Ushahidi-Haiti: Closing the Feedback Loop

Jaroslav Valuch is our Ushahidi Field Representative. He was the first to join the Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts Team to deploy the platform and he has been in Haiti for over 3 weeks. Jaroslav is from the Czech Republic and a Hubert Humphrey/Fulbright Fellow at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. In 2009 he worked in Burma as a relief and capacity building projects coordinator.

It’s been one month since I returned from holiday in the Czech Republic to Washington DC to carry on with my Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program at University of Maryland, Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Yet in the plane I was thinking about where to start my professional affiliation, which is an essential part of my fellowship. Before Christmas, I had the chance to meet Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, chatting about my experience from Burma and about the potential of new technologies in human rights and development in general. He connected me to other people like the great folks from Digital Democracy.

I had no idea that few hours after my departure in DC in January I would be in Patrick’s living room at The Fletcher School in Boston tracking any available sources of information coming from the earthquake hit Haiti and submitting them to Ushahidi.

Things were moving incredibly quickly—more and more volunteers joining, more information available, especially after the 4636 short code was announced. In order to process the load of information, teams of developers were 24/7 working on the system, the team at Fletcher/Tufts kept improving the way of processing messages from hour to hour in order to ensure that they are processed as quickly as possible. In the mean time, trainings for dozens and hundreds of new volunteers were taking place together with online trainings for teams in Geneva, DC, Portland… The pace was incredibly rapid; it had its up and downs. It is a big responsibility to ask people in the most desperate situations you can imagine to send a text message to some anonymous number.

The initial plan was to simply map those incidents to give to anyone interested a clear picture of the situation on the ground. One simply cannot expect that the rescue teams and other responders will be online on Port-au-prince airport checking the Ushahidi web in real time. But luckily, as many times during the whole operation, amazing things happened: phone-call from US Coast Guards followed by requests to feed them with any incidents that are “actionable”—i.e., those that report accurate location and give specific information on the situation: trapped person, serious injuries, food and water shortage… The loop was closed. Things on the ground started moving. However, that’s what we know now. At there time, there was no immediate feedback on what actions were taken based on the reports we provided. There was no time for that. We were just sitting in the Situation Room, watching the stream of messages and processing them, hoping that somebody on the ground was responding. Hundreds of volunteers did the same, putting all effort into something with no clear idea of it’s worth. We got pretty decent media coverage—it is sexy to report how new media are saving lives, but at that time nobody actually knew what exactly was going on. Not us in the center of it, and hardly anyone who was reporting it. We know now that some responders used Ushahidi-Haiti extensively. I am in Port-au-Prince now ensuring that we will link the stream of reports from Ushahidi to coordination structures here on the ground. It is great to have unique reports from the ground accurately mapped, but without having a relevant responder on the other end it is only half of the job. The emergency phase is to large extent over and the early recovery phase requires more coordination and distribution of information to a variety of humanitarian actors. Closing this loop is priority again. Single incidents reported through SMS are replaced by the needs of whole communities. The task is now to deal with the situation of hundreds of thousands people stacked in improvised IDP camps all around before the rainy season starts (and before they’ll get upset with the pace of humanitarian response). It will be difficult to provide everyone with proper shelter before the rains start. But for us, the question is simple: how can Ushahidi contribute to the overall effort to maximize the efficiency of the response? Ushahidi was originally used to track individual violent incidents but is now transforming into a platform dealing with reports on the situation of populations, but still using the same source of information–short message sent by individuals. We obviously can't expect that action will be taken on every single SMS report, unless it is a life/death situation such as serious injury. The power is in aggregation—more messages reporting similar incidents from one location mean more relevant and reliable report. Diversification of sources of information is needed, as well as improved verification of this information. The Haitian diaspora and other partners already stepped into this process and very soon the Ushahidi reporting will shift to a totally new dimension. Ushahidi reporting won't replace the needs assessments being conducted on the ground by teams of relief workers. But they can fill the gaps, indicate some irregularities, they can be sentinels of some emerging dangerous trends. Furthermore, local communities should have a channel that will bring their concerns to the right places. More and more we  hear complaints of numerous local initiatives that the whole humanitarian process is almost exclusively top-down. “We feel like foreigners in our own country” is only one of the many comments I have overheard. It is not easy for them to take part in high-level decision-making processes—lack of appropriate knowledge and experience in the UN driven coordination system might be only part of the problem, impossibility to pass security gates at UN logbase where most of the meetings take place is trivial but still very common obstacle. And similarly, the people on the ground have to be informed about the humanitarian and development efforts. Internews and Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) took the lead in this—by providing support to local radio stations and journalists and by emergency information service sending essential information through SMS to the affected communities. Deploying Ushahidi in Haiti was rapid with no preexisting structures and channels in place on the ground. And it is quite an exciting idea to imagine that next time the links will be already established. Simply, way less people will die. The first two days in Port au Prince were quite surreal for me. Of course I knew the place already from the satellite imagery and Google Earth, but being here personally is a bit different. One gets quite used to the images of destruction around, especially with a lot of work to do and great supportive people around. But no matter how intense it was, the most impressive experience for me are still the first days at Fletcher school with all the great people around; the energy, commitment and readiness to accept responsibility is something I will hardly forget.