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.

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

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.

29Jun

Information wants to be complex

(Cross-posted from the Ushahidi blog)

Questions lead to answers that lead to more questions. Tactical Tech Info Activism Camp has a number of tracks: Documentation, Investigation, Curation, and Beautiful Troublemakers. I joined the “microscopes are us” evidence team aka Documentation. We’ve spent the week in brain strain grappling with the nature of problem-solving, decision-making, ethics, analysis and documentation.

Our mighty facilitators built the sessions based on real projects and examples. Our community of participants infused it with their project examples. It is often within the scenarios that the rich detail inspires and challenges us. As one participant opined: “Information wants to be complex” and another stated: “Information sometimes has a force of will.”

What would you do?

Our Thursday discussion focused on Ethics in Documentation. These examples are about “personal identifying information” and “informed consent”.

ethical1

ethical2

Questions and Statements from the Documentation Discussions

Each of us had various questions and alternate viewpoints:

How do organizations and individuals manage risk?
Moral decisions are circumstantial.
We are not longer gatekeepers of information.
Who’s data is it anyway?
Ethical decisions can change over time.
Sometimes you need to take a risk when conflicted on ethics.
Be prepared to defend and stick to a decision.
Information belongs to the person, not to us. Be responsible.
How can we make information powerful and use it to make change on the ground?

Next Steps:

I suggest that we collectively create an Ethics toolkit to help keep the momentum of the discussion. As an output of this camp, I am creating further guidelines for using Ushahidi for our community. I will include ethical scenarios based on our work. This idea directly comes from my experiences here.

Thanks to all the participants and organizers.

26Jun

Camping with Info Activism

Lake Orta, Novara, Piedmont, Italy.

Eddie, the peacock, is in the courtyard at Centro d’ompio. We are eating breakfast and getting ready for another day of learning and sharing. I’m at Info Activism camp with 138 other folks from 48 countries. Participatory sessions range from Documentation, Curation, Investigation and Beautiful Troublemakers. I’ve joined documentation because I want to focus on storytelling with purpose. Afternoons are full of skillshares. So far I’ve been in a PGP and digital security learn-in as well as a Data cleanup workshop getting regex 101. Sublime Text and I are are now friends.

infoactivism

Every day I send the Tactical Tech’s Security in a Box to community members. I’m here to polish up and learn new skills to keep on that journey. Global events really inspire me. We, the beautiful troublemakers, work around the world to connect humans and tech for social good. It is sometimes lonely path, so these times that we are together are precious from sunrise to sunset.

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.

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.)

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