Ushahidi

19Feb

Open in Protest and Crisismapping

Protest and Crisismapping are intertwined with voice. I think conflict mappers, videographers, data analysts and storytellers are incredibility brave and important to our future. But, local knowledge, local language and local context must guide decisions. There are some tough questions to ask about what should be openly shared or why not have something as open data?

Videos, imagery layers, pictures, reports, maps, stories and datasets are used to both give voice and collect evidence on human rights violations. From the comfort of my home in Canada, I have not lived in times of civil war in Syria. I have not stood in the freezing cold in Kyiv alongside protestors. We can, in solidarity, write about it, share links online, become crisismappers (Digital Humanitarians), petition our governments, but for the most part, we are a world away. No matter how connected we are via the Internet, we can be equally disconnected.

On Protest

At Info Activism Camp, I joined the protest salon. Speakers discussed their activism in various global contexts. You can download and watch the discussion, read the protest mini-magazine and listen to the protest soundtrack.

There is a big difference in marching down to Queens Park (Toronto) vs. trying to feed your friends in Taksim Square in Istanbul or keeping your friends safe in Brasil. The stories of people’s lives, their efforts to protect rights and collect evidence gave me a profound backdrop for how I observe the world. The videos and livestreams from Ukraine tell a story of another country’s people in protest. There have been over 3 million views for the video I am a Ukrainian. The first time I watched it I cried. On the second view, it hit me how powerful video and Internet remains. Then and now: I fear for their safety.

Crisismapping Syria

Talking with Brown Moses, Women Under Siege Syria, or Syria Tracker, I have come to learn about the tenacity of humans and potential of digital forensics. These projects and their leaders are the forefront of asking questions: what should be published or not published. Their verification methods for video, pictures and reports are mapping new ground. They work very closely with people in the affected regions alongside global helpers. Brown Moses is meticulous in his analysis of social media (how Facebook is destroying History), weaponery and videos. Lauren Wolfe has built the Women Under Siege project to give voice to women who suffer brutal violence in times of war. Her methods in research, journalism, online engagement and verification highlight how a map can be one corner of a larger, more extensive project. Both the Syria Tracker and Women Under Siege teams do not publish all the details outright. They review, debate, curate and anonymize. Brown Moses has a unique talent of identifying and teaching methodology. These digital skills show us how crisismapping has evolved. Evidence and data collection happens in real-time. People are using these tools to make decisions. This is the nature of data and information. And while data can and has been used as a commodity and a power device, these types of projects show focus on those we serve – the survivors and the affected.

From Aleppo


“We struggle with this challenge, balancing between the imperative to do no harm with the virtues of transparency and openness.”

All of us seek information for evidence or even to help guide humanitarian decisions. This week First Mile Geo released it’s detailed case study on Aleppo complete with a set of open data. Collecting data about bakeries, locations and, potentially, movements in a conflict zone and then releasing that data will surely bring on questions. But, the First Mile Geo is already asking them with us:

Matt McNabb: But the principles underlying open data have their limits in conflict-affected areas, where the contest of information can –and often does –emerge more frequently to support actions that may have a deleterious effect on citizens’ safety or well being. Perhaps obvious to say, data in war can be a dangerous thing.

I firmly believe that the next future of open data is collected by citizens for whom the data is about rather than only stored in a government or business sanctioned data portal. We need both. The success or failure of Open Data will happen in the “majority world” (or as others call it the Global South or Developing world.) It is great to have Open Data events in over 110 places around the world on Open Data Day. One day is a start, but I think the penetration of Open Data will only happen if it follows the lead of OpenStreetMap. People need to be involved at a local level. Simply put: people don’t trust government and want to be part of the process (have agency over their data.) So, it is with this that I think methodology of First Mile Geo is at the forefront of combining offline community engagement (paper and pen) tied with maps to build local help. Crisismapping shows us that the raw questions alive in the field and being shared openly by folks like the First Mile team, Brown Moses, Syria Tracker and Women Under Seige. We need to consider what they have learned and how it can apply in conflict, crisis or developing areas.

Also see the Wired article on Mapping Aleppo

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And now for more questions:

What does it mean to be “open” and “collaborative” in a conflict or crisis zone? What does it mean for protestors? When does the affected population get a voice in what video/picture or imagery gets used and for what means? What are the new ethics for the digital crisis? In January of this year, I joined a round table and said: we need an imagery code of conduct (for satellites and drones). I advised them that we can’t wait for 4 years of research. This is happening now. People are being affected now and digital humanitarians are having these discussions now. I shared some of the example discussions we have had within the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. As security analyst Bruce Schneier rightfully points out, location is being used and we need to prepare for the new level of privacy and security discussions. While we race to share, collaborative and open up information, we need to build stronger data guidelines and data training.

Please go to: RightsCon and Responsible Data Forum to talk among peers. I’ll be watching via the Internet trying to catch snippets.

11Feb

The Day We Fight Back

The web is the biggest global community we all want to protect. My career has been an OSI one – from Internet ISP to domain registrar to online citizen voices via open maps/data/technology. In that time, I have worked on projects involving domains taken down, data center outages and activists threatened for simply trying to tell their story.

I am shaken by the brave people who use the web to give voice to the disposed and cite the horror of atrocities. As part of the Ushahidi community, I have had the honour to work closely with the folks from Harassmap and Syria Tracker. They are my teachers in why an open web matters. They are my teachers on why we want an internet that is not crippled by fear and surveillance. While I am based in Canada and many people I work with are not in the US, we are without a doubt affected by the laws and activities of the USA (NSA). As well, I look to the Canadian government and other governance bodies globally to do better.

More about the Day we Fight Back.

26Nov

Data Soup Ingredients (feelings, methods and next steps)

I’m a big fan of soup. Really, it is magic, you add all kinds of ingredients into a pot and hopefully get a “worthy soup”. Sometimes I think we should take the cooking smarts and apply it to our work. What are the key ingredients and tactics to activate Open Data? Surely, you’ve had a sad pot of soup before (eg. too much salt, not enough spice, etc.) It is really some new ground, but I think there are some common sense practices that need to be discussed. So, instead of ‘nuts and bolts’, let’s talk about how we get to the ingredients to make a decent plan (a pot of great soup) to feed our brains and guide our decisions.

Tonight I’m participating in the ICT4D London Panel:
Eliza Anyangwe of ICT4D London Meetup/Guardian Development asked that we prepare the following:

…go beyond gushing about how great open data is and stimulate thought about areas in need of improvement and strategies to get us there. The topic: what would happen if data quality is not addressed?

What do you see as the challenges of open data for development? How can we as a community get around them?

I decided to focus on challenges and things that we can do to build community:

Feelings

It might seem really ‘off’ to talk about ‘Feelings’ when we talk about open data, but we should. Do we Trust the data? Do we trust the sources/collection methods? Do the consumers/users understand the data and, most of all, can we ‘believe’ that we can base our decisions on big issues like nutrition planning or humanitarian responses? If we don’t talk about assumptions or talk about ‘data corrupts humans and humans corrupt data’ feelings, then we might be setting ourselves up for data fail. How do we build ‘trust’?

At the Open Government Partnership Summit, I had the chance to meet Chuks Ojidoh of ReclaimNaija project from Nigeria. He challenged assumptions about data collection and how communities ‘on the ground’ who were supposed to be served by ‘data’ felt about it. To sum: people don’t trust the data and won’t trust it unless they are involved in the data collection. And, the concept of central ‘firm’ datasets on, for example, budgets, needs to be community sourced council by council. Plus, people want to give feedback on the data and interact with it. This is a good reason to share, whenever possible, the datasets in an open fashion. It helps us be accountable and transparent plus gives us the ability to remix and use data.

So, there we have it: feelings! Until we talk more about how we will help people collect basic datasets and involve citizens (including digital literacy), then we won’t really get an accurate open data picture. I firmly believe that the ‘open data movement’ as it stands today will be greatly reshaped by folks like BudgIT from Nigeria and ReclaimNaija.

(Chuks shared this research with me this great article from Dr. Steven Livingston on Africa’s Information Revolution.)

Method to Madness

From data collection methods (sms, maps, spreadsheets, analog paper) to data ethics, privacy/security and protection, we need to grapple more with “methods to our madness’. This also includes the heavy topic: How can we have feedback loops and iterate/improve data. Of course, I fall into the category of “open data” allows people to use and remix data, but this does not come without a heavy filter of common sense.

engagedethics

What is a clean dataset?

After working on the Uchaguzi Kenyan Election project, I was on a mission to find a way to open up the Ushahidi datasets, I started to research how to create a Clean DataSet Guidelines list (created with help from Okfn, Datakind and Groundtruth Initiative). I think that there are many people trying to figure this out. If we had some standards and means to clean data, then people may be more comfortable sharing it. This does not minimize the risk of human error. A quick summary of how to get to a cleaner dataset: remove names, phone numbers, geolocation, and sensitive information. Challenging isn’t it? What happens when you remove this and it affects a decision negatively? (See some resources on this topic.)

One important thing that we did during the election project was to have a Data quality team reviewing the data in real-time. This team involved researchers, software developers and subject matter experts. Most of these people were community participants. While this might not be possible for all projects, it is a road forward on short sprint ones until organizations reorganize to do it themselves.

To the machines

Along with the Data Science for Social Good Fellows and my (then) Ushahidi colleagues, I spent the summer assisting a Data cleaning project. How can we use machine learning to help us build clean data sets? How can we clean datasets to know include personally identifiable information? What are some of the data ethics that we can infuse in our methods?

Details on that project:

Project background
Documentation
Code

While machines cannot replace the Human API (your eyes), it is a start. There is much improvement to be done on this.

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Improving the Recipe

The biggest ingredient that I think needs to be addressed is the “how’. A widespread group of people from various disciplines and regions need to have the capacity to be data makers. This means that we have digital literacy barriers combined with data literacy. At OKFN, we have the School of Data to help with this.

Last week, together with my colleague, Michael Bauer, and a few community members, we held an experimental training workshop. Our goal was to give people of menu of data skills from data cleaning, how to use spreadsheets, data visualization 101 and how to geo-code. These are really tough skills to integrate into all our workflows. For early adopters, I am sure that these are easy, but how to we get the next 1000 datamakers in civil society and governments? I was actually approached by someone thanking us for giving them a safe and equal space to learn these important things. Datamaking should not be some magical thing that is inaccessible to average people doing great work. It should be every day soup making: given the ingredients, some basic skills, and time to learn/test/iterate, there is a chance that we can fill this gap.

Steve and SCODA
(Steve of Devint training folks at the International Crisismappers Conference)

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When we talk about challenges and opportunities, there are some important next steps to consider: Spaces to learn for free, mentors to help us on our data journey and checks/balances on data curation/quality.

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.

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

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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!

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.)

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.)

Ihub Event with Jessica and patrick
(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!

29Aug

The Interviews: Heather Leson & social good on the internet

[Cross-posted from Michael Goldberg's Blog]

How can we use the Internet as a force for good has been a question that many in the tech community have asked. Heather Leson is the Director of Community Engagement at Ushahidi, and is working on that exact problem. Ushahidi allows users to compile maps to track anything they want. Collating data from text messages, social media, e-mails, sensors, and more Ushahidi is trying to aid those that want to help fix the world.

Websites, and programs mentioned by Heather:
Great Lakes Commons Map
Trash Wag Matching artists to trash.
Brck
Brck specs
Brck’s Kickstarter Campaign
Social Coding for Good
Random Hacks of Kindness
Public Lab
Open Knowledge Foundation
Ushahidi Wiki
OpenStreetMap
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
Social Tech Census
Learn OSM
Map Box

Audio recording can be found on Michael’s blog

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.

cameras in baskets

(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.

9Jul

Decamping to Open Source

It is July, which means OSCON is around the corner. OSCON is the largest Open Source Convention run by the folks from O’Reilly. (Portland, July 22 – 26, 2013) It is bootcamp to learn and meet others who work in this wide field.

OSCON

One of my major life goals is to get people more involved in their world. Sometimes I call it “Brain Sharing” and other times “Brains Colliding” – all in an effort to do good with our collective knowledge, especially our technical know-how. On this journey, I’ve volunteered and worked with a number of Humanitarian Free and Open Source Projects (HFOSS).

This year I’m honoured to speak this year at OSCON with a group of rockstar Maps, Hacks and Data leaders: Become a Digital Humanitarian Open Data and Open Source for Good.

We will be share stories from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, Random Hacks of Kindness, Sahana Software Foundation, Geeks without Bounds, and Change Assembly.

Speakers are given a discount code. Ping me if you’d like it.

The Community Leadership Summit (FREE) is right before OSCON. It was a huge infusion to my brain and work at Ushahidi. If you can’t attend OSCON but volunteer or work with communities in HFOSS or regular technical communities, then consider joining us.

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.

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