Mappers

11Sep

Serving Data @ NetTuesday

Thank you to TechSoup for inviting me to participate the Net Tuesday panel all about Open Data. I’ve collected some discussed reasons for and against Open Data, plus provided a resource list on privacy and security research into data sharing. During the chat, we also dug into the roots of ‘data owners’ and ‘consumers’. I think we need to talk about some barriers in models and organizations, before we can ask folks to be more open.

In Service….

It was mentioned at the event that some non-profits workers have bias: Citizens who ‘consume’ their services don’t have the ability to measure, give context or give feedback with the level of comprehension or respect required. For me this was a culture shock moment, I asked back:

“what is the mission and why are people so removed from whom they are supposed to be serving”.

Enabling citizen voices is a huge theme in my open career. The idea that a ‘citizen’ as a ‘widget’ and not a participant in this journey is archaic. This model or perception that a ‘citizen’ is only a ‘consumer’ of some product of an ‘non-profit’ or ‘non-governmental organization’ is shocking. Who are we serving? It sounds like a case of the brand coming before the mission. This is why I am a passionate about Open Knowledge via OKF, an Ushahidian fangirl and increasingly excited about projects like Feedback Labs. I think that open data is part of that journey of leveling the field and making it a conversation with participants. Simply put: citizens can and should be the participant, community, the partner, the funder, and the data owner/remixer.

There was a great blog about leadership and humility posted to the Harvard Business Review. (I think it applies to our work.) We need to have some humility and honour those we serve.

When we think about the way forward for small budgeted non-profits and how they can take advantage of open data and even share their data, it means other changes in how we work. Every organization has the ability to build their own open data community helpers. This means building a plan to find and on board these types of participants. It is a knowledge gift.

Why Non-profits won’t share

Bill Morris (211ontario.ca) shared thoughts on what are some of the barriers & responses to sharing Open Data.

  • Competition
  • Complicate data structures
  • What’s in it for me? What is the Value to a NFP to share data
  • Turf
  • Time, resources and focus
  • Perceived ownership
  • Licenses
  • risk of privacy and security issues

Our list of why to share

  • Use the best collective brainpower
  • Avoid duplication of effort
  • Cross-check your assumptions, bias
  • Obtain complimentary datasets to provide nuance
  • Identify gaps
  • more info could help with better decision making
  • tell the story

(And, of course, all the beautiful items like – inclusive, transparent and accountable.)

(NOTE: I purposely did not review the Sunlight Foundation list until after the event so cross-check our thoughts. See the Reasons not to release data gdoc.)

Thinking about Privacy and Security with datasets

For the past few months, I’ve been working on Data Cleaning Guidelines for the Ushahidi Community. At Info Activism Camp I was able to get some help testing my assumptions with folks from Datakind and OKFN. Then, I reviewed the following documents to help consider what recommendations we should collectively give citizen mappers:

Standby Task Force: Data Protection Standards 2.0
ICT4Peace – The potential and Challenges of Open Data for Crisis Information Management and Aid Efficiency
Oxfam: Evolution of Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict
UNOCHA – Humanitarianism in a Network Age


ICRC: Professional Standards for Protection Work Carried out by Humanitarian and Human Rights actors in armed conflict and other situations of violence. This list really struck me as a way to consider what types of data we can share.

  • Necessity & capacity
  • Data protection laws
  • Do no harm
  • Bias/non-discrimination (objective information/processing)
  • Quality check/reliability

(This was my third time at a Net Tuesday speaking. They are fantastic growing community. I hope my notes are helpful.)

20Jun

You can’t just throw a map at it….

I’ve been saying this quite a bit online, in workshops and now in interviews. Putting a map project takes a plan and a community. Every day I teach people strategies for map plans. The first question I ask is: why a map?

You can’t just throw a map at it! Shiny, sexy maps and visualizations are great storytelling and activating devices. True. The route to technology for good of maps or data takes basic project management. While we can all hope to be on Upworthy and be the next meme. I truly believe that behind every one of these Internet stories, videos and pictures comes grit. I’ve been writing on the Ushahidi blog and in the wiki all about how to be successful with map projects. Plus, this year, I co-lead a large online map project for the Kenyan Elections. As my colleague, Jake Porway of Datakind, wrote this great article on “You can’t just Hack your Way to Social Change…” Map projects fall into this same category.

There are major ethical issues with just throwing a map at it. I’ll write another day on that huge topic. In the meantime, see my Data Ethics in Research Google Hangout.

Conrad Chau interviewed me for his Cambridge MBA podcast on how maps level the playing field, but need a plan. I advised his listeners to stop only reading TechCrunch, buy a plane ticket to the continents of Africa or Asia and look for the unusual suspects to invest and develop.

24Feb

OSM needs you: join the OSM Hack Weekend

At Toronto’s International Open Data Hackathon event this past weekend, it struck me how many folks would love to know how to use and how to build tools to support the OpenStreetMap community. Conversation after conversation folks mentioned that they wanted to learn more, do more.

Well, this is your chance Toronto.

The Toronto OSM community is a dedicated group hosting their second Developer Hack Weekend from March 8 – 10, 2013. An OpenStreetMap “Hack Weekend” is a local event for technical work to improve OpenStreetMap. They are holding intro sessions, socials and a developer focused hackathon.


Full details about OSM and this event can be found on the OSM wiki. If you haven’t created an account yet, anyone can join OSM. There are many ways to start contributing. Just join and start connecting.

OSM
(Photo from Toronto’s OSM 8th Birthday party. Cookies courtesy of Meg the awesome.)

Three ways you can get involved:

1. Join one or all of the events.
There is a great mix of learning, social and developer action events. OSM is supported by developer projects that make the mapping possible. I’ve added the links and some details below.

2. Help spread the word
“Support OSM globally and in Toronto. Join the OSM Hacker Weekend: March 9 – 10, 2013: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Toronto_Hack_Weekend_March_2013#Who.27s_coming.3F”

3. Help Sponsor
Like every hackathon, OSM could use a hand with food and drink. If you or your organization can lend a hand. The contact and event organizer is Richard Weait. Ping him:RWeait at Gmail dot com.

OSM Intro Session and OSM Social

There are monthly Toronto OSM casual mappy hours to meet and connect with other OSM users and fans. I’ve been attending for awhile and always learn something new. Getting an introduction to OSM is really the best place to start, so take a break on Friday afternoon and check out the session. If you can’t miss work for the sake of mapping, you can catch the Friday night Mappy Hour. It is my understanding that guest mappers and hackers are coming into town. This is a chance to learn about OSM plus get a deeper understanding of the Hack weekend opportunities.


Register for OSM Intro Session (Friday, March 8, 2013 14:00 pm EDT)
Register the OSM Evening Meet and Greet Mappy Hour (Friday, March 8, 2013 18:30pm EDT)

Your Weekend is better if you Hack for OSM

These are the core of the event and are cast from the same OSM Hack Weekend alloy that has lead to important advances in the OpenStreetMap infrastructure and tools. If you have wanted to know how to become a developer – contributor to OpenStreetMap, this is your best opportunity to learn from and share with the experts.

OSM Saturday and Sunday Code Sprints:

Join Saturday’s code sprint
Join Sunday’s code spring

There are many mapping projects that you can get involved in within the greater OSM community. It has been such a pleasure to get to know them via the Humanitarian OSM community. I’d encourage you to find your special niche and map away!

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:

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:

17Dec

Canada’s best Geo Start-up: Jump2Spot

I wanted to create an “atlas of inspiration.” Chung Wong, founder of Jump2Spot.

Jump2Spot is a hot Canadian geo start-up, founded by Chung Wong, with the mission to map stories from books, music, arts and beyond.

35, 853 iconic moments mapped

Jump2spot

Some of the astounding Jump2Spot highlights:

  • It is the world’s largest GPS atlas mapping stories
  • It currently has more than 2 million words
  • 35,800+ iconic stories are stitched together at 20,500 places
  • It’s larger than the 1st digital encyclopedia
  • It’s the 1st GPS app to geo-tag books including the Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Daniel Lanois’ Soul Mining & JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. You’ll see when you cross a book scene with GPS.

Imagine being a super fan of a novelist, performer or artist. You are walking around a city using Jump2Spot to discover the finer details of the city beyond what a guidebook or specialty tour can provide. See how Jump2Spot Profiles can make a difference in this meander:

Profiles

  • 16,670 notable profiles have been tagged where they made history
  • Timelines of icons have been geo-tagged – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Sylvia Plath, Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Apple and more.
  • Notable portfolios have been geo-tagged: Frank Lloyd Wright & Frank Gehry buildings, Berenice Abbott photos, Monet paintings, every notable Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro movie scene, New York album covers, the world’s most expensive photos and more
  • Top YouTube videos have been geo-tagged in New York and notable music venues
  • New Scenes – we have a lot of contemporary street artists, digital artists and musicians profiled…showcasing leading-edge creative work.

Download

Jump2Spot is available via web and ios at the moment. Future releases are planned for android.

Download from itunes

Jump2spot is Hiring

Are you looking for a new and exciting contract?

GEO-DESIGNER: For people on the go, make front-end less text-heavy & more visual so it is easier to see. I find when i show the app, i need to show the pictures (they can’t see the text).

GEO-SEARCH DEVELOPER: For people going to the same places, we need to add search stories by address or name so they have new content.

RANKING GEO-STORIES (DATA VISUALIZATION ARTIST): We need to make the most interesting stories accessible….ranked content, filtered by topic, new to the user. We have more than 2 million words and 35,000+ entries and it’s hard to find people who’ve worked with this much data.

If you are an investor, please contact Chung to discuss options.

(Disclosure: I am an adviser on this project.)

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.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

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.

Women Under Siege

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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. )

26Nov

We’re RHoKing Toronto and Vancouver

Random Hacks of Kindness season is here again! RHOK’s mission is to make the world a better place through a global community of innovation developing practical open technology. We are a global hackathon community holding events on December 1 – 2, 2012 in over 30 cities. (Personally, I’m very excited to see Sydney, Australia join us again. I had the honour of leading their first event in June 2010).

Canada has two cities participating: Toronto’s 6th event and Vancouver’s first. (Montreal previously held an event in December 2011 and June 2012.) TechVibes did a great post about the impact of RHOK and plans for December 2012.

RHOK is a truly special event connecting cities, subject matter experts and hackers. It started in November 2009 and has grown to a global community and movement. We all aim to use our tech and knowledge for good.

rhoktoprep

RHOK Toronto: Design Jam

On Saturday, November 24th, a few of us met to hammer out the problem set. The key is to have a subject matter owner in the house to help guide the hacks.

Stephen Sauder will be leading the charge on a Sanitation Hackathon - Toilet hack. Don’t laugh. Water issues are one of the top development needs worldwide. If we all hacked our toilets more, who knows how we might be able to help others. The plan is to collaborate with the Southhampton UK team on a Sanitation Dashboard.

Another hack will be the Invstg8.net: Micro-tasking Tool for Journalists. Saleem Khan has been leading the charge for this effort. What if Internet access did not preclude your access to information to be a journalist? This hack was brained on at the June 2012 RHOKTO and was also featured at the African News Innovation Challenge.

We are still working out the final 3 – 4 problem sets. Watch rhokto.ca for more details.

Support our Hackers

We have raised some kind funds and are being hosted by our friends at Mozilla. But, we need some last mile help to feed our hackers. There are over 49 folks registered.

How to help:
Buy the hackers lunch - approximately $500.00 (even in part)
Contribute some prizes – we’d love gift cards for tech or music
Snacks – homemade and healthy things are most welcome

To contribute, please drop us a line at rhokto at gmail dot com. Or, contact me: Hleson at ushahidi dot com.

RHOK Vancouver

Renee Black and the Peace Geeks team have been working for months to plan the first ever RHOK Vancouver. She is Rhoking the community with her excellent local sponsors and problem sets. Go Vancouver!!!

Come Hack with us, you don’t have to be a tech


Registration for RHOK Toronto

Registration for RHOK Vancouver

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Here’s to a great event.

Sadly, I am going to miss half of RHOK due to a prior work engagement. This will be the first time since June 2010 that I’ve missed a part of a RHOK Global event. Go RHOKstars!

Heather

14Nov

Anti-Corruption Fighting -15IACC

Anti-Corruption and Transparency activism is merging with hacks and maps. In the past year at Ushahidi, I’ve met a number of mappers who are using the open source tools to activate and organize around these topics.

As part of the 15th Annual International Anti-Corruption Conference in Brasilia, Brazil, I met these mappers and held an Online Tools Game Changers Session about their work. The Transparency Hackers movement in Brasil, lead by Daniela De Silva, held a simultaneous hackathon. Let no topic go unturned.


Here are some snippets on this work:

An Interview with the IACC team


An interview with BBC Brasil

“Por trás dessas ferramentas online que servem de “atalho” para se denunciar corrupção está uma multidão de jovens internautas.

“A juventude está mudando as táticas do ativismo anticorrupção. Eles trazem consigo um incrível entusiasmo por tecnologia móveis e novas mídias, como vídeos”, diz Heather Leson, uma das diretoras da Ushahidi, à BBC Brasil.

“Esses jovens ativistas agora atuam e compartilham, ininterruptamente, em suas redes sociais. E assim eles não precisam mais usar arquivos em PDF de 50 páginas para lutar contra a corrupção. Estão livres disso. ”

Some of the Corruption Mappers:

Heather

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.

Rhok ICCM

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.

RHOK ICCM

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.

RHOK ICCM

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.

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