Technology

6Jan

Powering up a global community

Global communities and collaboration are often duck-taped together. There is no one set way to do real-time collaboration for community development. Add to the often cited request of some open source communities to only use open source tools.

As a community leader, I have a few priorities:

Share
Connect: build community, often with a human touch (Video, picture)
Reach: activate the curious, invite new participants
Document
Remix

Add to this: we want to morph time and space which means content/events that can be translated and recorded across timezones and potentially in multiple formats. Tall order.

What’s in the toolkit?

Rings (Lamu 2013)

Over the last few years, I’ve been a toolkit consumer, user and creator. At Ushahidi, we wrote and remixed the Ushahidi toolkits. These were shared almost every day via PDF/slideshare. A few months of that and I decided to make wiki pages of each of the key pages of the original toolkits. This was followed by creating new advanced toolkit pages: Data Cleaning Guidelines or the whole Ushahidi Kenya Elections Toolkits. We made the toolkits active and remixable for the community. Anyone with an account can edit the community wiki.

There are many toolkits examples in the ICT4D ether. Recently, I had the pleasure to review an upcoming Nesta Toolkit. They will be announcing the updated toolkits in the spring. See a previous version of this: Nesta’s Open Workshop.

More and more, we are looking for templates and best practices. Often tookits are just kludges for ideas. I think we need to look at them in a lean kanban sort of way. What can we keep? What do we remix? What assumptions or biases do toolkits make?

Will it ring?

After a number of notes on the OKF Mailing lists about which tools people should use for tasks, I promised to think about tools and workflow. The tool suggestion lists provided are fairly generic for many different types of jobs. There was talk about not using Google Forms for community surveys but to use: LimeSurvey or Libresoft. References were given to this stunning list of Open Source Alternatives. Another comment mentioned the Tactical Tech guide for alternatives.

Global Community Toolkit – a draft

I think we need to be very realistic about which tools a community manager needs to use in the global space. Some of the open source tools are excellent, some of them are missing key components such as reach. How can we get the next 1000 or 1 million people engaged in open source projects. If your community doesn’t use it, will they if you do? This is a juggle. We, those who work in technology, assume that our favourite tools have a low barrier to entry. If our goal is to use the best open source technology to connect the global community, then I think there are a few core tools missing. It is a tradeoff. Use the best tools to reach your current community while building a new community network or test new tools. Sometimes testing with community is a great idea. But this assumes that people want to learn yet another new tool just to learn or do stuff. My list:

Tool /Task Type	Example
Blogs	WordPress, Drupal, Joomla*, tumblr, medium
Video	Vimeo, Youtube, Miro*
Social Media	Twitter, Facebook, G+
Collaborative storytelling	cover it live, storify, scribble live
IRC
Video Editing/Translation	Webmaker, Amara
Hangouts	G+ Hangout
Audio	Mumble*, skype
Document sharing	Google Documents, Dropbox, Slideshare, Scribd
Collaborative Writing	Hackpad, Etherpad*
Wiki	Mediawiki, Atlassian

KEY: * = OS software

This makes my Community Manager toolkit a little over half OS software. I did not include browser (always Firefox), project management (Basecamp) or mail (which is gmail), but you get the picture. What will ring with the community but incorporate global community engagement and open source tools?

Google Hangouts is one of the best community tools to connect global folks to ideas and each other. Last year I hosted a BRCK G+ hangout which now has over 2000 views. This is small potatoes for some communities. Ubuntu and Mozilla are both great open source communities with great G+ Hangout engagement.

I find Hackpad much easier to use because you can connect a series of collaborative documents. I’ve used versions of etherpad since 2010 and am a fan (especially considering the OS piece.) But with Google Apps for Business and the ability to easily collaborate on massive documentation, I remain at a loss on how to use other options.

Now, I realize that some folks don’t approve of using Google products. I understand and have read many of the articles on NSA. I juggle this with “tools that are easy to use with the global community” and the fact that Google is open of the biggest contributors and supporters of Open Source. Google Summer of Code has infused many a small tech for good project.

Wish list

Top on my open source tools for Community Management wish list are: Video Hangouts and Document sharing. If you can make these tools usable and open source, I will happily try it out.

(Footnote: Last month on the Open Knowledge Foundation Community Hangout we started a list of tools for community building. Feel free to remix and add: OKFN Community Building Tool Directory)

3Jan

Canada: Open Data for Development Challenge

The day is finally here! After years of building open community connections with governments, each one of us can look to this a turning point. The Canadian government, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, is officially hosting an event inviting the open communities to join them in a 2-day hackathon, er, Open Data for Development Challenge. There have been many hands and minds to make this possible. The government has been very keen on listening and observing Open style events globally. This is likely the first of many Challenges for Open Data in Canada. They are taking idea submissions until January 8, 2014.

Crisismapping background with DFATD (DFAIT)

Since the Haiti earthquake, I’ve participated in a number of informal discussions with the government. They were keen to learn more about how open communities map during emergencies. In September and December of 2011, we had two meetings to learn more about each other’s work to build a common language. In February 2012, DFATD (formerly DFAIT) hosted an Open Policy day. Along with Melissa Elliot of the Standby Task Force, we pitched a Crisismapping simulation using OpenStreetMap and open data sets. This lead to the first ever Canadian government sanctioned CrisisMapping simulation in March 2013 with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (Pierre Beland), Ushahidi (myself), and the Standby Task Force (Melissa Elliot and virtual SBTF teams). The sessions invited various levels of governments from different departments to observe our work.

This is a small window into bringing open communities closer to government data and cooperation for humanitarian purposes. I am more than certain that others have great stories about the road to opening up Canada.

***
The Open Data for Development Challenge idea that I am working on stems from the School of Data Expedition into Nigerian Extractive mining. I’m keen to learn more about Canadian company transparency for their work. This is the document I’m using to track datasets.

Hope to see you at the Open Data for Development Challenge!

Open Data for Development Challenge – January 27,28, 2014 (Montreal, QC)

You can register for the event (by January 10, 2014) http://www.open-dev-ouvert.ca/ (updated link)
(challenge submissions are due on January 8, 2014 via the same website)

Questions about the event should be directed to: opendata.donneesouvertes AT international.gc.ca

From the Announcement:

Do you want to share your creative ideas and cutting-edge expertise, and make a difference in the world?
Do you want to help Canadians and the world understand how development aid is spent and what its impact is?
Do you want to be challenged and have fun at the same time?
If so, take the Open Data for Development Challenge!

This unique 36-hour ”codathon” organized by Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada will bring together Canadian and international technical experts and policy makers to generate new tools and ideas in the fields of open data and aid transparency and contribute to innovative solutions to the world’s pressing development challenges.

The event will feature keynote speakers Aleem Walji, Director of the World Bank’s Innovation Labs, and Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. It will have two related dimensions:

Technical challenges that involve building applications to make existing open aid and development-related data more useful. Proposed topics include building a data viewer compatible with multilingual data, creating a publishing tool suitable for use by mid-sized Canadian non-profit organizations, developing and testing applications for open contracting, and taking a deep dive into the procurement data of the World Bank Group.
There is room for challenges proposed by the community. Proposals should be submitted through the event website no later than January 8th. Challenges will be published prior to the event, along with key datasets and other related information, to enable participants to prepare for the event.
Policy discussions on how open data and open government can enable development results. This would include the use of big data in development programming, the innovative ways in which data can be mapped and visualized for development, and the impact of open data on developing countries.

The international aid transparency community will be encouraged to take promising tools and ideas from the event forward for further research and development.

We invite you to register, at no cost, at: https://www.accreditationcanada.gc.ca/ODDC/accreditation.aspx as soon as possible and no later than January 10. A message confirming your registration and providing additional information about the venue and accommodation will be sent to confirmed participants. Please wait for this confirmation before making any travel arrangements. Participants are asked to make their own accommodation arrangements. A limited number of guest rooms will be available to event participants at a preferential rate.

To find out more about the Open Data for Development Challenge, please go to DFATD’s website.

(Note: content snipped from the civicaccess discuss mailing list)

7Nov

Putting on our Training Hats!

You’re invited to a skillshare pre-conference day with fellow Crisismappers. The International Conference of CrisisMappers (ICCM) will be held November 18 – 22, 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya. (About the full ICCM Conference.)

If you just want to attend the pre-conference training, you are very welcome! It is open to EVERYONE for a small fee ($50.00) paid to the ICCM conference. The trainers and speakers are local and national leaders. We hope you will join us at the ihub on Tuesday, November 19, 2013.

(Photo by Ushahidi)

See more ihub and Ushahidi pics

About the Training

ICCM Training Day will have 4 tracks: Mobile/Security, Maps, Data and Knowledge. Each track will have sub-sessions and directed training. Participants can elect to join in one whole track or pick the individual sessions within the tracks. The purpose of this to give more hands-on training and allow folks to learn/share in smaller groups.

This is our ICCM Pre-conference day Draft Schedule. (Note it will be updated in the coming days)
We will add more details about the sessions and the bios of the speakers/trainers here.

How can I join?

To Join you can sign up for the Crisismappers Network, then click “ICCM 2013″. There you will find details about the registration login.

If you have any outstanding questions, send a note to Heatherleson @ gmail DOT com with the subject line – ICCM Pre-Conference Help wanted. Then, complete the registration. If you have questions about the full conference – please contact melissa at crisismappers dot net.

Outreach help wanted

We have more space open for the pre-conference training, Can you reblog my post or tweet this to your local communities? The sessions will offer a breadth of knowledge and expertise from security to research to map and data. We know folks will want to dig in and learn.

TWEET ME:
Join @crisismappers Pre-conference training- Nairobi – Nov. 19th. All welcome. Please register. Details: http://bit.ly/17fSDeE

********

Thanks a million to my fellow trainers, to ihub/ ihub research for hosting us and for Ushahidi (love you guys) for keeping us in food and drink!

22Oct

Global Community: the road to learning

For the past 3 years, I have focused on building global community via maps, hacks and data. The journey has introduced me to a number of communities plus I’ve been fortunate to lead efforts in a few great spaces.

For the past month, I’ve been head down at Open Knowledge Foundation working on the Open Data Partnership for Development project as well as learning all about Open Knowledge Foundations’ communities and networks. We have the amazing opportunity to activate everything from open data to open government to open science to open glam (galleries, libraries, archives and museums.) Having library training background, I’ve always thought that the Internet opens up large borderless communities, much like the old Mechanics Institutes*. It gives us a chance to connect with fellow leaders and support the unusual suspects who want to use new technologies to disrupt and activate change.

(Stools by Ai WeiWei)

Some might consider it a tall order to involve citizens and technology to activate change. I see it as an art. What if we looked at it differently? Many of us are focusing on building stuff and showing the potential of opening data, creating apps and convening at hackathons/sprints. Others are focused on analyzing our methods. Great! We need to have real-time analysis/research in all our projects. Giving evidence and showing impact is mandatory as we move forward. ABC: Always be communicating/changing. Some folks make a career out of highlighting the faults in the old systems and faults in attempts to use new technology to see the world and the information overload in a new way. Also, great. The truth is: None of us are getting it right, yet. But, we are trying.

Meeting, Making and Showing

In the next month, I am going on a whirlwind of meeting, making and showing. Each of these spaces involve communities of folks trying to use policy, information, maps, hacks, data and more to open up our world. It is a huge privilege to participate and learn. I’ll try to post some ‘Dispatches’ as I have done at previous events:

1. Mozilla Festival – London, UK October 25-27, 2013.
MozFest is a home for me. I’ve attended each of the fests including its predecessor (Drumbeat). Imagine rooms full of brilliance in everything from Open Hardware to Open News to Open Internet. My brain and heart will burst with happiness in seeing old friends and digging into learning while making stuff. There are few events that are this interactive. The Open Knowledge Team will be hosting a few sessions (Building collaboration across the open space and a Data Expedition)

2. Open Government Partnership Summit – London, UK October 29 – November 1, 2013
The OGP summit connects governments and civil society communities to discuss policy and demonstrate the latest actions by country, topic and movement. The Open Data Partnership for Development is focused on helping connect governments and civil society folks. My goal will be to meet others on this journey and see how I can help support their efforts. As well, the Open Knowledge Foundation team will be supporting the Civil Society Day.

3. International Conference of Crisis Mappers – Nairobi, Kenya November 18 – 22, 2013
The Crisis Mappers community is one of the most amazing ones that I’ve encountered. Each of us from business to open source to government and academic want to learn the best ways to use data, mobiles, informatics and maps to aid crisis response. We will meet for a week of training, ignite talks and collaboration/simulation. The opportunity to do this in Kenya is amazing. My heart remains in East Africa. Ushahidi was born there and has inspired so many of us to consider how citizens can and should be involved in the conversation. I’ll be running a full day training session with 4 tracks: Maps, data, mobile and knowledge. There are many community leaders helping out, including my colleague Michael Bauer of the School of Data.

I am really look forward to involving more people in each of these communities.

Here’s to amazing building and making. I am more than certain that the next weeks will shape the coming year and far beyond!

*On Mechanic’s Institutes: I had a membership at the Atwater Mechanic’s Institute in Montreal, Canada. I loved that I could use a library and get training. It is the way forward: we need to train a digital network of new leaders to use the power of technical skills to tell stories and use data/software to activate new ideas/change in their communities.

5Sep

Thank you, This Community Rocks

[Cross-posted from the Ushahidi blog. Ed. note: I am honoured by all the comments, tweets and notes I've received. Thank you.]

Community is a gift in every way. At Ushahidi, we are truly lucky to have each of you contributing, using our software and supporting each other. Thank you.

For over the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of building stuff, answering your questions, helping you flourish, giving you thanks, and, most of all, shouting from rooftops about each of you and your projects. It with sadness that I share my news. I’m making some personal changes and will moving on to the Open Knowledge Foundation. While it will be tough to leave the Ushahidi team, we all agree that it is great that I am moving to an organization that shares so many of the same ethos, mission, and friends. Truly, as I believe in the community, team and projects, I’ll continue be involved as a community member. (More about my future plans and journey on my personal blog.)

(Uchaguzi Event with Jessica and Patrick (January 2013), Photo by Nekesa Were)

To Fellow Community members:

You inspire me. Your map projects, ideas and strength to amplify citizen voices. We’ve talked from the inception of your map project ideas all the way to a full implementation with feedback loops. You are the unusual suspects: the people who are trying to use and analyze new technology to make a difference in your community and world. Don’t stop, ever. This drive to make a difference is what makes you special. A free and open Internet means we can collaborate globally and tell our stories. Leveling the data and map playing field has been a joy. I know you can help us all keep up that mission. You are building this one map at a time.

Angela Odour, Community Developer Liaison, and the team are here for you to keep answering your questions and guiding your Ushahidi experiences. We will provide more details on who to contact for what in the coming days. (This will be on the wiki (naturally).

To the Ninjas and Pirates:

You juggle code and business like no other I’ve ever seen. We started calling the tech team Ninjas for a reason. Seriously, folks, please keep on creating, building, and making. To team Pirates: you keep the air and juices flowing. It is breathless to see the ideas and drive. Each of you have touched my life in ways that I cannot even begin to measure. I will miss working so closely with you. But, I can’t wait to see what you do next. From the sidelines, I hope that I can continue to help, and cheer. #fanclub

On Community Management

The base layer of Ushahidi’s community framework and strategy has been built. Now it is time for the next Community leaders to join Ushahidi, remix it and make it better. Community Management is a career and a journey not for the light of heart. You will be a translator for technology and human. Navigating, creating, mapping, documenting, sharing, mentoring, conversing, writing and distilling are your forte. If you think you are up for the task, let Erik know. (Erik at ushahidi dot com). Honest, I am a bit jealous of your adventures.

Thank you all and see you on the interwebs!

3Aug

Cameras as Evidence

(Cross-posted from the Ushahidi blog)

Deep in the mountains of Italy, Centro d’Ompio, we sat in a circle brainstorming Cameras as Evidence. What would it take to collect a good and actionable citizen report using photos or video? Lead by Chris Michael of Witness, we discussed and brainstormed. The Witness team and some of the participants have amazing experience in building human rights cases. Inspired by the beautiful setting for Info Activism Camp, we collectively pulled out all the stops to consider how we can help activists and citizen reporters create valuable and usable content for their mandates. While our session aim was not tool specific (e.g.Ushahidi), it remains very applicable for Ushahidians: our software, our community.

(Photo by Heather Leson, Venice Biennale. Art by Magdalena Campos-Pons)

3.0, Rich media content: Categories and custom forms

Some Ushahidi deployers use the power of rich media content, including video to give voice and document their projects. As we journey down the 3.0 road, we are thinking about how to improve.

The path to building 3.0 is very much considering how should categories be used and how can we make custom forms as flexible as possible. See our current discussion about the future of categories on the developers mailing list. This is a critical juncture, so you input will help us serve you better.

People are using both categories and custom forms to drive their data colletions missions. We’ve seen items that could be either a category or a custom form item. To be honest, I think that sometimes people use categories as work-around because custom forms have sometimes been buggy or are hard to use.

I will say that I am grappling with the different Ushahidi users – those who want to collect and analysis data and those who simply want to file a report. As you can imagine, this is a balance. Our community has discussed too many categories, very unclean/unclear data in the past.

If you are collecting videos and/or photos as part of an evidence-based project, here are some of the recommended data points to consider:

Title (useful)
Description
Location/GeoCode
Time and Date
Time point Highlights
Reference or corroborating information
License (use, consent, eg. creative commons)
Chain of Custody
visual geolocation (land marks)
clock, timeline, length
context – before and after
violations
weapons – materials
identification of people in footage, groups involved
other contextual videos
verbal information – context, language
security concerns
other filmakers
translator – references
timeline
details, serial #, clothes, id, tattoos, wounds
length of video
filmaker name and contact details
device details
surrounding scenes
locations of all involved
original video
bitrot – is it playable
posting information – all, originals, copies
missing clips, edited?
transcribed?
file format
resolution
frame rate
livestreaming?
who has it been sent to, who has the files, where to share and not to share
purpose of video? – eg. change situation, document, share, influence, action
Unique id
categorization by file
sound quality, notes about sound (eg. guns, shouting, tone)

Alright, that list makes me contemplate: how are we going to incorporate this without scaring off reporters? How can we make video useful as part of the map mandate?

What do you think? What is missing? Do you think we should have a suggested custom form for video reports?

Some resources

Ushahidi Toolkits
Witness Toolkits

Thanks to Tactical Tech Collective for bringing us together to collaborate.

11Jul

Grant GWOB

Geeks without Bounds needs your help. They want to hire a grant writer to take their team to the next level. Can you share a few dollars? I’ve co-hosted and participated in a few of their events. They are the real deal.

/GWOB Love

5Jun

Personal Democracy Forum is 10!

Personal Democracy Forum is one of my favourite events of the year. Geeks and political savvy convene in NYC for this 2-day brain feast. Last year, I had the honour of being a Google PDF Fellow.

Why PDF?

PDF sessions, keynotes and, most importantly, the chance ‘lobby conference’ include a high caliber of local, national and global thinkers who are keen to discuss the intersections of politics and technology.

Meeting or reconnecting with bright minds who work in the global tech for good space, is one of the best parts of PDF. Ichi, one of the founders of sinsai.info (a crisismap in response to the triple disaster which affected Japan in 2010) is in town from Japan:

Hiroyasu Ichikawa with his Social Good Guide

Hiroyasu “Ichi” Ichikawa with his Social Good Guide

Talking with strangers is very much encouraged. You never know where it will lead. Last year over lunch, Meighan Stone and I had a long talk about changing the landscape of who can attend events. She went on to build GlobalXGood, which Ushahidi sponsored. Meighan truly felt passionate about this gap and made a huge difference by addressing it.

To summarize – have an idea, network with like minds, build it. I wonder if anyone has ever done a trackback on the power of connections related to PDF chance experiences. This is part of why I am so excited to attend and brain collide.

If you can’t be in NYC, you can watch the hashtag #PDF13 or the livestream. Check out the PDF agenda and don’t miss out.

See you soon! (Look for the bright red hair, if we haven’t met before.)

11May

Go Open Data

Data, So what from Heather Leson

Futures Panel @ Go Open Data

Notes

Slide 1:
What is our Open Data Vision for Ontario? Canada? the World?  How will we get there?  Last year at OSCON – Tim O’Reilly told the participants that “we won”. After 14 years, open source is often a default.
Last year at Mozfest – Mark Surman told participants that Mozilla “won”. The Browser is now competitive. Our next mission is the “Open Web”.

What are our versions of this for Open Data? How do we get there?

Sunglasses by Sunlight Foundation for http://transparencycamp.org/

Slide 2:
Ushahidi is information collection, data visualization and interactive mapping software. We are used for election monitoring, city building, Civil society work such as anti-corruption and harassment reporting. Plus, we are used for environmental actions.

Uchaguzi was our partnership and community driven project for the Kenyan elections. (March 2013)
We tried to incorporate both citizen and official data.
uchaguzi.co.ke

http://sitroom.uchaguzi.co.ke/

Slide 3:
The Uchaguzi project started with base layer information of all the counties, all the polling stations and an offline communications strategy. We had radio announcements, grocery store screens had TV ads with our short codes. Next, our team and partners trained people from partner organizations collected information via SMS (primary channel), email, web forms, mobile apps, and, of course, social media. We received 1000s of messages, we had strategies to verify and escalate issues to official organizations. But the partnership with the government was not possible. A citizen program of communication and voice is this much closer to being tied to official action. Someday.

Some of other ways that data science mattered – we had a QA Integrity team to doublecheck for private information and tribe information. We were prepared to have visualization around the Results, but the electoral commission (IEBC) had technical failures. In the end, they did manual counts.

Slide 4:
Around the world organizations like Oxfam, ICT4Peace, World Bank, ICRC and the Woodrow Wilson Center are working to build research in the area around new technology and humanitarian work. When we are building projects and using data to tell stories and help people, we need to mindful of these and incorporate these in our strategy. If we can protect the people most at risk, we build trust with our fellow citizens, institutions and governments.

The ICRC, hosted by the International Crisismappers community, provided this framework for data standards.

Some of the Key Standards for Data management they outlined included – 1. necessity & capacity 2. data protection laws, 3. do no harm 4. Bias/non-discrimination (objective information/processing) 4. Quality check/reliability

http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/data-protection-standards-2-0/

http://acmc.gov.au/2013/04/in-search-of-common-ground-protection-of-civilians-in-armed-conflict/

http://ict4peace.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/The-potential-and-challenges-of-open-data-for-crisis-information-management-and-aid-efficiency.pdf

http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/publication/p0999.htm

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Privacy_MissingPersons_FINAL.pdf

http://www.unocha.org/top-stories/all-stories/humanitarianism-network-age

Slide 5:
Rhok.org
datakind.org

http://spaceappschallenge.org/

http://spaceapps.tumblr.com/

http://codeforamerica.org/

http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/datasciencefellowship/

http://opengovhub.org/

http://www.ihub.co.ke/

Slide 6:
How will we connect our mission for data to what real citizens need? How can we involve them in our plans? Even more so, how can we be guided by them and be excited for this common journey?

3May

Live Chat with the Guardian

The Guardian’s Anna Scott invited me to join the April 11th session on Making ICTs work for social justice and development. It was a vibrant discussion. Here are some of the best bits.

Some of my input:

A tool is only as good as the wider project: Successful projects need a mandate, a plan, a target audience and set metrics before any tool is applied. When people come to me asking about using Ushahidi to map their data, I ask them to prove to me why they need a map, and ask what their offline and online programme is outside of the technology.

The Guardian hosts live chats once a week on a wide range of topics. It was exciting to discuss topics ranging from security to project management. See future topics for the Global Development Professionals Network.

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