Deployment of the Week

Flood News bears the bad news of global floods. It is daunting to see so many lives affected by rising waters. This looks like a small team mission to map Floods. There have been a few water maps in the past years including SkFloods and previous Deployment of the Week from Czech Republic.

Small Asks: Community Tasks

Our community site is being retired. Finally. We are on a mission to make our community fully editable and interactive. Earlier this week we moved the Forums to the wiki. Next up, we are moving other community pages. Can you help move content to the wiki?

Some Small Asks

Relevant Research

Resource: Practical Considerations before you Get Started

Resource: Verification – Things to consider

We welcome guest blog posts from the Community and are happy if you wish to Share your map project with everyone.

Angela is working on how the “Small Asks” and technology community plans for each of the software products. We’ll have more on this in the coming month. See our very short, developer survey below.

Things we love!

The Guggenheim Lab is tracking 100 Urban Trends. Check out their great interactive site.

We are super excited that the Data Science Fellows are diving into Ushahidi to help make us better for you:

Announcing our 2nd #dssg project! Helping @ushahidi do smarter crowdsourcing for crisis mapping: http://t.co/cLxmPpEW8i More partners soon.

— Data for Social Good (@datascifellows) June 17, 2013

Speaking of which, did you see that Ushahidi is seeking a joint fellow with Internews for the Knight Mozilla Open News Fellowship. You can build and make in-house! Change Ushahidi.

Upcoming Events

Tactical Tech – Info Activism Camp. I will be attending this important event to learn as much as possible to share back with the Ushahidi community. We are sharing the Security in a Box guidelines to people a few times weekly.

We’re at OSCON again this year. The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is the must-attend gathering of the best and brightest minds in technology. It offers five immersive days of all things open source: new and innovative projects, major enterprise-wide deployments, and—from icons of the open source movement—deep perspective on where we’ve been and where we’re headed. If you like to add, email hleson at ushahidi dot com for the discount code.

I’ll be hosting an Ushahidi Community Casual Meetup in Portland to coincide with OSCON.

Into the Code

Take our Developer Survey. 5 questions to help you get involved

Get a Crowdmap demo:

Sometimes a demo makes all the difference in helping you learn. We created this casual demo hangout all about new Crowdmap. See the Crowdmap user guide to get started. This week’s topic of the week (#tow) is #brazil.

• Add a post and map
• Customize your tiles
• Link your Crowdmap to Twitter and Instagram
• Add posts via email

Ushahidi Core

The ushahidi v3 hit team is set to meet up in London this coming week, in their bid to knock out an Alpha release in the coming weeks. Big thank you goes out to our Mozilla friends based in London for agreeing to host the team .

You can view progress on the v3 github page, and the v3 roadmap on the wiki.

Swiftriver

We’ve reworked the Swift user guide to match the recent changes made to the platform. Have a look. You can also test this out on http://next.swiftapp.com with the following credentials:-

• username: admin
• password: password

Mobile

The SMSSync release has been pushed to Thursday, 27th June, to give room for community testing. Henry will be in touch with more details on what needs to get tested in the coming days, so keep your eyes and ears open on the dev chat and mailing lists.

We now have a base in Nairobi (although we are fundamentally virtual) so the fellowship will give you a chance to come work with us virtually and in real life in Nairobi. There are many options. As the use of the Ushahidi platform, both in downloadable form and Crowdmap grow, so do the possibilities for data science to help gain insight from the data gathered. There is also a worldwide community to tap into and different topics, from Crisis, Elections, Environmental monitoring and City logistics to choose from. We hope to work with people who not only see the importance of giving voice to wider populations and emerging journalistic models, but also have a great civic attitude. Why? Ushahidi (Like Mozilla) is all about building cool things that have impact and reach. Our global community is an exciting one to be a part of. As Dan Sinker Put it…

The Knight-Mozilla Fellowships offer visionary coders, data geeks, civic hackers, engineers, and technologists the opportunity of a lifetime: 10 months to write open-source code with impact, to travel the world, to engage in dynamic communities, and to create tools and projects that help the world to learn more about itself. This is an exciting moment in journalism, and you can be right at the center of it.

Below is a video that explains more about the opportunity

Get your applications in!

We want to make it easier for you to get help and to meet each other. The Ushahidi wiki makes it easy to add pages and rich media content. Plus, it only requires one login. Moving the forums from forums.ushahidi.com to a space inside the wiki means that one search will get you wiki articles plus a relevant forum posts.

We’ve created forum page for each of the Ushahidi products to help you get started:

The wiki software has areas called “spaces“. We now have a “wiki” space and a “forums” space. Your Ushahidi wiki login works for both “spaces”. You can click on “spaces” in the top left hand corner of the top menu to see all your active “spaces”.

How to add a Forum Post

Creating a Forum post is exactly like creating a wiki page. We love that you can easily add screenshots and attachments. You can “watch” pages, make items “sticky” and list articles as “favourites”. Plus, you can link directly to wiki pages. We’ve create How to Use the Forums and an FAQ to get you started. I’d encourage you to search the whole wiki for answer prior to posting a question. We are adding new pages daily. Watch the Activity Stream to see the latest.

Take a deeper dive in the Confluence wiki Forums documentation.

Migration of Forums content

The legacy forums include some rich information and, sadly, some out of date responses. Consider the wiki the “source of truth” for the most up to date documentation. If there is legacy forum post that you consider valuable, please take the time to add it to the wiki. We are tracking wiki documentation gaps and forum migration via this document. We will live the legacy forums live (viewing only) until August 2013. We want to ensure that the most used forums posts become wiki entries. Please help us move over any forum posts that you think are useful.

The Community Hub Project:

This change is part of a three stage change to integrate Ushahidi community touch-points in one wiki hub:

Stage 1 - Move forums to wiki (Today, June 17, 2013)
Stage 2 – Move community site to the wiki, activate community bubbles (July 2013)
Stage 3: Retire community.ushahidi.com and forums.ushahidi.com

This was one of your biggest community asks from the Community survey. We want to provide you with more documentation and answers to help you on your Ushahidi journey.

If you would like to join the Community Site migration team, just drop Heather a line @ hleson AT ushahidi DOT com or ping us on other community channels.

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I’ve been riveted by all the events in Turkey. My thoughts are with citizens and activists. There have been a few questions to our community about who is mapping. Protest and conflict mapping is very hard and complex, please be safe. See Security in a Box. Here are a few examples of projects related to OccupyGezi:

Crowdmap “classic”: There are two active mapping projects: Istanbul Violence and Global Gezi.
New Crowdmap – Search Istanbul, OccupyGezi and Turkey for posts.

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Crowdmap: Topic of the Week

With new Crowdmap, You can now send an email and have that post to your map directly. The “Topic of the Week” is to add a Joke to new Crowdmap. You can tag with #TOW (Topic of the Week)

How to

Send an email to jokes@in.crowdmap.com will put up a post on https://crowdmap.com/map/jokes/

Example Post

Add on your map

You can test this out on your own individual maps by sending an email to [map_name]@in.crowdmap.com.

Events

Crowdmap User Forum – Get a Demo, Ask Questions, Give Feedback. Our next hangout is June 18, 2013 at 09:00 EDT/ 17:00 EAT

Getting Involved in Ushahidi needs a reboot. Join us for our community developer call to share your input. June 17 at 21:00 EDT.

Data, Data, Data

Ushahidians work with data every day. Today we hosted a chat with our friends at the engine room and ihub Research about some of the ethical considerations that data researchers need to consider.

Summary:

Christopher Wilson, the engine room, rightfully pointed out that this discussion could lead into many sessions. Simply put, there is a myriad of critical topics. In our discussion of Internal Review Boards (IRB), we considered how each runs differently and don’t have real-time standards. As Jennifer Chan of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative pointed out: “the IRB cycles might not match the ever-changing real-time flow.”

There is no one source to get the data standards, guidelines and research ethics for best practices in development. Anahi Ayala Iaccuci, Internews and Standby Task Force, and others are creating a Tech Salon series on this Ethics in Development. This will provide a resource for the wider community. Anahi advised that:

“it is shocking that in the digital space – organizations don’t understand. Sometimes folks just give up. It is hard to incorporate all the data ethic standards and keep up with the technology and ethics.”

Ihub Research will be releasing their Umati report next week. We look forward to sharing this important research into monitoring dangerous speech.

Intro – Data Ethics in Research:

Dr. Collette Mazzucelli, Adjunct Associate Professor, Center for Global Affairs @ NYU, was presenting today at Montreal Institute of Genocide and Human Rights – Concordia University:

C. Mazucelli: @ushahidi platform challenge is #bigdata.Volume of data in #Kenya elections was huge and system faced limitations #migs2013

— MIGS (@MIGSinstitute) June 12, 2013

Iran Voices: Deployment of the Week

Iran Voices and echoes collected news and reports from different cities of Iran are less media attention has been created. We recognize their difficult work as Deployment of the Week. Hat tip to Global Voices for helping amplify this project.

Previous Deployment of the Week winner, Aztecast, an application that allows the SDSU community to view, post and share events happening on and around San Diego State University, has new mobile apps in Android and ios.

Swiftriver

Emmanuel’s rolling out the upgrades made over the past few months to the main site. Propagation of the data is taking some time, but we’re hopeful that this can get done within the next few days or so.

Ushahidi Core

We managed to knock out two big issues that have been affecting 2.7 users:

• CSV Upload issues
• Custom form validation issues

These fixes have been propagated on Crowdmap classic due to their urgent nature. If you are using custom installs, you can pull in changes to test them out.

A huge shout out goes out to Neil Horning and his HimalayanTechies team, who’ve worked on the KML Filter and Export Reports plugin. You can download and test these two plugins out from their respective github repos listed below:

• Export Reports
• KML Filter

Ushahidi 3.0 aka the next generation

On the 3.0 front, in line with Robbie’s thoughts on designing the v3 API, work on authentication is ongoing. Have a look at some of the work being done on access control functionality on the 3.0 Github repository.

Mobile

Henry’s managed to fix an issue on SMSSync that causes the app to slow down and crash when trying to import messages. See the github issue here. The next SMSSync release is expected to be June 20, 2013.

BRCK

Didn’t get to order a BRCK during the kickstarter campaign? You can now preorder yours today!

Happy Mapping!

On this World Environment Day, we recognize the work of Krizova Mapa, Louisiana Bucket Brigade and all the community mappers who want to help the Earth talk back with their projects.

We are hosting our first Data Ethics introduction discussion. Research ethics are key to a successful project. Join us for our guests engine room and ihub research to G+ hangout to learn more.

Deployment of the week

We recognize Krizvoa Mapa Ceska and the amazing team including Ushahidi community leader, Jaroslav Valuch, as Deployment of the Week. The Krizova Mapa team are sharing the stories of those affected by spring flooding. It is great to see this project initiated by a local Television station.

Citizen crisiscrowdsourcing & Media broadcasting mashed krizovamapa.cz .1600 reps/3 days. @ushahidi @sbtf #floods pic.twitter.com/asS1CgHF9q

— Jaroslav Valuch (@jvaluch) June 5, 2013

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The Louisiana Bucket Brigade was featured on NPR and Public Integrity:

“…Exxon revealed the benzene total was actually 31,022 pounds — nearly four times what the refinery released in upset events in eight years, according to company reports compiled by the nonprofit Louisiana Bucket Brigade.”

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade has been working very hard to unite offline and online mapping of these long term issues. (See our Environmental G+ hangout featuring LBB to learn more.)

See more examples of Environmental Maps.

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Congratulations to Community leader, Justine MacKinnon for being recognized for her community mapping leadership with the First Women of Public Service shortlist.

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Have an idea that needs funding?

Knight Foundation has a community information challenge. You can apply until July 1, 2013

Ushahidi Events

We’re on a mission to get you talking and building! This month we will host research and software meetups. Remember, if you’d like to host a meetup, simply contact us – info at ushahidi dot com. See our event tips on the wiki.

Intro – Ethics in Research. Join our Google+ Hangout on Wednesday, June 12th at 11:00 EDT

Ushahidi Community Developer Skype chat: Register for Monday, June 17th at 21:00 EDT.

Crowdmap Community Forum. Share your feedback, get a demo and help build Crowdmap. This is an open community chat. Tuesday, June 18th at 09:00 EDT on G+ Hangout.

Into the code

BRCK

30 days, and 1078 backers later, we are $172,107 funded! Thank you so much for everyone’s support. It’s been an incredible ride!

Ushahidi v3

Work in UI prototypes is set to begin soon. You can keep track of the work our awesome designers will be up to on this github repository.

Mobile

Some updates were made to the Android app recently. Head over to the appstore and update yours if you haven’t yet.

For those interested in jumping into mobile code, documentation on how to build the android app has also been updated.

SwiftRiver

Emmanuel started putting together additional docs for swift in light of changes that the team has been working on for the last 2-3 month. Here’s an overview of the components that make up the swift app. The staging area for the latest code base is up http://next.swiftapp.com

The docs are still a work in progress, so some sections are still incomplete, but getting there. Have a look!

NYC Mapper meetup

We had a great NYC meetup last night. For us, it is magic to put all the diverse community folks in the same room. Corruption, crisis, environmental, city and community mappers brain storming with researchers, NGOs and developers. It is why we host casual chats. Here’s a quick reunion shot featuring some of the participants:

Tom Gillis (map.occupy.net), Wansoo Im (Community mapping), Hal Seki (OSM Japan, Sinai.info), Heather, Daniel Latorre (City mapping) Serdar (Change.org), Hiroyasu “Ichi” Ichikawa (Social Company, sinsai.info)

Apparently, we need to go hat shopping for the next meetup. (Photo via Ichi)
Happy mapping!

sandstorm from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Sandstorm is a legendary canvas and leather bag company in Kenya, they design and fabricate all of their bags here and do it at a world-class level. I personally carry their fishing bag as my laptop bag wherever I go globally.

The BRCK team met up with Mark Stephenson, Managing Director of Sandstorm, to talk about a special slip cover for the BRCK. We discussed it at length, talking about a rugged leather and canvas cover that would shield the BRCK from some bumps and bruises while banging around in the Land Rover or hanging from a tree somewhere out in the African bush.

The Sandstorm team came back to us today with 7 different prototypes, and we narrowed it down to this final version which will become more polished in the next week (we’ll send updated pictures at that time). It sort of reminds us of a World War II radioman’s piece of kit, which is tough and has all the feel of something that was made to protect and also make your BRCK more useful.

The BRCK + Sandstorm sleeve features access to all of the ports. It has a leather strap across the top, which adds extra dust protection to your already rugged BRCK. On the back we’re adding a belt loop, which a carabiner will be attached to. This allows you to hang your BRCK from a multitude of places. There’s a clear plastic cover on the top, so you can see the power button and tell from the glow color (green or blue) whether your device is on primary or secondary power or connectivity.

To all of our $300+ backers, we hope you like the BRCK+Sandstorm sleeve as much as we do.

- Erik for the Ushahidi team

With just under 30 hours to go, we have 981 backers and $153,893 contributed. Huge! Your support has made all the difference. We are humbled.

Everyone’s comments have been greatly appreciated as well. It’s helped inform some final parts of our design process BRCK v1 and given us some great ideas for v2.

In this last day of the kickstarter, help us get the word out to an even wider network.  We have to admit, it would be awesome to break 1000 supporters, it just has the magic number feel. So if you could email one friend, post, or tweet out, it would mean the world to us. Here is a sample tweet you could use:

“24 hours left in #BRCK Kickstarter http://t.co/xuRE9WaiOY 1000 supporters for @brcknet would be so cool! Last chance – Please RT!”

We plan to have an online pre-ordering system for people who miss the boat here, but all Kickstarter supporters are going to be first in line, so now is your chance to get one of the first BRCKs!

We also have one of the big prizes left – the Silicon Savannah BRCK Safari. An epic trip around Kenya with the Ushahidi gang to product test the BRCK in all sorts of wild environments. From rhino charges to coastal excursions, from the iHub to anything else we can dream up – it’ll be a trip to remember, guaranteed.

And lastly, thank you all again so much.

The Ushahidi Gang

Courtesy: HarassMap

There is nothing more empowering than enacting the change that you wish to see; and along the way, battling the stereotypes and the social stigma that sexual harassment brings. This is what HarassMap continues to do, as Egypt’s first independent initiative to directly address sexual harassment; seeking change in the Egyptian society at an ambitious level. To be on the street, processing and mapping text messages, emails, calls, and locally reported incidents is a challenge in itself. After 8 years of research, and 3 years of mapping reported incidents, HarassMap has proven they are capable and are ready to take the next step in their campaign’s journey.

In 2013, one UN Study found that 99.3% of Egyptian women admitted being sexually harassed. This is a massive problem! With HarassMap, these statistics are visualized and encourages men and women who are sexually harassed to speak up, to report it, to share their story with fellow citizens, and with the world. They continue to prove that the demographics and stereotypes that have been accepted are false and show no predictable trends of any kind. HarassMap needs to raise national awareness; in order to progress further, HarassMap now seeks to “change the perceptions associated with sexual harassment and create a positive association with standing up to harassment.”

HarassMap plans to produce a high quality national campaign, to help bring an end to the resigned and passive attitudes towards sexual harassment found in a majority of Egypt’s population. The full-scale and multifaceted plan to reach out across the nation involves everything from television commercials, radio and print ads, to guerrilla marketing, giveaways and street art. Of course, an effective, top quality media campaign needs to be produced, and worked on tirelessly.

Support Harassmap’s Crowdfund

HarassMap has started a crowdfunding page for these aspiring and high-reaching goals, in which they detail past history, awards, and an in-depth plan on how they will move forward, and bring awareness of sexual harassment into” hopefully every [Egyptian] household” with their bold new media campaign plan.

Courtesy: HarassMap

Even if you are not able help monetarily, there are so many other ways to help make this a reality for this ever expanding campaign; help by sharing their crowdfunding campaign on social media and by following them on their Facebook Twitter accounts, help by donating your time as a volunteer (send an email to volunteer@harassmap.org, help by directing people to Harassmap to report, and most importantly you can help by reporting sexual harassment if it happens to you, or if you witness it, by telling HarassMap what happened, and where.

HarassMap also empowers activists and their communities worldwide… as their crowdfunding page notes, “HarassMap has already launched in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India; projects in progress include Libya, Turkey, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, US, Canada, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Cambodia, Morocco and a group of countries in South America.”

About Harassmap

HarassMap was launched in 2010, with 4 volunteers using Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS, approaching members of the community little by little, and day by day. Until June 2012, HarassMap was a 100% volunteer initiative. Today HarassMap is has 4 founders, 13 paid staff, and approximately 700 volunteers in 13 governorates around Egypt, including Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Qaliubiya, Minya, Gharbia, Beni Suef, Faiyum, Port Said, Dakahlia, Assiut, Sohag and the Red Sea mobilized throughout neighborhoods and communities.

These volunteers still reach out to people on the street. They help to dispel myths and misconceptions concerning sexual harassment, they encourage members throughout their community to not accept sexual harassment, and to not stand idly by if they see sexual harassment occurring. One of the tools volunteers use for community empowerment, has been the truth. Truth that more and more people are being able to visually see in their neighborhood the incidents of sexual harassment that happen around them every day, thanks to HarassMap. One course of action community members can take is to declare and designate the area in which they work a “Safe Zone.”

Before HarassMap, it was easy to deny the reality of sexual harassment. As co-founder Rebecca Chiao explained at a TEDx Talk: she gave last year, “Every day, more and more people are taking action, with us, or on their own, and person by person, they are all getting us closer to the day we will reach a tipping point in our streets, and harassers will no longer be tolerated.”

Deployment of the Week

The Media Council of Kenya aims to instil, maintain and protect press freedom in Kenya. They are Deployment of the Week:

Upcoming Events

May 30 -31, 2013 Upgrade Days
Upgrading is easy, with a little help from friends Sign up if you need help or can help

Tuesday, June 4, 2013: NYC Casual Meetup. Join us to talk about your projects, meet the team and be inspired by NYC Mappers and makers.

June 6 – 7, 2013: Personal Democracy Forum. It is one of our favourite brain fests combining politics, democracy and technology. Ethan Zuckerman, Ushahidi Board Member, will be speaking. Tickets are still available. Follow #PDF13

June 12, 2013 Research and Ethics in Data Collection (a primer).
Ushahidi is used for data collection by diverse organizations for a variety of map missions from election monitoring, corruption and human rights. In our research community, we’ve been discussing ethics in research. Join our guests engine room and ihub research for a round table introduction to what to consider before starting your data mapping project.
(We’ve been talking about this article highlighting the importance of ethics in data collection.)

Crowdmap: using Embed Codes

Team Crowdmap is adding code everyday. We know that you want to embed and port data to your community and your networks. See how easy it is on our wiki how to.

Hi @Crowdmap, how can you embed the new beta maps into sites? Thanks!

— RenewableUK Cymru (@RUKCymru) May 15, 2013

In the news

We are super honoured to be included in the Governance Report 2013.

Help Wanted

Haalaat.com is a platform for aggregation, crowd-sourcing, mapping, distribution, and analysis of incidents of crime, violence, and other public nuisance across Pakistan. With more than 700 reports and close to 100,000 subscribers on Facebook in less than three months, the website has received a great response. The goal is to be a central database with which average users, journalists, think tanks, experts, and law enforcement agencies alike can interact in an easy and innovative way, making sure that the endless opportunities that technology has given us are availed to the max. We are extremely excited about discussing and sharing ideas so if you are interested, feel free to drop us an email at info AT haalaat DOT com.

Into the Code

We held our second BRCK Google Hangout. In this 1 hour session, we dive into the tech details including the differences to MiFi, ways to BRCK hack, BRCK uses, What’s in the box? or Will it blend?

SMSSync

More bug fixing is underway, with a release scheduled in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we move closer to the release date.

Ushahidi Core

The teams are working on API fine-tuning and UI implementation.

Swift

Work on the new UI and data migration is still ongoing, but should be done in the coming weeks. Stay tuned to the wiki and mailing list for updates coming soon.

Fun tools to play with your data

Scrollkit

This post is about what to consider when you are planning a pilot project to test a bigger data collection project. Data collection can provide information to power your campaign and the process of collecting it can win communities’ support. But it’s not easy to set up a data collection project to inform and power an advocacy campaign.

It’s challenging to identify the right strategy and tools. It’s easy to waste time, energy, money, and contacts with an over-reaching project that hasn’t been tested with a pilot. Have you heard yourself describe your project and think: “That project would be amazing if everything worked out perfectly. But I have no idea if it will succeed and I don’t even know where to begin.”? Thinking through how to effectively pilot may be the next logical step in launching your project.

But what is a pilot, and how can you go about designing one? This post aims to work through the biggest problems in designing a pilot, and provide some guidance for how to do it effectively.

Informative Failure

Failure can be a wonderful thing. To fail well, it’s important to design a project so that when something always breaks, you can tell what piece was responsible for the failure. For failure to be informative, you must be able to isolate the cause.

Anticipating and embracing failure, and isolating its causes can be challenging, but it is much easier if you design a pilot that starts small, changes fast, and is well-documented. If a project starts out too large, it won’t be clear what variables were the source of the failure. If a project changes too slowly, it will be challenging to eliminate the points of failure or stumble on innovative and effective methods. And if a pilot isn’t well documented, it will be much more difficult to identify and monitor failure.

But what does it mean to start small? And what pieces and parts of a pilot should you consider in your design and planning?

Pilot Project Components

1. Scope and Issue

Starting a project that covers every issue from the outset is bound to fail — and not in a good way. Saying you want to monitor and support citizens in tracking every component of government service delivery will lead to frustration and chaotic failure. Picking a very focused issue area (rather than maternal health – access to pre-natal vitamins, rather than election “fairness” – opening and closing time of polling stations) can make success easier to track. Selecting small subsets of issues leaves you with tangible data about a specific issue, and it also means more targeted engagement with communities. It gives you great statistics, and it also increases the chances that your campaign will resonate. The next time you ask a maternal health related question, you want pilot community members to remember you and your project.

• Do be as specific as possible with your issue that you want to cover in your pilot. Also have a general idea about what outcomes you need to understand how best to scale. An informative pilot is a success in its own right.
• Don’t set yourself up for frustration and disappointment by picking an issue to tackle that is too broad.

2. Geography

Geographic scope of a project can play a huge role in the success of a pilot. Starting with a whole country, or even a whole city can doom a pilot. Think about a dead Ushahidi map with 40 reports across a country of 40 million people. That broad geographic scope makes it challenging to get others involved, and it makes the project easy to ignore. Choose one neighborhood and get everyone involved in a pilot, and then you have a story. You can establish relationships with the community and get feedback on what their expectations are for your project. You can carefully document who engages. We’ll talk more later about making sound choices when selecting geographic scope, but keep it in mind when considering other variables.

• Do think small. Make sure you think about the smallest, most feasible-sized place to test your project. Pick a geography that you have the resources to cover and cover well. Think about the place where your strongest and most supportive constituency can help you test your idea.
• Don’t pick a geographic scope that you don’t have the resources to cover. Don’t introduce your organization or project to an entirely new constituency in a place you don’t know well. And don’t go too big to test variables or make your team feel like they haven’t accomplished anything at the end of the pilot. You want a win and you want a success story.

3. Data Gatherers or Contributors

Your data collection project won’t succeed without people to collect and contribute data. If you already have a community or group of people who you know will be good data gatherers or contributors, start there. If there are other groups of people who already work together or associate who would be good for these jobs, speak with them about collaborating. It might be easiest to work with a group of people who are located near one another. If you know of a well-connected group that doesn’t live near one another, that may work well too.

• Do let the pilot community know what you are working towards. Do collect contact information and make sure to follow-up with the community if outreach and community building is a component of your project.
• Don’t collect unnecessary information or information that will put your pilot community at risk. Why collect national ID numbers if you don’t need them? If you are planning on sharing information you collect, make sure you tell the people you are collecting information from. There is no better way to burn bridges with your pilot community (and your larger project) than betraying their trust.

4. Audience

Who do you want to win over and who are you trying to reach? Before you step out on a limb and scale a project, it is important to provide likely supporters the chance to help out (through volunteer hours, donations, awareness raising, etc). It is also critical to understand who your message and project are meant to reach. There are lots of resources to do this. Here is a simple starter site for stakeholder analysis. Are you trying to influence government? The general public? Civil society? Women living in poverty in rural areas of your country? Knowing who you want to reach is the most important part of designing a project.

5. Supporters

Some people you reach out to will be more supportive than others. You won’t need to convince them of what you are working on, and you may even be able to get them involved in the project. Will you need more volunteers for the next phase of the project? Then you will need to target your pilot community to build a network of people that are not only willing to participate in your pilot project, but also so committed that they are willing to work with you in coming phases of the project. Is there a vocal politician that can champion your cause? Is there a well-networked neighborhood that would be a helpful, captive audience interested in making your project a success?

6. Budget

Pilots are hard to budget because they change so fast and are hard to predict. Always be on the lookout for hidden costs. Just because the software you want to use is free does not mean that it won’t cost time, energy, and resources to get up and running and to maintain. While technologies make it technically feasible to contact just about everyone in your country, don’t let the reach of technology distract. In mobile projects, starting a data collection campaign with a blast of SMSs to a huge list of numbers is popular. This kind of SMS blast is very expensive. A pilot is a good way to test a project idea on a small sample, and use the pilot as a way to iterate before spending a lot of money on a larger, follow-on bigger blast. Keep in mind that pilots are a great way to prove a concept before your boss or donor spends the big bucks on it. It also shows that you are keen to not waste money.

7. Incorporating a Pilot Phase in Project Proposals

It’s common to include a pilot phase in project proposals, and this is a good first step. But, having a paragraph on piloting won’t help the project if the rest of the proposal still commits to specific activities that haven’t been tested by the pilot phase. Proposals can include flexibility by openly describing the way a pilot may influence the development of the project. Make sure that project benchmarks are specific enough to be useful, but open enough to be adapted when you learn from the pilot phase.Donors like to see openness and honesty about how a project will unfold and how you are preparing for unpredictability. Flexibility is key. And while it can be challenging to plan flexibility into your projects, showing donors that you are considering how to test ideas and design as you learn from testing will show them that you are thinking ahead and thinking creatively.

• Do try to use clear and frank language about the importance of running pilots. Be clear about challenges and opportunities and how you plan on managing a responsive and evolving project while also staying on course to meet your obligations to donors. Try to structure pilots in proposals so that they have real capacity to influence the way projects are planned and rolled out.
• Don’t just say you are running a pilot as part of your project because you think it sounds good.

8. Results and Narrative

Documenting impact in a pilot project is critical to justify and design scaling. What results do you want your pilot to have? What do you want to learn from your pilot? The outcome of a pilot can be a subset of the outcome you want out of a project, or it can be tangible proof that the project will work (even if you expect the project to work differently than the pilot did). Document, document, document. After a pilot project it’s important to have a compelling story to tell. Who did you reach? What statistics and hard numbers can you show to document your work? How will this pilot function if scaled? What would you change if you could do it again?

Let us know if we missed an element of pilot design or if you want to share an example of a successful or failtastic pilot project. We will be putting together a decision process for pilot design as a next installment. We are also happy to talk to you about your project if you want help thinking through how to design a pilot to test your concept.

Also, thanks to Chris Albon at FrontLineSMS for helping me think through some of these issues!