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Students learn programming with Ushahidi

[Guest post: Cam Macdonell is an Instructor of Computer Science at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB. He completed his PhD from the University of Alberta in 2011 and began teaching at Grant MacEwan in September, 2011.]

In September, I began teaching my first upper-level University course at Grant MacEwan University. Having taken some (and heard about some other) lack-lustre undergrad Software Engineering courses, I really wanted to make this course practical, project-based and interesting for the students. One inspiration was the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Project (UCOSP) where final-year students select a project and are mentored by faculty across Canada to work on an open-source project for course credit. I also loved the practical approach of the Software Carpentry course taught by Greg Wilson and Paul Lu, which I was involved in a few Summers back and frankly preferred to some of the “Ivory Tower” Software Engineering that is common in undergrad courses.

It was Greg Wilson that pointed me to Ushahidi, and I felt Ushahidi’s humanitarian focus would be a great added benefit to my students. Computer science is so often focused on science, business, marketing and advertising that I felt this was an opportunity to show my students how a small group of dedicated people can use software to make a difference in humanitarian way. There were other great projects suggested too, such as the Sahana Foundation, but I made up my mind to go with Ushahidi once I was introduced to Heather Leson and got to peak in on a Ushahidi hack-a-thon from Nairobi via Skype. The energy of the group was obvious and very exciting.

Organizing the Curriculum

With much enthusiasm, I jumped into trying to build a course using Ushahidi as the core project component. The first major hurdle was that 3rd year computer science students have minimal system administration experience. Except for a few exceptions, they haven’t run a database or a web server on their own. Moreover, PHP is not part of a course curriculum. The sysadmin challenges were answered by using Harvard’s CS50 Virtual appliance. This VM is based on Fedora Linux and comes with PHP, Apache and MySQL already installed. The VM runs on VirtualBox, which is free so students could install it on their laptop (this is how most students ran it). As for PHP, I felt that PHP was accessible to undergrads coming from a Java background. It’s syntax and object-oriented are quite similar to Java.

Our courses at Grant MacEwan involve a weekly three-hour lab component. The first lab was used to introduce PHP with some sample programs. The second lab was used to introduce Kohana and the MVC framework. After the second lab, the first assignment was given. The first assignment consisted of 4 simple tasks

  • Apply a patch to get Ushahidi to work with non-clean URLs
  • Change the site name and tagline on the admin page to match the main page
  • Modify the labels in the API stream
  • Add a ‘’pirate’’ response type to the API

These assignments helped the students become familiar with how MVC web servers work. I also felt that the API was an important concept for them to understand well. In the end, this assignment was a bit too easy in some ways. In general, it’s very challenging to judge the level of difficulty when working with an existing code base. To this point, most of my students would have only written programs from scratch (similar to most undergrad CS courses).

It was also to determine what kind of hints to give. For example, problem #4 from above become quite trivial once you show students how to search (using grep) through a code base. Without that hint, students will try to trace the code manually and search manually. So the dividing line between dozens of hours of work and 10 minutes is literally the knowledge of how to use grep effectively. Once the students had completed the first assignment, it was time to throw them head first into Ushahidi on some more significant projects.

Picking the Projects

One advantage I had was that there were only 10 students, which enabled students to work on separate projects based on their interests. Mistakes with a course of 10 students are much more fixable on the fly than with, say, 40 students.

In trying to gather project ideas, I searched the feature requests on the Ushahidi development site and also I asked the Ushahidi community for ideas for projects. Projects from the feature request list included selecting multiple categories and multi-coloured dots. Others came from the Ushahidi group, such as 2-way SMS communication, OpenStreetMap integration and white-labeling the J2ME app. Some were my own creation, such as the SQlite back-end.

In general, is very difficult to carve 10 appropriate projects from an actively developed open-source project like Ushahidi for the following reasons:

  • Ushahidi developers are focused on moving the project forward, adding real features that users care about. As such, they are typically not willing to risk those features not being developed by leaving them to an undergrad.
    Course projects are in 3 month blocks whereas actual development in the project focuses on small increments or “many months away”, so carving off a piece that fits nicely into a 2-3 month course project is hard because that is not how developers think. Developers, from what I gather, focus on the next few week or two, or they may focus on large scale goals (significant re-writes of subsystems) which again are difficult to break down into course projects.
  • The knowledge gap – real developers know the code, my students do not. This gaps adds to the difficulty of developers creating projects that can be handed off to an inexperienced student to complete.

Even with the above challenges, our results show that it is possible and extremely valuable to use real software in an undergraduate course project. I believe that our projects on Ushahidi went as well as I could have expected for three main reasons:

The Ushahidi developers cared enough to try and suggest projects. Some projects were fine just as suggested while others could at least give me ideas that I could try and distill into projects. In the end, my responsibility is determining and setting the educational goals, so this worked well. The developers were of a great help, quick to respond to questions and supportive of the students, and I can’t thank them enough for this. My students were willing to accept the “ups and downs” of this kind of project. They knew the alternative was a canned, built-from-scratch project that no recruiter would care about. I was able to convince them that saying they had worked on (and got patches accepted to) a real software project would be of at least some merit over a typical SE course project.

There were certainly some bumps in the road in terms of some projects being too easy (to which I would assign further work) or too hard (a completely working project was not required in some cases). In then end, the students were able to make significant progress on some real problems that the Ushahidi community cared about.

Student Project Review

All that said, let’s talk about the projects, cause they’re really cool.

Dale Douglas (code) added the ability to allow reports to be edited on the main display. His implementation was not secure by any stretch, so may not be deployment ready, but was an interesting project. Dale wished that plugins could overwrite system files so that he wouldn’t have to modify the main Ushahidi codebase.

Brett McKay (code) white-labelled the J2ME app. He also discovered that the J2ME app was in the middle of re-write. So he added the functionality to the new re-write version to add a deployment site and fetch reports. This an example where a student had to take on additional tasks once his initial task (white-labelling) was complete. Brett was challenged in there is actually no documentation of the J2ME app at all

Richard Laan (code) added the ability to select multiple categories on the main map page. Richard’s learning curve was even steeper in that he had to learn Javascript for this project. In the end, a very successful implementation. Tracing the javascript was the most challenging aspect for Richard.

Joel Joseph (code) added a search functionality to the API. This feature allows an API query to search and return results for particular keyword. Joel’s first project was a refactoring suggested by one of the developers. This was another example of a project that needed to be extended once the initial task was complete.

Ranjoat Panesar (code) added a plugin to support 2-way SMS communication between an SMS user and the system. For example, the could stop and start notices or search for incidents related to a keyword. The motivating idea was having a user search for incidents around their current area, but we didn’t get that far.

Alex Molzhan (code) Alex added a button that allowed the incidents to be shown in their incident colour when being displayed under All Categories. Richard Laan is currently continuing to work on this feature in relation to his “Select Multiple Categories” project.

Chris Proulx (code) Chris added an AJAX-based interface to the reports editting page under the administrator. The features chris avoided reloading all the reports when one was deleted. His changes made the reports editing noticeably snappier.

Wilson Liang (code) Wilson created a standalone Java app for the desktop. His application would follow a particular deployment. It may be useful in a situation when connecting to a particular deployment may have intermittent connectivity.

Ruben Estevez de Freitas (document) Ruben worked on getting OSM installed locally and working with Ushahidi. Most instructions for OSM are for Ubuntu, so Ruben learned about the mess that is Linux package management and the difficulty in translating Ubuntu package names to Fedora package names. Ruben’s submission is not a github repository, but simply a document describing all the steps to get OSM working with Ushahidi on a Fedora virtual machine.

The course ended with project demos some of which the students put up for recording. The students have all made their code available and some are continuing to work on their projects.

I think I can say that the students all enjoyed working on a real software project and found it valuable. There were certainly challenges that the students mentioned. The most difficult was the lack of an up-to-date, detailed technical description of how everything works. The lesson here is that such a document rarely exists, especially on open-source projects. For one, the document would be too massive to read or to keep updated. Updating is especially difficult due to the incremental nature of open-source development where developers’ time is already stretched thin. Know-how comes from mostly from doing and playing with the code, not from documents. Although, as always, more documentation would certainly be helpful both in the code itself and external to it. In particular I think a “How to get started with Ushahidi” document would be helpful for new developers. Second, I think a curated “To do” list for various levels of experience (new, novice, advanced) perhaps on the new wiki, would help with new developers looking for a way to get involved (or for a university professors looking for projects :) ).

In the end the course went extremely well. I learned a lot about Ushahidi, got to interact with some great people and, of course, some great students. A big thank you to Greg Wilson, Heather Leson, Dale Zak, David Kobia, and Aaron Huslage for all their help and interaction over the last several months.

********
Contact Cam Macdonnell via email

To Cam, all the students and Grant McEwan University:
Thank you being the first class of students to focus an entire semester on Ushahidi open source software development. Your hard work has taught us much about how to integrate Ushahidi software development into classrooms. We are close to launching more changes to make it easier for people to contribute, including more Git love aka a “To Do” list. And, a special thanks to Greg Wilson for advocating open source in Canada’s universities.

To the Ushahidi Community Developer Skype Chat folks:
Thank you for supporting this initiative and answering Cam’s and his student’s questions. We hope to do more of this in the future and hope that you will join us on that journey.

Posted in Academic, Community, Development, Mobile, Plugins, Ushahidi, Ushahidi Users. Tagged with , , , , .

By hleson
January 27, 2012

No comments

Empowering Action New Tools for Crisis and Humanitarian Response

[Guest Blog post by Ryan Lanclos, ESRI, originally appeared on the ESRI Site.]

This week several members of our team attended the 3rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland and we were blown away by the turn out (Follow #ICCM on Twitter). This community has grown substantially over the last 3 years – when we attended the first conference held in Cleveland, Ohio back in 2009 there were about 100 attendees. Now there are more than 400 gathered here discussing crisis mapping and the challenges they face. There are really 3 main things that we keep hearing as it relates to GIS and mapping:

  • How to collect and organize data from the crowd around the globe as it relates to crisis
  • How to enable action from this data
  • How to build, collect, and maintain reference data for crisis

Collecting and Organizing Data from the Crowd

As for the first topic, collecting and organizing data from the crowd, there is a good tool developed by our partner Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a platform that takes crowd sourced information like SMS messages, categorizes them, and displays them on the map as a point or cluster of points showing relevant location. The result of this effort is a point map that begins to illustrate where individuals are vocalizing need or disseminating information.

Enabling Action

While points are a good start, we have been working with Ushahidi and a focus group comprised of both GIS and Crisis Mappers to define requirements for new tools that will support analysis of this data. We have heard the need for spatial and temporal analysis tools within the Ushahidi platform as well as the need for tools to bring Ushahidi data into ArcGIS where analyses can be run.

We are very excited to announce that we have made the first tool available to support these requirements-the ArcGIS add-in for Ushahidi which can be downloaded and quickly added to ArcMap. This add-in allows you to connect to a Ushahidi instance with the API enabled, convert text between languages, and download the Ushahidi data into a geodatabase. This opens up the feed of data being captured in Ushahidi to the rich spatial and temporal analysis tools within ArcGIS allowing users to empower action and inform decision makers using a sound scientific approach. Curious how this might work? At the bottom of this blog is a good write-up of using this tool to analyze information coming in from the current Thailand flooding.

Reference Data

Having this information and resulting analysis is great, but without good reference/basemap data as a backdrop, it is hard to understand the context of any situation. A common theme discussed here in Geneva is the isolated and rural nature of many locations and the lack of base data. While there may be global vector and raster datasets available, they are often either severely dated or at a scale that does not support local action.

One data set that supports crowdsourcing of basemap data is OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is constructed and edited for all types of use by a global user community, and yes you can join! Crowdsourced basemap data is particularly valuable during a crisis response where current and often high resolution data needs are compounded.

In support of this open source effort, Esri offers a desktop tool for ArcGIS that allows you to join the crowd by editing and publishing to OSM from within ArcMap. This tool also allows you to download OSM data over your area of interest directly into ArcGIS for use in a disconnected and offline environment common in response. You can download the ArcGIS Editor for OSM.

Esri is committed to supporting the crisis response community thru our Esri Disaster Response Program as well as thru the continued evolution of ArcGIS to support the collection, management, analysis, and visualization of data in a collaborative environment. While these tools don’t solve all of the problems we face as crisis mappers, we hope you will find them valuable in your arsenal and as a starting point to a dialogue around enhancements to and construction of additional tools or data. We are already looking forward to ICCM 2012 in Washington, DC!

ArcGIS Add-in for Ushahidi

Getting Started

To get started, first download the Esri Add-in for Ushahidi. Once you’ve installed the Add-in you’re ready to add it to ArcMap. Go to the Customize menu | Toolbars | Customize… located at the very bottom of the list.

Esri customize_part1

esri customize_part2

In the Customize dialog, click the Commands tab| type Ushahidi in the Show commands containing: text box. You will see the Ushahidi2ArcGIS Add-In listed in the Commands pane.

esri customize_window

Drag the Ushahidi2ArcGIS command to any existing toolbar in your ArcMap window. You must drag this command onto an existing toolbar, not just onto the map. You will see a new button with a blue circle icon show up on your toolbar.

Connecting to a Ushahidi Instance

To connect to an Ushahidi instance click on the Download Ushahidi Reports to ArcGIS button and enter the parameters.

UshahidiGetReports

The key parameter to enter is the API Endpoint. This is the main URL to the Ushahidi instance, such as Thailand Flood Crisis Information Map or Bushfire Connect. You also have the option to translate the data (using Bing Translator) for either just the categories or all the incident data. Note that the more you have to translate and the more records you have the longer the time it will take to download and create the data.

Once the data is downloaded it is added to a layer. The tool automatically sets the data to render on Unique Values in the Category Title field and uses the default colors from the Ushahidi instance.

esri layer_properties_symbology

Additionally the HTML Popup set and the description of the layer has been populated to reflect the source, date and time the data was downloaded. This is critical temporal information for Crisis Mappers.

Perform Further Analysis

Now that the Ushahidi data is downloaded you’re ready to perform further analysis. You can look at data over time, limit your focus on specific categories, or do more in depth spatial analysis.

For example if we wanted to get a better understanding of the reports of flooding around Bangkok we can focus on those reports (i.e. just one category of the incidents).

esri Flood Reports

We can then visualize the data as a “heat-map” (by using the Kernel Density tool).

esri heat_map

To get more detailed information on the data and to further determine significance of the reports we can use spatial statistics to determine if there are non-random spatial patterns and statistically significant hot or cold spots in the data. To do this we can use the Spatial Autocorrelation and Hot-Spot Analysis tools. The basic workflow is shown here in ModelBuilder:

esri model_builder

The results of this analysis are highlighted in blue on the map as areas (1 km^2 ) that have statistically significant clusters of flood reports (in this case 8 to 27 per km2 ). These are the high priority areas that should be focused on first. Then we focus on questions like why are there so many reports in this area? Is there a single authoritative source of SMS feeds on the ground or is there a large group of people that need help?

esri stat_sig

This is just one type of analysis that can be run in ArcGIS Desktop from Ushahidi data. We are interested in learning more from you in the type of analysis that you’ve run using this tool. Please use the comments section of the tool and let us know how the tool works and what needs to be improved.

*****

Thanks to the ESRI team for creating this valuable plug-in.

Posted in Community, Crisis, Development, Mapping Resources, Plugins, Ushahidi. Tagged with , , , , , , .

By hleson
January 26, 2012

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Google Inc + World Bank = Empowering Citizen Cartographers?

[Cross-posted from Patrick Meier's blog iRevolution]

World Bank Managing Director Caroline Anstey recently announced a new partnership with Google that will apparently empower citizen cartographers in 150 countries worldwide. This has provoked some concern among open source enthusiasts. Under this new agreement, the Bank, UN agencies and developing country governments will be able to “access Google Map Maker’s global mapping platform, allowing the collection, viewing, search and free access to data of geoinformation in over 150 countries and 60 languages.”

So what’s the catch? Google’s licensing agreement for Google Map Maker stipulates the following: Users are not allowed to access Google Map Maker data via any platform other than those designated by Google. Users are not allowed to make any copies of the data, nor can they translate the data, modify it or create a derivative of the data. In addition, users cannot publicly display any Map Maker data for commercial purposes. Finally, users cannot use Map Maker data to create a service that is similar to any already provided by Google.

There’s a saying in the tech world that goes like this: “If the product is free, then you are the product.” I fear this may be the case with the Google-Bank partnership. I worry that Google will organize more crowdsourced mapping projects (like the one they did for Sudan last year), and use people with local knowledge to improve Map Maker data, which will carry all the licensing restrictions described above. Does this really empower citizen cartographers?

Or is this about using citizen cartographers (as free labor?) for commercial purposes? Will Google push Map Maker data to Google Maps & Google Earth products, i.e., expanding market share & commercial interests? Contrast this with the World Bank’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI), which uses open source software and open data to empower local communities and disaster risk managers. Also, the Google-Bank partnership is specifically with UN agencies and governments, not exactly citizens or NGOs.

Caroline Anstey concludes her announcement with the following:

“In the 17th century, imperial cartographers had an advantage over local communities. They could see the big picture. In the 21st century, the tables have turned: local communities can make the biggest on the ground difference. Crowdsourced citizen cartographers can help make it happen.”

Here’s another version:

“In the 21st century, for-profit companies like Google Inc have an advantage over local communities. They can use big license restrictions. With the Google-Bank partnership, Google can use local communities to collect information for free and make the biggest profit. Crowdsourced citizen cartographers can help make it happen.”

The Google-Bank partnership points to another important issue being ignored in this debate. Let’s not pretend that technology alone determines whether participatory mapping truly empowers local communities. I recently learned of an absolutely disastrous open source “community” mapping project in Africa which should one day should be written up in a blog post entitled “Open Source Community Mapping #FAIL”.

So software developers (whether from the open source or proprietary side) who want to get involved in community mapping and have zero experience in participatory GIS, local development and capacity building should think twice: the “do no harm” principle also applies to them. This is equally true of Google Inc. The entire open source mapping community will be watching every move they make on this new World Bank partnership.

I do hope Google eventually realizes just how much of an opportunity they have to do good with this partnership. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will draft a separate licensing agreement for the World Bank partnership. In fact, I hope they openly invite the participatory GIS and open source mapping communities to co-draft an elevated licensing agreement that will truly empower citizen cartographers. Google would still get publicity—and more importantly positive publicity—as a result. They’d still get the data and have their brand affiliated with said data. But instead of locking up the Map Maker data behind bars and financially profiting from local communities, they’d allow citizens themselves to use the data in whatever platform they so choose to improve citizen feedback in project planning, implementation and monitoring & evaluation. Now wouldn’t that be empowering?

Posted in Community, Crisis, Data, Partnerships. Tagged with , , , , , , , , .

By patrick
January 25, 2012

4 comments

Crisis Mapping Syria: An Important Update

[Guest blog post by Syrian activist, author identity withheld for security reasons]

Syria Tracker was launched on April 23, 2011 and has been able to log aggregate or individual reports since March 18, 2011 [accessed January 9, 2012], including 550 reports for the category “Killed (قُتِل)” and 356 reports for the category “Missing-مفقود or Detained-مُعتقل”. A total of 6,317 individuals killed over 286 days (March 18, 2011 thru January 8, 2012) were documented and verified. Killing ranged from 1-210 killings per day (median of 17.5 (95% CI: 14-19)), in 463 cities, affecting all age groups (median age of 36 years old (95% CI: 27-45)) with 427 individuals (~7%) less than or equal to 18 years old, and 289 individuals were female (~5%) and 6,028 were male (~95%).

Syria Tracker is collaborating with the following crowdsourced efforts to further validate, corroborate, and disseminate the information: Middle East Voices (Voice of America), Syrian Martyrs شهداء الثورة السورية, Silmya, and Syrian Youth Movement. Syria Tracker also incorporates complementary situation-awareness information (news, blogs, Facebook posts, etc.) from the HealthMap system, an information system that uses unofficial reports of disease—e.g., from clinicians or web-based health-related information from news media or blogs—to track disease outbreaks. HealthMap was tailored, referred to as “HealthMap Crisis”, to mine crisis information in English for evidence of killing, torture or arrest. HealthMap Crisis is provided as a news stream that is available to the public on the Syria Tracker’s website. Reports were primarily verified by a group of volunteers from the Crisis Mappers, Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) in addition to cross-validating information against other sources or online posts. Please find Google Earth layer here.

Posted in Crisis, Data, crowdmap, crowdsourcing. Tagged with , , , , .

By patrick
January 23, 2012

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Haiti and the Power of Crowdsourcing

It’s been two years today since Haiti’s devastating earthquake… here’s a blog post from then on the power of crowdsourcing in crisis response.

Cross-posted from iRevolution.net

It’s been two weeks since I called David Kobia to launch Ushahidi’s crisis mapping platform in Haiti. I could probably write 100 blog posts on the high’s and low’s of the past 14 days. Perhaps there will more time be next month to recount the first two weeks of the disaster response. For now, I wanted to share an astounding example of crowdsourcing that took place 10 days ago.

Boston, January 17, 8pm

Picture a snowy Boston evening and the following “Situation Room” a.k.a. my living room at Blakeley Hall, part of The Fletcher School.

My fellow PhD colleague Anna Schulz, who has rapidly become an expert in satellite imagery analysis and geolocation, receives an urgent request via Skype from InSTEDD‘s Eric Rasmussen pictured below with Nico di Tada. That tent is pitched right next to the runway of Port-au-Prince’s international airport, some 1,600 miles south of Boston.

The urgent request? GPS coordinates for 7 key locations across Port-au-Prince where many Haitians were known to be trapped under rubble. They needed to communicate this information to the Search and Rescue (SAR) teams before 0600. Anna immediately got to work.

Boston, January 17, 8.30pm

An hour later, Anna had found the GPS coordinates for all but one of the locations for the rescue operations.

Boston, January 17, 9.41pm

Boston, January 17, 10.26pm

Some time later, the same urgent request originally sent by Eric and Nico appears on the CrisisMappers Google Group:

Boston, January 17, ~11.00pm

At Anna’s request, I send out the following Tweet on Ushahidi.

Boston, January 18, ~1.00am

The following report is submitted to the Ushahidi-Haiti platform by someone from the Twittersphere:

Boston, January 18, 1.20am

My colleague Jaroslav in The Fletcher Situation room Skypes back to Anna:

Courtesy of high-resolution satellite imagery on Google Earth:

Boston, January 18, ~2.00am

It’s getting late but the ALL CAPS in this Tweet to Ushahidi catches my eye:

My colleague Jaroslav and I decide to try the number. Low and behold, we get Marc on the phone after just one ring. With a mixture of English and French, we find out that he was indeed a former employee of Au Bon Prix which happens to be a book store just off “Au Champs de Mars” near the Palace. We immediately Skype this information back to Eric and Nico at Port-au-Prince airport.

Boston, January 18, ~2.15am

Boston, January 18, ~4.30am

It’s still snowing in Boston. Time to get a few hours of sleep. We hand over operations to the Ushahidi Team in Africa.

Patrick Philippe Meier

Posted in Crisis, crowdsourcing. Tagged with , .

By patrick
January 12, 2012

1 comment

Election Monitoring in the DRC

[Guest post by Galya Ruffer, J.D., Ph.D., Director, Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffet Center, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Galya lead a team deployment for the recent Democratic Republic of Congo.]

On November 28th, 2011 crowds assembled at 62,000 polling stations to elect DR Congo’s fifth president in the country’s first independently administered presidential elections since independence in 1960.

Polling Station in Bukavu, Ibanda Commune

Polling Station in Bukavu, Ibanda Commune

Getting off to a late start, just three months before the elections, Center for Forced Migration Studies at Northwestern University (CFMS) organized a group of voluntary partners comprised of humanitarian, civil society and human rights organizations to report on the elections. With Ushahidi’s past record of difficulty deploying to the Congo given it’s size (as large as Western Europe), lack of infrastructure and limited electricity and access to technology, the late start and lack of funds posed a major challenge. Therefore, our first decision was to limit the deployment to focus on the hotbed areas for violence: North and South Kivu in the east and the main opposition candidate’s stronghold, Kinshasa.

Technology had improved considerably since 2006 with most people having cell phones and greater access to wireless. On the other hand, the remote areas most sensitive to violence and election fraud are the ones without cell service and electricity. Thus, many of the same challenges remained. Knowing all these challenges, we still decided that deployment would be useful since many organizations are looking to crisis mapping to assist in combating the ongoing insecurity in eastern Congo and massive sexual violence. We could all learn from the experience. The site went live one week before the elections, on November 18th, reporting in French and English.

Organizing Networks and Teams

Through the international partners, a U.S. based diaspora group, RDC2XTE, seeking an alternative vision for DRC through supportive actions to improve accountability and advancement, and our own contacts, we created a network of local independent observers and media sources based in Bukavu and Goma in the eastern Congo and Kinshasa to continuously report back what they were witnessing at various polling stations.

One of our main dedicated partners in the east, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, trained and organized local women journalists to SMS or email direct reports. A second dedicated partner, Collectif D’Actions Pour La Defense Des Droits Humains (CADDHOM), a local NGO focusing on a wide range of programs concerning human rights, was an official partner of the CENI (the National Election Commission) deploying 200 monitors in South Kivu. CADDHOM sent us reports via email and SMS as they received phone calls and SMS from their official field observers. I also accompanied the executive director of CADDOM, Pasteur Joseph on election day to observe the elections.

Outside EDAP Polling Station

Outside EDAP Polling Station in Bukavu with CADDHOM Coordinator, Pasteur Joseph (right)

A third dedicated partner was Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), who organized to station a volunteer in Kinshasa to receive reports from the 30,0000 network of Catholic Bishop monitors in the field. Although in contact with the EU monitoring team, there were no actual exchanges of information and the Carter center did not respond to emails.

We provided all partners with training material and produced post card sized printouts with SMS instructions. I only arrived on the ground on November 25th, but used my time there to meet with local partners none of whom, even though they had received all my materials before hand, had actually visited the site. Internet access is simply too complicated to spend time trying to view a site that takes hours to access. On the other hand, once I arrived and installed the local SIM cards, the Android phones with SMSSync worked perfectly. In fact, since I put the SIM cards on roaming, they work even here in Chicago.

Election Day, SMS Blocked and Lessons Learned

Even with the late start, once the elections got underway we began to receive reports via SMS and email. But then a major glitch came when the government shut down the whole SMS network on December 4th due to concerns of impending violence with the announcement of the election results scheduled for December 6th. Our independent deployment hit a major roadblock between the block on SMS and evacuation of internationals from Kinshasa. I was scheduled to fly to Kinshasa on December 5th, but could not get there since flights were cancelled. All work was suspended in Kinshasa and people ordered to stay home. As CENI continued to delay announcing election results and tension mounted, the CAFOD volunteer could not send any reports. CENI finally announced Kabila’s victory on December 9th, but with growing unrest from the opposition, SMS was not restored until December 14. As soon as it was, we immediately began receiving reports from the volunteer, but these were limited to the December 13th press release that the EU confirmed the Archbishop of Kinshasa’s declaration of irregularities in the elections and media reports.

Speaking with many organizations on the ground, it became apparent that Ushahidi was not widely known in the DRC and, although I physically sat with locals and showed them the platform there was interest, no one I met with could view the site on their computers given the slow Internet connection. A local radio station in Goma. Radio Mutaani, had also set up an SMS system and gmail chat feeding into their website, but were weary of sharing data with Ushahidi given security concerns. I visited their radio station and attended a program at the University in Goma and was impressed with the level of engagement surrounding the election. Until SMS was cut off, they had a lot of activity through their gmail chat.

Without SMS the deployment shifted to media monitoring coordinated by undergraduate Liz Casano of the NorthWestern University Student team and Bharathi Ram and Leesa Astredo of the Stand-by Task Force. The SBTF was instrumental in sorting through and reporting on more than 20,000 tweets. So far, a total of 320 online reports have been uploaded from over 70 locations, comprising 55 types of incidents. There are over 150 reports still waiting to be input into the system, most likely with more to come as the team reviews additional media sources.

One of our goals going in to the deployment was to be able to provide a broad platform to link up the work of local and international monitors and amass all the reports in “real time” for use by all. We learned that this was not in the best interest of the official monitors. Given the strategic role of the National Episcopal Conference of the Congo, the country’s Catholic bishops’ council as the largest monitoring group, it was in their best interest to kept their reports secret until ready to make an official announcement which they did on December 12th. In the end, the need of human rights and humanitarian organizations to report on and respond to crisis, did not coincide with the needs of official monitoring efforts to postpone release of information until they could better assess and negotiate the political implications.

Although more time to conduct networking on the ground would have produced more buy in from humanitarian, civil and human rights organizations, it seems that in the end we might have had the same problems given the SMS and need of the largest observers to withhold their reports until the best strategic moment.

The project team is now shifting its focus to analysis. In the next three months our goal is to issue two reports on the elections. The first will examine the question of transparency that was central to the rejection of the election results by the opposition and critiques of the official monitors. The second will layer in additional data to seek to answer questions broader questions such as did NGO civics work result in reduced problems? Were their areas that had violence in 2006 but not this time? And what kinds of responses were most successful and why?

Posted in Community, Deployment, Ushahidi, elections. Tagged with , , .

By hleson
January 10, 2012

1 comment

The [unexpected] Impact of the Libya Crisis Map and the Standby Volunteer Task Force

[Cross-posted from the SBTF Blog. Guest blog post by Andrej Verity. Andrej is an Information Management Officer at UN-OCHA in Geneva with a focus on both leading OCHA's collaboration with the Volunteer & Technical Communities and supporting OCHA's information management staff around the world. In 2010, Andrej deployed to both the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods. In March 2011, Andrej lead OCHA's collaboration with the Standby Task Force in creating the Libya Crisis Map. Later that month, he also worked closely with Crisis Commons in their data collection exercise in response to the Japan tsunami.]

At the beginning of March 2011, OCHA HQ activated the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a self-organized group of structured volunteers, to create the Libya Crisis Map (LCM) early in March of this year to help provide better situational awareness of the unfolding situation on-the-ground. This site and the data were made available to responding organizations with the intention to them improve their operational planning. The site was extended beyond the first month largely based on efforts from OCHA Colombia, volunteers sourced from the UNV online volunteer service, and SBTF members who choose to stay on beyond the official SBTF deployment.

But Why the Collaboration?

It comes down to two simple reasons: 1) the UN did not have physical access to the country, and 2) OCHA did not have the idle capacity to gather, verify and process the enormous amount of available online information. In many ways the resulting data behind the map was the “gold mine”. OCHA had a data specialist reviewing the data, looking for patterns or trends in the data, showing what ‘non-map’ products could be generated, and outlining how such data could be integrated into traditional coordination products.

But what measured impact did the map have?

At the moment, a Masters student from Tilburg University is working on a formal impact evaluation of the site. However, measuring the impact of even a traditional static map is not an easy undertaking. What was the measured impact of the last map you used?

The LCM data was being incorporated into the traditional Who-is-doing-What-Where products and info-graphics which were being created remotely by OCHA IMOs [Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, and South Sudan]. These products were then being printed and shared inside the emergency arena. So, what impact did those printed products have? We rarely try to measure their impact on decision makers but recognize they are necessary in every emergency. So, if the LCM data augmented these products, what measurable impact can we say it had?

The challenge in quantifying the impact of information products in situations such as the Libya crisis is they tend to be incomparable to other situations and may yield very skewed outcomes. For OCHA, the impact the volunteers had on the efficiency of the operations and quality of decisions being made is perhaps more interesting. This impact can be more easily quantified by assessing the effectiveness of the decision makers using the maps as input and compared to their workload in other crisis before the SBTF was put into action. This quantifying research is currently being conducted, but on our preliminary qualitative input we can already see that the SBTF has a significant impact on OCHA’s way of working.

The unexpected impact? How we now work differently.

There are three core areas in this collaboration that have influenced OCHA’s work:

1) Speed: as noted in my blog post on UN Dispatch at the end of March, I outlined how much faster we could produce standard IM products in the early phases of an emergency when working with remote volunteers and/or staff. It was quite stark and significant.

2) Connection / Communication: The information management team in OCHA HQ was quite impressed with how well the always-open, tiered Skype chats worked in collaborating with the self-organized task-team based volunteers. The team has taken this approach and opened our own group for OCHA Information Management Officers [which has really made our internal IM Community of Practice flourish and provide support to each other]. We have leveraged the same approach to help incorporate field-based staff into the development of standard tools and software – something we were rather poor at in the past. As well, when we had one IMO responding to floods in Cambodia, we asked for OCHA IM volunteers and placed them in a dedicated Skype group. We ended up with IMOs from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia and Haiti helping out with the efforts.  The OCHA IM team is really learning how we can leverage remote support and are incorporating these concepts into traditional mechanisms.

3) Collaboration Platforms: to collaborate with the external volunteers, we had no choice but to accept the use of non-UN standard software [e.g. Skype and Google Docs]. However, the abilities that these modern tools unlocked helped some of our traditionally skeptical staff members realize there are better ways of working.  It has started a culture change [even if slow].

So, you can easily deduce that OCHA is adopting concepts from the SBTF work style. How much of an impact is that?  Perhaps not quantitatively measurable, but could be qualitatively described a “big”.

But, what challenges arose from the use of new technology and the volunteers?

The challenges can be summarized into three categories:

1. Zoom Level. The volunteers tend to want to work at the highest possible zoom [i.e. close to the affected] and we can understand that desire. However, large responding agencies are dealing with multi-million dollar programme spanning across millions of people in countless locations.  Although they are concerned for the individuals, they need information at a different ‘zoom level’ in order to assess, plan and respond. Thus, we need to ensure that there is a way to aggregate the detailed data appropriately for people or organizations working at different zoom levels.

2. Always On. One major benefit of the volunteers, enabled by modern technology, is that they are dispersed around the world resulting in almost 24 hour support. However, the flip-side of that benefit is that the liaison person from the requesting entity can be faced with questions/issues around the clock if structures, messaging and requirements are not defined early. With the task-team structure used by the volunteers in place, we know that OCHA was sheltered from a large number of questions. Still, in the early days, there were a significant number of topics that arose which needed to be addressed. It meant that we had to be connected all the times – from checking Skype over breakfast, to responding to emails while on the bus, to skipping dinner in the evening to review a risk management strategy.

3. Questions. The volunteers are not necessarily experts – and do not pretend to be when they are not. The challenge for the requesting entity is that someone needs to be available to answer hard questions in a very timely manner. In the Libya context, defining appropriate report categories was one of the first and most challenging questions for OCHA to answer and has reconfirmed that standards are needed.

Did ethical questions arise for the UN?

Of course ethical questions arose during the LCM deployment. They were not specific to the UN. In the Libya context, we dealt with three specific issues:

1. Identify. We did not want any information provided in the LCM that could be used to identify the individual who reported.

2. Location. To avoid anyone from being able to pinpoint anyone reporting, the data was generally anonymized to the centroid of the city it was reported from.

3. Do No Harm. Given the situation in Libya was conflict-based, we needed to ensure that whatever we did minimized the chance of causing anyone harm.

Early in the deployment, OCHA made a decision to run two separate websites. The private site would hold all original data and only be accessible to approved agencies. The public site would show no identifiable information and the data would be delayed by 24 hours. Some have argued that two sites were not necessary [e.g. everything private or only have the anonymized public site], but all we can say is that “It worked”.

What is OCHA doing now?

In June, OCHA held a lessons learned workshop with several of the V&TC entities with whom we collaborated with either for Libya or Japan. That workshop pointed towards 9 thematic Communities of Interest (COIs) to be developed to ensure future collaboration can be maximized [see the final report]. OCHA has been pushing these forward in an attempt to get them started and hosted a one-day meeting with the COI leaders prior to ICCM 2011. [Note: originally a Humanitarian Standby Task Force was suggested, but it has morphed to a 'network-of-networks' concept - which will likely be called the Digital Humanitarians - and be designed to receive requests for virtual support and then find the appropriate entities to support those requests]. In the Libya and Japan crisis, OCHA received support from several V&TCs which resulted in some (positive) unexpected impact and we want to continue to explore and understand the possibilities through the COIs mechanism to help maximize the benefit and effectiveness of V&TC engagements with the traditional humanitarian entities.

This collaboration, amongst others recently, has helped to show OCHA’s IM team that we need to open up our work, our data, and our ideas to external parties very much in accordance with the principles Dan Tapscott outlined in Macrowikinomics: Collaboration, Openness, Sharing, Integrity and Interdependence. We are no longer in an era where good ideas only come from inside our own organization, but rather in a time where we have to be open and ready to receive them from outside.

Participants in November 2011 COI Leadership meeting included: Crisis Commons, Crisis Mappers, Geeks without Bounds, GISCorp, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, HOT (OSM), ICT4Peace, Internews, ISCRAM (Tilburg University), MapAction, Missing Persons Community, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, NetHope, SBTF, UN Foundation, UNHCR, UN-OCHA, UN-SPIDER, University of Munser, UNOSAT, Ushahidi, US State Department (HIU),  Woodrow Wilson Center, World Vision

Posted in Crisis, Data, Deployment, Partnerships, Ushahidi, crowdsourcing. Tagged with , , , , .

By patrick
January 9, 2012

1 comment

John Etherton – Trusted Developer

We are honoured to recommend John Etherton as an Ushahidi Trusted Developer. In addition to being the technical brains behind Ushahidi Liberia, he is a passionate and prolific contributor within Ushahidi Developer community. John often shares his knowledge with new deployers and community members. When we launched Tunis 2.1, John joined our Ushahidi SWAT team to dig into Quality Assurance (QA) testing and add bug fixes.

Trusted Developer Badge

Here’s a full report from Kate Cummings, Program Manager for Ushahidi Liberia:

John is a remarkably talented developer and teacher. He has dedicated much of his time to not only creating contextually relevant plugins and features for Liberia’s Ushahidi instances, but also has spent the last 8 months conducting intro to programming training for the local staff so they can contribute their own code to the Ushahidi platform (and beyond). Working with John is an honor; he’s a natural humanitarian, always seeking ways to combine his technical expertise with pressing needs in places like Liberia.

The Simple Groups plugin – allowing multiple organizations composed of several unique users to have private admin access to the same Ushahidi instance. Each group has a private admin page that contains their own messages, reports, and admin map. Here are features we’ve added for groups:

  • Whitelisted phone numbers – trusted sources’ phone numbers can be linked to particular groups
  • Tagged reports – each group’s report is tagged with the organization’s logo so viewers can quickly identify the source that has approved and determined the verification status of the report
  • Admin Map plugin– many partners to keep certain reports temporarily private due to their sensitive content. We created the Admin Map on each group’s admin page that shows all unapproved reports as black.

More features of Admin Map:

  • Multiple categories can be compared at once using the Boolean functions OR and AND. These logical operators give groups a new way to look for trends in their data
  • All of these features have also been added to the instance’s homepage (all except groups’ unapproved reports). Click on the “Big Map” button at the top of the election homepage
  • Location Highlighter - When our partners are turning messages into reports, it can sometimes be difficult to find the message’s location on the map. To expedite this process, the Location Highlighter tool outlines Liberia’s counties and districts on the map to narrow the scope of the search. Because most of our groups work with low bandwidth, the Highlighter’s clear parameters allow admin users to spend less time clicking and dragging across the map and more time searching a clearly defined area
  • Forwarding Messages feature – Because several of our partners have a customized instance and are Simple Group members on a shared instance (like Liberia 2011 or LERN), the “forward messages” feature was added so messages could be shared between the admin sides of both instances. We also created a code library for interacting with the Ushahidi API; this made it easier to use the API for forwarding messages, and will make it easier for all Ushahidi developers to interact with the Ushahidi API.
  • Print Map – A map that’s setup to print well on letter and A4 sized paper. This page also adds a key to the map, so when it prints the user can see what categories were selected. The print map page also lets users create a link to just their customized map and selected categories. For example, if you wanted to show someone the reports of violence (one category) and women & children (another category) send them this link generated from the Print Map page at the bottom
  • SMSSync and the platform – After extensive testing led by John Etherton and Ushahidi’s Henry Addo have formed a reliable protocol for operating SMS services in Liberia. Several issues were corrected in the SMSSync plugin and additional software was used on our phones to ensure the phones don’t default to “sleep” mode (which was disabling SMSSync). We now forward SMSs to our Ushahidi instances reliably.
  • iFrame Map - This is for people who want to embed Ushahidi in another website. For an example, see this demonstration. Some of our partners that use the LERN site are using this feature to highlight their maps on their own websites
  • Density map plugin - Another new feature on the instance is Ushahidi’s first Density Map plugin. Located on the right side of the homepage, just above the categories, the Density Map option makes it easier to separate reports by geographic region – in this case, by county. All reports that have been associated with a particular county will show up using the Density Map. This feature was requested by UN OCHA as well as other local partners, and serves as a small step towards making the Ushahidi platform a data analysis tool.
  • Internationalization – Thanks to John’s twice-a-week programming trainings with Ushahidi Liberia’s local staff, many of the plugins written for Liberia have been setup to work in other languages. This helps to ensure the work we do in Liberia can be used in other parts of the world.

Contact John.

About the Ushahidi Trusted Developer Program

We are very thankful for our growing community. Each of their contributions are valued. We started the Ushahidi Trusted Developer Program to recognize excellence in Ushahidi software development.

Previous Posts in this series:
Introducing Ushahidi Badges
Recognizing Ushahidi Deployment Partners

Thanks John for all that you do! And thank you Kate for sharing.

Posted in Community, Deployment, Ushahidi Users. Tagged with , , .

By hleson
January 9, 2012

1 comment

How OGC’s Open GeoSMS serves for Disaster Management

[Guest blog post by Kuo-Yu slayer Chuang from Tawain's Industrial Technology Research Institute, ITRI.]

I’m Kuo-Yu slayer Chuang from ITRI, a government funded research institute in Taiwan. We developed an open standard for exchanging location information via SMS among mobile devices called Open GeoSMS, which has currently been adapted officially by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Several use cases of this standard are shown with the following video:

We introduce Open GeoSMS with a quick and real example. Noritsuna-san is a friend of mine from Japan and a guest researcher in our company. One night, I got an SMS from him saying that he can’t get taxi home since it’s too late. I had no idea where he was and he could not read the street names in Chinese. I thus asked him to send me an Open GeoSMS with our free application. I then got an Open GeoSMS with the coordinate embedded in URL that points to Google Map service. At the end I totally new where he was and drove my little car to rescue him.

In the previous case, Open GeoSMS sent as a peer to peer message between mobile phones. It can be also used between mobile and server in disaster management. Users who have smart phone with GPS for incident report can attach coordinate in SMS with Open GeoSMS format (usually, with an App such as Ushahidi app on Android that we hacked).

This feature enables users to do incident reporting without a data connection. We know some volunteers bring their own smart phones and work with expensive data roaming fee. This feature also enables the backend server to auto-process the geo-tagged report, and insert this POI to map automatically. Rescuing activity or the resource transportation tasks can be assigned with Open GeoSMS for more specific location information. Especially with the offline map supported such as Open Street Map, POI-based information exchange can be easily achieved through Open GeoSMS.

As for the notification, the server doesn’t need to care if the receiver is a smart phone user or not. Open GeoSMS notification is just an SMS and that works for almost every phone. On a smart phone, Open GeoSMS can bring out more information via URL. The latest spec and code are available on Google Code. If the SMS with coordinate is compliant to Open GeoSMS, other applications or services can easily parse it and get the x and y coordinates. Last month during a cyclone simulation of Samoa, PinPointAlerts provided Open GeoSMS as a notification option on http://www.SamoAlert.com so the simulation notification could be sent with this open standard. Our team also shipped five smart phones to Samoa with an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi app installed or this Cyclone Simulation activity. As a result, not only could the general SMS-based incident reports be made, but also the Open GeoSMS style geo-tagged SMS could be sent to server for the possible automation afterwards.

Our team has hacked an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi Android App, now we are working with Ushahidi mobile app team on additional projects to merge our technologies. Our next step is to implement a plug-in for Ushahidi to parse Open GeoSMS in order to gain the automated processing ability. Further objectives include working with offline maps such as Open Street Map (OSM) so users can have a better understanding re incoming Open GeoSMS. For more information and our latest activities, please visit our facebook page.

We really hope this tiny handy open standard can help people in various way :-)

Posted in Development, Mobile, Partnerships, Plugins, Ushahidi Users, reporting. Tagged with , , , , , .

By patrick
December 19, 2011

6 comments

RHoK – The Next Steps for Ushahidi Hacks

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a short and mighty sprint of brains colliding to prototype on solutions on real world problems. RHoK was held on December 2 -5, 2011 around the world. We were delighted to see some projects use Ushahidi.

Being part of a global hacking community supporting open source software is very important to Ushahidi. Community members participated in various cities or virtually. They answered questions, taught each other, and happily, gave us feedback on how we can improve. We hope to support some of the project leaders as they continue to work on these initiatives.

Here are some of the weekend highlights:

Water Quality reporting

watervoice

The co-winner of RHok Montreal, Watervoices, collaborated with RHoK Toronto to build an Ushahidi deployment focused on giving people voice about water quality in Northern Canada. The WaterVoices project was co-lead by Steve Sauder and Melanie Gorka. The teams in both cities included front-end and back-end software developers, international development specialists, emergency managers, graphic designers, open data advocates and researchers. The prototype is currently offline, but you can follow their twitter account (@mywatervoice) to see how they will proceed. To learn more, see a WaterVoices video featuring the RHoK Montreal team members.

Another highlight of this project was testing an easy-to-use application that lets people use Tropo to input data into Ushahidi via SMS. Thanks to the Tropo team for this! It is now available on Github for other people to use and test.

Offline to Online Communications

How to give voice when technology is unavailable is a huge quandary. There were a few hacks that worked with existing solutions testing to Ushahidi. The Reflab team with Francesco Ciriaci leading the charge built an HTML5 hack for reporting Offline/Online. This hack is something that Ushahidi would like to see continue. During RHoK, the DRC map was unable to receive SMS reports due to connection issues. We will be connecting with the various hackers and groups involved during the weekend on this to see how to move it forward, including Geeks without Bounds, Reflab, Mozilla, Tropo and more. The RHok Zurich team worked on Message Carrier (another offline/online communication tool). The code is listed on github.

Also see Francesco Ciriaci’s post on his Mobile Web App for Ushahidi.

Other Ushahidi RHoK Hacks

RHoK Montreal worked on a Security Alert App for Humanitarian Workers. Medicins San Frontieres provided invaluable use case input to the team who created this Ushahidi prototype using Tropo. To learn more, see their presentation and videos (see Part 1 and Part 2).

For two RHoK events (including Rhok Portland this month), Pascal Schuback has been hacking away on SAARRA: Situational Awareness and Rapid Assessment Application using Ushahidi. He continue to work away at this and would really like to know how to have the ruby app work with Ushahidi software. If you have knowledge and can assist, let us know.

Luis Hernando Aguilar, RHoK Bogota lead, had a team of people collaborating on the “Sistema De Control de Simulacro” using Ushahidi to test within official humanitarian simulations.

RHoK Boston participants lead by, Rufus Pollack, hacked on a Pybossa to Ushahidi Geodoing Microtasker (github link).

And, lastly, we’re really excited to see Open NASA’s multi-partnered efforts with The Catalyst Map. Various cities built prototype on how actions plus activists can be connected to big data. Stay tuned for more on that topic.

RHoK in over 30 cities can be very hectic with global collaboration and juggling hacks. If we missed any active projects that used Ushahidi at RHoK or if you want to elaborate on the detail, please add comments below.

We’re excited to see these projects come to fruition and hope to see the next steps!

Posted in Community, Development, Events, Ushahidi, Ushahidi Users. Tagged with , , , .

By hleson
December 15, 2011

3 comments