Revisiting Liberia: impending challenges, opportunities for innovation

When I last wrote about using the Ushahidi platform in Liberia, I talked about crowdsourcing in a place where the crowd often manipulates information and becomes the vehicle for collective vengeance.  In anticipation of Ushahidi’s deployment in Liberia later this month, I have been considering the platform’s potential challenges in this context.  I’d like to address two particular areas of concern – practicing Do No Harm and accurate verification – that are relevant for every Ushahidi deployment and certainly apply in the Liberian context.

Verification: this was the primary concern of each Liberian organization with whom I met in March.  Each of the 18 organizations – ranging from civil society groups to UN departments to government offices – said the need for more decentralized information and different methods for aggregation were critical, but each of them also wondered how incident reports would be verified.  Search for Common Ground (SFCG) an international NGO with a radio network in Liberia, has been dealing with issues of verification for all of its 13 years in-country.  SFCG’s radio hosts regularly receive reports from listeners that they must verify as true or false; over the years, SFCG has developed a methodology for verifying information that gives radio hosts some guidelines for filtering the data they receive.  We will learn a great deal from partners such as SFCG, and this in itself is part of our strategy in Liberia: learn from local organizations who have years of experience working for the public and are also skilled managers of misinformation produced and/or spread by the public. And yet even with the guidance of veteran organizations, users of this platform will face challenges - if only because it is an entirely new approach in Liberia.  This reality came into focus recently when Youth Crime Watch, a Liberian organization using the Ushahidi platform, described the gaming of existing security systems: robbers call the police while they are robbing someone just to keep the phone line busy.  Robbers also send out false leads, so those police who do respond to the call are chasing phantom crooks.  There is, therefore, already an understanding of how to manipulate information.  Another consideration is the sensitivity of incident report titles.  If, say, one report is mapped with the title, “Church burnt in Voinjama”, people from that village may see the report and form a mob to track down the perceived perpetrators, setting off a chain of retaliatory actions. It is clear from these examples that the human filters at each partner organization will serve a crucial role in verifying information.  These individuals are the ones who will be sorting through received messages, determining what information should be displayed on the map, what information is too sensitive for public viewing, and where the sensitive information should be directed in order to facilitate an effective response to the incident.   My colleague and Technical Support Manager, John Etherton and myself will provide training for each organization’s filters, and will determine with each group how they would like to sort and map information.  Verification methods will be developed as we and local partners learn together – this will undoubtedly be a process, and one that no amount of planning could predetermine.  In the first weeks and months of deploying the Ushahidi platform in Liberia, strong relationships with local partners will be perhaps the most important factor in producing effective verification methods.  Each node in this early warning network will have unique information to contribute.  It could be the collective knowledge of this ecosystem that will answer questions that, today, are open-ended. In all international development and humanitarian efforts, Do No Harm is a mantra regularly chanted but infrequently embodied.  Using the Ushahidi platform has the potential, as other early warning approaches have, to cause inadvertent harm in a context where violence is just below the surface and ethnic/political tensions are running high.  The platform is sometimes considered to be more likely to cause harm because it is an open source tool, and therefore accessible to everyone.  While this is a valid concern, the platform - because it is open source – is versatile and can take many forms: partners in Liberia have the option to make internal maps, viewable only by staff; partners may also choose to delay posting sensitive information by several days or a week in order to discourage violent reprisals; partners can create maps that they share exclusively within the early warning community and can explore other avenues such as radio for getting timely information back to the public. Because the tool is different with each deployment, how the platform is used and aggregated information is shared can be specific to each partner organization – and partners can choose to change their use of the platform at any time.  One of the project’s primary objectives in Liberia is to provide organizations on the ground with useful data collection and visualization tools – and the foundation for a network that is Liberian-owned and operated.  NGOs and government agencies may ultimately decide to use the tool for internal purposes; to plan their work, chart progress, solicit feedback from clients and show the public what they’ve accomplished.  This use of the platform would in itself be an improvement in accountability and transparency.  As the Liberian public becomes more familiar with the platform, citizens may come to expect relevant, timely and free access to information – another significant shift for Liberians who currently experience numerous restrictions on information.  In its 2007 Media Sector Mapping Survey, Search for Common Ground commented on the hyper-control of information and communication in Liberia: The top-down approach [of information sharing] is inadequate in the new and complex reality of Liberia today as it is ineffective at communicating ideas, and is even less effective at gathering or collating popular feedback. Despite recognition of this in Government, few ideas or plans exist for changing the institutional informational landscape. As an early warning network grows in Liberia, and nodes in the network use open source tools such as the Ushahidi platform, that missing plan for “informational landscape” reform may finally be in reach. It is important that we keep asking ourselves these questions of appropriate action and verification, and it is just as vital that others in the early warning community and beyond continue raising concerns.  The Ushahidi platform is a shape-shifting tool, and this may be its evolutionary advantage, but the tool can only adapt to new circumstances if its human operators maintain an awareness of the possibilities and limitations of the context.