Ushahidi

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.

11Mar

When your community changes you….

[Written and Cross-posted from the Ushahidi blog]
Uchaguzi is You! is our mantra. We are always on and always in edit mode. We are managed in a team driven engine that is decidedly non-linear. Everyone works with integrity and takes our Code of Collaboration to heart.

From the community, partners, team and friends, Uchaguzi has been a massive project of collaboration and change. In that spirit, we wanted to share some overall highlights. We are global and 24/7 with over half of the people involved based in Kenya. While our cultures and languages may be different, Kenyans and people from around the world joined together in a common cause: GIVE VOICE.

The Uchaguzi team have been head down mapping since last Friday, March 1, 2013. We are collectively exhausted, but driven. Each person, each edit, and each suggestion has been discussed in a team zone. Often, we’ve been so busy doing that even writing about what we are doing instead of doing, seems, well, wrong. But, we want to honour the community by sharing some of their story. Thank goodness that our Analysis and SMS teams have been blogging some on the sitroom blog. Their posts give a great view into the ever-changing project. We have been inside the skype chat rooms trying to take their large volume of inputs (SMS) and give them outputs (reports to analyze).

“Everyone pulled together and went where was most useful. Even though they had signed up to perform one certain task, no one complained etc about doing a different one. This just goes to emphasise what a bunch of multi skilled volunteers there are.” Jus MacKinnon

The connection between the offline and the online is core to the project. Daudi Were, Project Lead, has held tireless field meetings and training sessions with partners who were on site for election monitoring at polling stations. These people remain deployed in the field. In addition, have trained over 200 people mainly local with some global support for timezone shifting. Our mapper friends from Abuja (Nigerian mappers), NYU GIS class lead by Dr. Colette Mazzucelli, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and some Standby Task Force folks have joined the mostly local Ihub Nairobi community as well as those trained from our partners Creco, Peacenet and Sodnet (who are all across the country). We also have a strong contingent from Translators without Borders to help translate and folks from MercyCorp to help verify reports. There are many new people, which is beautiful and hard. We are seeing the future leaders in this field. And, we are overwhelmed by the gift of each person’s time and energy to this project.

“But for me the long term impact of this deployment will be an evolution in the area of connecting humans to their governance process from a position of power”- Om.

More about what the Digital teams are doing:

The Community participants come from all walks of life. Here are some of the key curves that they have navigated with amazing tenacity, spirit and dedication:

MAKERS: learning and building global collaboration skills in real-time
BUILDERS: creating a common language while combine all areas of knowledge and disciplines. This is truly an interdisciplinary group that works with many cultures and languages
EDIT MODE: change the process, software and research in real-time. There are few things sacred on this project. Our wiki has all the process documents which get edited frequently. We advise of changes via skype because email is too slow. Bugs and some features are fixed and tested in real-time. Plus, the embedded real-time analysis and research team is providing guidance, sensemaking and quality control feedback. Data is not static in this type of project, so we in turn, need to be in EDIT MODE.

See our wiki for how we are editing. : )

The number of A-ha moments across the board are brilliant. Not only are people rising up to learn and do, it is changing our software development as well as changing best practices for deployment, research and documentation. Thank you, take a bow.

Photo by Wambui Kamiru

SOME HUMAN STATS:

We’ve been posting numbers all week about reports, types of reports, awaiting approval, awaiting verification etc. But, the big community story is how we collectively made this possible:

Number of Skype Sub-teams active:
10 (SMS, Media Monitoring, Geolocation, Translation, Reports, Verification, Analysis & Research, QA, Tech and Communications), 11 if you count the Ushahidi internal team chat.

Number of Training sessions with Field Partners:
50 plus meetings between January 4 and March 4th. (There were many in 2012 too.)
Number of Community Working Group and Digital training team meetups:
14 (There were also some side group team sessions. (e.g. Analysis))
Number of people trained for digital teams from February 11 – Sunday, March 3, 2013: Over 239 trained on and before
Number of people added from March 3 – 6th (including some real-time trained folks): 218
Number of days that the Deployment was 24/7 around the globe and locally: Saturday, March 2 (9am EAT) – Tuesday, March 3 (3:00 pm EST)
Number of days of monitoring: Friday, March 1st plus Tuesday, March 3 – continuing
Where are people from: Kenya, Cameroon, Libya, Botswana, Nigeria, Ireland, UK, Slovenia, US, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Spain, South Korea.

Digital Teams

Some quick team updates for you:

SMS
The SMS team wins for the most revisions to their process to meet the real-time needs. The good news is that team trained and handed off each process. Due to high volumes, we use many people from other teams. (See more about their team below).

MEDIA MONITORING
The MM wins for being the team that we steal participants. Honestly, with the volume of SMS, we needed more folks in SMS and Reports to help. The Media Monitoring team has been slightly skeleton. We made a mandate at the beginning of the year to only post citizen voices to the map. This means SMS, Twitter and Facebook posts. We aren’t recycling news stories. But, with the sparse coverage there are fewer of these types of reports. We look for the most urgent ones.

TRANSLATION
The Translation team is a combination of trained professionals at Translators without Borders and digital participants from Kenya and beyond. The transition to being deeply inside a software deployment had a steep learning curve. But, it was fantastic to see reports quickly translated. Being fast paced on global teams is hard enough, try doing it in a few languages like these folks.

GEOLOCATION
The Geolocation team has been one of our rocks in this process. They have been doubling up on reviewing content and keeping the rest of us in line for process adherence. Plus, maps are hot. Our friends from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap arrived Tuesday and Wednesday just as we were burning out. The amount of nerd cross-training in Team Geo has been fantastic. Simply put, there will be more geonerdia in .ke if these folks have anything to say about the future.

VERIFICATION
Verification is the ROCK of the project. The folks in the field and in our verification skype rooms are fast. Stellar fast. Often, they are working on verifying information before the rest of us can get the reports to geo or translation. At first it was confusing, but once we got into the flow, it was amazing. Please look at all the reports with “verified”. You will see notes about the action taken. This is not the first deployment with embedded verification. But, their often seamless link between offline and online teams will be a best-practice strategy for other deployments to model and remix. A taste of how we worked:

TECH:
The technical teams included some core Ushahidi staff and trusted developers. Code was pushed frequently. See github for that action.

They also worked closely with the Analysis team to create the Visuals and Results pages.

You’ll note that we hacked that into the Uchaguzi platform.

ANALYSIS, Research and QA
The Analysis and Research team includes designers, developers, data hackers, researchers and policy folks. They collaborated to create Visuals and make sense of the data. Plus, their frequent reports helped all of us know the wide-angle lens.

In the middle of our live project, we created a sub-team for Quality Assurance. This team includes developers, researchers and others. The goal is to dig into the data and problem-solve. Doing root cause analysis can help with training and fixing stuff. This is one of the most important changes to keeping the project on the rails.

Communications:

We’ve got a dedicated group of folks trying to tell the story while we map. Check out their amazing snapshots on the SitRoom.

Some More thoughts from the community:

“I want to profusely thank the “UshaGuzi” team for their vision to create a best-practices solution for such pressing needs. Ushahidi and spinoffs are a huge step in the right direction. I also want to highlight how this process was different from other deployments in the respect that a communications feedback loop was closed and I think the effect will be electric.”

Receiving SMS and mapping it: done often
Receiving SMS and sending a response: done rarely

Creating a means to react to ongoing communications with an individual: New Paradigm Thinking
School and childcare pulled me out of the windows longer than I anticipated; it was always incredible to return and see hundreds of messages gone by. But for me the long term impact of this deployment will be an evolution in the area of connecting humans to their governance process from a position of power. I look forward to refining all of our procedures to prepare for the inevitable next election. Having developers involved with the live deployment was a pleasure.

I’ll include the ubiquitous appreciation for the actual people who joined up and got involved and whose dogged determination provided valuable understanding. SMS Team deserves more than that though. For problem solving on-the-fly, being enthusiastic about the larger goal while doing so much to tackle the minute by minute reality of providing a more clear ‘people’s voice’ to the world. Al Jazeera is just the first of many places where this map will show up and I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity.”

With deep respect,
Om
Asante tutaonana siku moja.
…………………………………………………………………………………….

The Kenyan team was very happy to have the Pan African contingent individual (Botswana), Yemi and Egghead Odewale (Nigeria) and Jean Brice (Cameroon) fly all the way to volunteer and spend time with us when we really needed it.

They were rockstars at helping out and jumping between their teams and assisting with SMS. It has been a great week of learning and camaraderie with the local community. Friendships made stronger around Africa and the US.

Dr. Susan Benesch not only worked with the Umati team but also assisted with the SMS backlog.

5Feb

CBC Spark Interview: Crisismapping, Ushahidi and Canada

CBCSpark’s Nora Young interviewed me about Ushahidi, Crisismapping and citizen activism. The episode #205 also includes an interview with Rebecca Chiao of Harassmap and my colleague, Daudi Were, Project Lead of Uchaguzi.

Download the CBC Spark podcast

I firmly believe that the lessons learned from crisismapping can be applied to every day important things. Maps have also been storytelling devices by sharing versions of history and location.

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There are a few maps in Canada that are truly indicate the future state potential:

Great Lakes Commons, based in Ontario and lead by Paul Baines, is keen to build a commons approach around Water Stewardship:

” A Commons perspective respects the waters as the heritage, sustenance, and inheritance of all peoples and species that live within this Great Lakes watershed. This map is yours to mark your connection and concern and share our collective desires to protect, improve, and sustain this home. “

YXEVoices, based in Saskatoon, SK and lead by Ushahidian Dale Zak, aims to connect citizens and their cities:

YXEvoices

Here’s to more growth in these areas.

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

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.

****
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)

****

(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.

11Jun

This means it’s Personal: PDF

What if? This is a question that drives me daily. What if people are connected to affect change with technology? I am very honoured to be selected as a Personal Democracy Forum Google Fellow 2012 among a distinguished list of accomplished fellows.

Learning about the struggles to give voice and have free elections around the world, I’ve encountered a few shining lights that we could learn and remix in North America:

Qabila.tv from Egypt has an amazing program of digital literacy accessible videos to teach people about democracy and the principles. It is in common language. The team used these in their community-based organization outreach campaign to reach the youth. In order to succeed in mandates for elections, we need to start thinking better about how to use the power of the Internet for true engagement. And, then take it offline to communities, listen and remix:

At Ushahidi every day I work alongside election monitors, corruption mappers and other civil society activists. I’m on a mission to ask “What If” citizens could give voice to their causes, their passions, their communities. These people are disrupters doing the heavy lifting. I simply have the honour of sharing their stories as Ushahidi is a vehicle for people’s change. And, I have the responsibility to find ways to augment and surface their work globally while supporting it with documentation and training.

Trust of citizens can only be acquired with long programming for safe elections. The Ushahidi Liberia team is a strong example of continuous planning and relationship-building.
Civil society and community-based organizations are core to real engagement. The Harassmap team has a strong offline and online program which could be applied to elections
Why people vote and don’t vote might be analyzed by Sentiment Mapping. Last year, my colleague launched I Vote Because for the Canadian elections, It was a small act to bind people to the “act of voting” and to spring discussion. I look forward to seeing more evolution in this area.

On Saturday, June 16th, I will participate in a Free Election Hackathon with a number of groups. I plan to use my PDF experience to assist people who will be doing election monitoring around the world in the coming year. I can’t wait to hack on ideas, then test them into action.

Here’s to happy braining,

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).)

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