What is Voice of Kibera?

In the past few weeks, France 24 and Triple Bottom-Line have produced stories about Voice of Kibera, and both stories have been littered with inaccuracies about the project, including naming Ushahidi as the deploying organization, an issue that's been addressed elsewhere on this blog. It's necessary to clear this up and this providie a real-life example of what Patrick addressed in his post, "Read This If You Don't Know What Ushahidi Is." Voice of Kibera, an intiative of Map Kibera,  is a citizen reporting project that uses the Map Kibera digital map and the Ushahidi software to aggregate and visualize information. Voice of Kibera collects local media, including video, as well as reports submitted through the web and via SMS (through the short code 3002). A major goal of the project is to give Kibera residents a chance to report information relevant to them and their community as well as providing a resource for Kiberans to find out more information about the community. The types of reports people can submit are not limited to any themes (as incorrectly indicated in the Triple Bottom-Line article) but rather the reporting is left open so that people can decide what is important. In addition to crowdsouring information, the Voice of Kibera project also has committed "SMS Reporters" who are part of the Editorial Board, which was formed in May. These reporters send in messages regularly but are not limited in the topics; however, hopefully more SMS Reporters will join the corps and will submit information on different predetermined topic areas. The other members of the Editorial Board are the site administrators, approving and creating reports online. The entire team makes all key decisions about the project. I go into length about this to show that Ushahidi is not running this project. There's a committed core team lead by Erica Hagen, co-lead of Map Kibera, which consists of people from different Kibera CBOs, Map Kibera, and those familiar with Ushahidi, mobile technology and project management, Jamie Lundine and me. Despite the number of partners involved in this project, both recent stories on Voice of Kibera have indicated that Ushahidi runs the project, when in fact it's an initiative of Map Kibera run by a number of local partners. Indicating that Ushahidi runs the project is the most glaring error in the Triple Bottom-Line piece. While in the France 24 video, conflating Map Kibera, Voice of Kibera and Ushahidi is the biggest problem. Misrepresentations such as these contribute to the misunderstanding of what Ushahidi is and does. In addition, these types of errors downplay the work of those actually running the project. Successfully managing a project like Voice of Kibera, and all other Ushahidi deployments, for that matter, is a lot of work that takes planning, time, and resources committed by those involved. For example, Voice of Kibera does a lot of offline and multimedia publicizing and promotion of the project, through workshops, speaking at events and by going on local radio to name a few. A second workshop is scheduled for July 14, 2010 where the Editorial Board will introduce the project to others who live and work in Kibera. Follow Voice of Kibera on Twitter @VoiceofKibera.