment and Violence in Egypt”

When: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, from 10:00 a.m. to noon
Where: IDRC, W. David Hopper Room, 150 Kent Street, 8th floor, Ottawa, ON

Montreal: February 8, 2013: 12:30 – 14:00

McGill University, NCDH 202, 3644 Peel Street, Montreal
“Women’s Rights – Egypt Combating Sexual Harassment”

She has been featured on CBC The Current and CBCSpark. On Wednesday, she will be on CBC Power and Politics.

I’m looking forward to attending tomorrow’s talk at UofT. Hope you can join some of the events.

24Jan

Planning for the Kenyan Elections

Nairobi, Kenya

Since I arrived in Kenya at the beginning of January, I’ve been deep in Uchaguzi (Kenya Elections 2013) Planning. There has been deep dives in crisismapping strategy, local political ecosystem and, of course, many community events. It is a pleasure to host events bringing like minds together for a common purpose.

I’m blogging on the Ushahidi blog about the project.

Uchaguzi Community Meetups

(Picture by Jonathan Kalan)

I organized a community map word exercise during the meetup. Kenyans described the regions of their country based on perceptions. It was great to get people interacting and thinking about location:

(Picture by Jonathan Kalan)

(Picture by Nekesa Were)

(Patrick Muniy created this infographic from the session)

Also, I did take a break to visit the elephants:

Swahili Lessons

4Jan

Coining Global and Hurricane Sandy

In December, I had the honour to present at the United Nations Spider meetings in Vienna. Here are those presentations with details notes:

Coining Global is a state of community for where Crisismapping and Digital Humanitarianism should grow:

Coining global from Heather Leson

Hurricane Sandy saw the rise of many Crisismapping projects, including the great Hot or Not test of satellite imagery. There was also a large number of Crowdmaps launched:

Hurricane sandy & the crowdsourcing community from Heather Leson

15Dec

HOT membership and Board proposal

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is in election mode. I hope to become a member pending approval and am proposing to join the board. More on that in a bit.

What is HOT and Why is it so important to the Digital Humanitarian Ecosystem

HOT grew with the need to recognize emergency and crisis mapping. Over the past almost 3 years, I’ve watched the team grow, I’ve worked on projects that benefited from HOT contributions and I’ve been continuously amazing by their talent and strengths.

More about HOT

Become HOT

The process: You need to be nominated to be a HOT team member. (This window is closed now)
Current Membership

You can still join the mailing list and contribute.

Their HOT Tasking tool is one of the best micro-tasking tools I’ve seen in digital volunteering. You can get started here.

HOT Board

In the coming week, HOT members will be voting for a new Board.

I am proposing to join the HOT Board pending acceptance as a HOT member.

Here are some of the things I can offer

1. Fundraising, Outreach and Storytelling skills.
2. Advocacy: While I may not be an active OSM contributor, but I am a big advocate of HOT and OSM in most of the work and volunteering I do.
3. Mapping organizations like Ushahidi need OSM to have the free imagery just as much as OSM wants it. I would essentially be an end-user in your corner.

In my job at Ushahidi, we changed our base map to OSM this year. When I talk with deployers, especially those working in crisis or conflict areas, they advise that they can’t use OSM as a base layer because the map is empty. One most recent example was planning for the .ke Elections in 2013. I want to join the HOT team and be an active more formal supporter to fill this gap. There has got to be ways to get imagery and to match the HOT team to these citizen science mappers. The map should not be a deterrent but a benefit in their journey to share stories of what they see and what they hear.

Thank you

29Nov

What kind of Internet do you want?

The Internet is our community garden, our public space and our workshop. Every day I work with people around the world who create maps and technology for good. A free and open Internet invites this collaboration beyond borders, religion, politics and societal barriers.

Crisismappers, particularly, conflict mappers do some of the bravest and scariest acts of Open Internet Activism. They take my breath away giving voice to the dispossessed, documenting atrocity and informing the world. Two such mapper groups are Syria Tracker and Women Under Siege Syria. Reports of a full communications shutdown in Syria takes away their voice. They should have the right to voice. We should protect their right to voice. What will the impact of this outage be on their important work?

Lauren Wolfe, Director of Women Under Siege, was interviewed a few months ago by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Current (audio) about this project and their verification process.

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The Syrian Internet shutdown was reported as I was writing this post about why the ITU and WCIT need to open their doors and not make decisions on behalf of the globe. More about this from the Mozilla andGoogle’s Take Action sites.

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What kind of Internet do you want?

Webmakers

At Mozilla Festival, we remixed video with Mozilla Popcorn. You can Make your own ITU activism video. There is something magical about being able to remix our web and amplify our voices. Webmaking is the kind of Internet that #freeandopen encourages and supports. It is the type of community space that allows for more voices to be heard and to interact. Creating the web is supporting it to exist.

Security and the Internet

Today the CBC posted an article: “Should the UN Govern the Internet“. They interviewed Citizen Lab’s Ron Deibert about his thoughts:
“the recurring push at the ITU to wield more control over the web is part of a bigger trend “towards greater state control of cyberspace and an older internationally governed system of telecommunications.””

I’ve been much inspired by the work of Citizen Lab over the past year. They fight the good fight with data and analysis about security. And, they’ve provided Ushahidi and myself some valuable help as I work to guide people through various security questions with technology. We need to be very mindful about What kind of Internet we are accepting and what kind of Internet exists. Ron’s TEDxToronto talk should be mandatory for any activist and Internet user.

Voices of Access, Infrastructure

Internet access is a growing human right. Attending Annenberg-Oxford’s Media Policy Summer Institute gave me an opportunity to meet citizens from around the world who study, work or are activists for media policy. Learning first hand about walled gardens and the advocacy of this type of “Internet” provided much framing for what kind of Internet other people might want. It was a rich discussion which could use a deeper study. Why do people support a closed internet? Who are they?

Working and volunteering in a space of Internet and mobile activism for technology and maps for social good, I’ve collected a number of maps that range from sentiment and demand for access, infrastructure reports, power outages and even how SMS campaigns are being used for ICT4D. Each is a unique project, but they collectively show how we could potentially map voices/stories and use this data to analyze with layers of hard data. We need to find new ways to use our technical might to show where access is and provide the qualitative feedback for “why”.

Launching an global map for stories about access and benefits of a free and open Internet would be a mighty task needing more than a few strong people. Perhaps not this time without a little help from friends. With Random Hacks of Kindness this weekend, it might even be feasible to consider? The question is: How can a map unite our common cause for the Internet we want or, even, open a dialogue about the different versions of an Internet?

Example Maps about Access, Voice and Infrastructure

Bring SuperFast Broadband to Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire (UK)
Reporting Mobile Coverage in Sweden
3G Fail in Brazil
SMS in action (Global)
Wimax Monitoring in Italy
Infrastructure issues after Hurricane Sandy (USA)
Powercuts (India)

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(At Ushahidi, I write frequently about our community of deployers who give voice around the world during times of crisis, for elections, and for civil society topics varied from corruption to environmental movements to human rights to violence against women. )

10Oct

Random Hacks at ICCM

[Cross-posted from Geeks Without Bounds. Co-written with Willow Brugh. Photos by Heather Leson]

The Random Hacks of Kindness at International Conference of Crisis Mappers took place this past weekend (October 13 – 14, 2012) at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Humanitarian hackathons are specialized in that the hacks proposed are brought by subject matter experts who fully understand the needs and impact of a tool built out during the event. While not all events curate their challenges, we did at this one, with the esteemed team comprised of The Doctor, Robbie Mackay, Jen Ziemke, Heather Leson, Kate Chapman and Willow Bl00. They examined each of the 16 proposed challenges for usefulness, if it could be accomplished over the weekend, technical specs and feasibility, as well as strong use case. Our 40 participants piled into our tiny room to work on the 7 of selected challenges. 5 presented on Sunday afternoon.

Juhee from MIT Media Lab presenting Open IR

Many thanks to our sponsors AT&T Developer Program and John Carroll University. Thanks to you, we had essential coffee, delicious food, candy and steady internet tubes. We were also able to award prizes to each of the teams.

James with Amnesty International worked on Challenge #8: Geographic Web Data Curation Tool with Nico from InSTEDD. This collaboration made me happy for two main reasons – one was that they were able to address James’s challenge with an existing tool. The second reason is that James, who came with little coding experience, took the weekend to learn about RIff and apply it to his problem space. There is a distinct issue in the digital humanitarian community of “Wasn’t Built Here” which adds to the already massive cognitive load of the responders.Extending an existing tool means we can keep using what works while making it better.

Clay and Jorge (Challenge #13: Mapping United Nations Security Council Resolutions) implemented MapBox by porting in UN Policies and geocoding them to the areas they were based around, matching a geospatial and temporal interface to search the resolutions issued by the United Nations Security Council. A quick way to see where the UN had been focusing, along with an easy pull on the referenced documents, this creates another way for people to search and catalog.

The Taarifa team linked up to a group in England to create the hardware trigger for a data snapshot from just about any input, along with the API call which would link up to that snapshot. A continuing hack from H4D2 (and other hackathons), we were pleased as punch to see this group working hard to see their platform for civic reporting push forward and build out their contributing community.

A subtle but powerful glue was created by Josh Snider while working on Challenge 15: Extracting info into SMS reports. A user could send in a text which would port directly into a wiki and geocode. If formatted incorrectly, a text is returned to the person asking them to reformat. The potential of messaging format issues could assist in the accuracy of content collected to so support digital humanitarians in processing massive amounts of incoming texts into maps.

HXL Team brainstorming with Andrew Turner, ESRI

Best overall hack went to the Humanitarian Markup Language (HXL) team, a challenge brought to the table by UN OCHA’s CJ Hendrix. It furthered the capabilities of this platform by doing creating an easy way to interact with maps, with special care payed to the visualization and interface – be still my linux-loving-mac-using heart. It eases the process of grabbing maps, uploading maps, and plugging them into what you need.Huge thanks again to our sponsors, and to the ICCM team Jen and Patrick for organizing the event our hackathon went hand-in-hand with. A special sparkle kittens to Heather Leson of Ushahidi for co-organizing and facilitating the event. I’ll match my blue hair to your pink hair anytime.

RHOK and ICCM share common goals of uniting the brightest minds for sprints of collaboration.

Willow at ICCM RHOK

This was the first time that RHOK occurred at ICCM. It was amazing to have guest subject matter experts join the hackathon to share their expertise with the talented developers and challenge owners. This is a huge opportunity to keep the momentum. A number of the challenges will continue on to RHOK Global in December. Willow and Heather will work with the folks to mentor their efforts. As well, based on the success of ICCM RHOK, we recommend that ICCM in Nairobi also have a simultaneous RHOK.

1Oct

RHOK @ the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM)

Maps and Hacks Together!
[Cross-posted from the Crisismappers.net blog]

The first Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) in collaboration with the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) will be held on October 13 – 14, 2012. We will brain on curated hacks that focus on humanitarian and crisismapper needs. These challenges can be maps, data, tools, and hardware that pertain to the emerging technology needs of Crisismappers. Challenges may be tool or organization specific, but the RHOK goal of open source solutions or prototypes remains.

This event provides a unique convergence of mappers, developers, humanitarians, NGOs, and governments in the same space. We truly cannot wait to make stuff and help merge dialogue with action. We’re delighted to have challenges from UN OCHA, MIT and Taarifa. More to come!

Who should attend
RHOK ICCM will be held in Washington, DC. As noted on the registration page, we seek developers (many flavours, front and back-end), data geeks, designers, and some support help (writers, videographers, and more)

Every effort will be made to include virtual participants via Google Hangout, Skype and IRC. Please register and make a note of your virtual participation.

Challenge Submissions

The Challenge Submission is slightly different from most RHOK events. First, we want to be sure that a Challenge Owner is available online or in person for the duration of the event to help guide the teams. As well, the challenge submission process is different from regular RHOK events. Willow and I will work with our teams to curate challenges based on the RHOK ICCM mandate. To submit a challenge, add your content to this page: Submitting Challenges. We will work with you on your proposed challenge to make it developer and hackathon ready. If you want to connect off list, I would be happy to exchange emails or calls (skype – heatherleson, irc.freenode.net #ushahidi)

We are accepting challenges until 19:00 EDT October 1, 2012.

More Details:

The International Conference of Crisis Mappers is the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mapping.

As you all know, Random Hacks of Kindness is an event and community that brings together similar minds for quick sprint-like “hacks” aimed at prototyping solutions for real world problems. The event will be held on October 13 -14, 2012 at George Washington University. The goal of RHOK ICCM is to unite the hacking (technical communities) with the humanitarian communities.

Registration
ICCM RHOK registration is separate from the main ICCM events. It is free and open for any participation. We are very thankful for our sponsor, the AT&T Developer Program, for making this possible.

Willow and Heather

4May

Map it, Change it! [video]

As much as I love talking about deployers, digital volunteers and mapping, I still get a bit nervous seeing videos of my talks. I was honoured to speak at TedxSilkRoad on April 11, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

You can tell I was talking fast when “Non-government Organizations” suddenly got renamed “Non-Government Associations.” The presentation has 2961 views.

(Also see: Map it, Change it (blog post).)

4Mar

Speaking events: Mobile and Mapping

AMREF : Mobile Africa

I’m honoured to talk about the rise of Mobile and Ushahidi at this week’s AMREF coffee house on Wednesday, March 7, 2012:

Mobile Africa: How Technology is Reshaping the Continent

AMREF’s Coffeehouse Speaker Series on global development. Join us at Urbana Coffee on the first Wednesday of every month at 6:00 pm.
Technology advancements are reshaping Africa politically, socially and economically. Join us to explore innovative technology solutions being used to make a lasting difference in people’s lives.

African Medical & Research Foundation (AMREF)

York University Symposium on the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami

The online response to the Japan earthquake was an incredible surge of volunteerism. I’ll present the story of Hal Seki of Sinsai.info and his team’s mapping experiences in response to the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

“The Japan’s Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of March 2011: LESSONS LEARNT”: March 9th, 2011, 9AM -5 PM

Organized by: Disaster and Emergency Management Program

23Feb

Pods: ISN Podcast & Podcamp Toronto

Two pods in one week! Valerie Sticher of ISN: International Relations and Security Network interviewed me for the ISN podcast on “Crowdsourcing for Change“. And, I’ll host a Podcamp Toronto 2012 session on Sunday, February 26, 2012 focused on “Dispatches of Disruption“.

ISN podcast: Crowdsourcing for Change

In this 12 minute chat, we discuss Crisismapping, CrisisMappers Network, Ushahidi, Security and Hackathons (specifically Random Hacks of Kindness).

“In today’s podcast, Ushahidi’s Heather Leson discusses her organization’s use of crisis mapping techniques and outlines how non-state actors are increasingly collaborating online to tackle issues traditionally managed by governments.”

I highly recommend that you follow the full podcast.

Podcamp Toronto 2012: Dispatches of Disruption

Sunday morning early sessions at Podcamp Toronto are sometimes quiet. Here’s to having a good discussion about Digital Activism and the power of the Internet.

Description

Date: Sunday, February 26, 2012 11:00 ET
Location: Ryerson RCC203 (map)
Every day someone uses the power of the Internet to change their world. What does it mean to be a disrupter? an innovator? a volunteer? What lessons can you activate at home? at work?

I’ll share some examples of disruption aimed at corruption, elections, violence, potholes, agriculture, burgers, #futurewewant, and emergency response.

Some additional thoughts:

Digital activism from volunteering to hacking to mapping is changing institutions and governments.
We are just a mouse click away from change. Or, are we?

Hope you can join this chat. If you are only attending on Saturday, look for me at the registration desk.

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