The Nangahar Connect deployment, which crowd sources information on commodity prices of beef, veal, milk, corn, wheat[Commodities], labour prices, service prices etc. This is a deployment that is well populated with information, run by the ministry of Agriculture and uses the Ushahidi Cloud based application (Crowdmap). What struck us about this deployment is first, the amount of data available. Substantial. Khalid Amini, the Manager of Geospatial services at Afghanistan Information Management Services AIMS commented that the data was accurate.  We explored the map more on mobile by using the filter capability on the mobile app mentioned above. Mohammad Nasir Shir, The Executive Director of Gisworking.af explored with us and we found that the deployment also included diesel prices. Mr. Mohammad noticed that there was information about fuel prices in an area that is relatively dangerous to be in and that it was great to have access to such information online and on mobile.We were speechless at both observations; Because we just discovered a great source of information that is geolocated, contextual and relevant to Afghanis. It is encouraging that our platform and service is of use to the Ministry of Agriculture in Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan. Explore the map and add the irrigation channel layer provided on the site. Many thanks to the Ministry for doing this deployment, we are certainly in awe of what has been achieved thus far.

As we go into 2012,the experience underscored our plans at Ushahidi to organize Crowdmaps by country so that discoverability of initiatives like this can be more commonplace and easier than it is right now. We are inspired and encouraged by the various uses, and this particular deployment gives us a glimpse at how useful contextual information can be disseminated, and how layers can be used to provide even more context. We will continue to explore and bring you ways to engage with and contribute to Crowdmaps around the world, on issues that you care about on a local level.

When you get speechless about discovering something together, the thing you do is take a picture right? Right. This is the picture we took to remember this joint moment of discovery and awe. That the picture was taken by Dr. Michael Gould of ESRI adds another of awesome doesn’t it. In case you missed it, ESRI has been a great technology partner for Ushahidi. Data feeds from Ushahidi deployments, Flickr and other geo services can be overlaid on custom ESRI maps.

Ah. Khalid Amini AIMS, Angela and Juliana of Ushahidi, Mohammad Nasir Shir and Bilal Ahmad of Gisworking.af

Since that last announcement two years ago, Ushahidi has grown as a team, a community and an organization. We’ve seen the deploying community come up with amazing new uses of the software, multiple translations and this simple idea of changing the way information flows has now become global, with over 20,000 deployments in 132 countries.

We’re now moving into the next phase of Ushahidi, where we’re exploring ways to diversify funding away from our historically private foundation grant funding, by increasing earned income revenue. This includes direct customer revenue through Crowdmap, B2B revenue through SwiftRiver SaaS offerings and continuing our value added services work on custom deployments of the Ushahidi core platform.

With this focus in mind, we’ve entered into a new agreement with Omidyar Network for the coming three years for $1.9m.

Where this funding goes

The foundation of the platform’s overall ecosystem includes:

* Ushahidi Core is the main Ushahidi platform, as well as the mobile apps that support it.
* Crowdmap is the Ushahidi platform running in the cloud.
* SwiftRiver is the initiative of web services that make up Ushahidi’s real-time data handling and verification process

While Ushahidi has had a good deal of success in many areas, we still believe we are only half way up the mountain

Our goals for Ushahidi are simple; to disrupt the way information flows in the world by providing the best tools for democratizing information with the least barriers to entry. Ushahidi’s primary focus is to maintain the core work we do within our open source software, making sure it is always available for free to end-users. This means that we will double down on cloud-based services, improve platform usability, integrate the three products and understand usage and user needs better.

We see the future of Ushahidi tied very closely to Crowdmap as the front-end for millions of users. Then, taking our expertise in crowdsourcing and live-mapping, and mixing that with the tools and partnerships that we’ve put together over the years to create the most powerful and relevant platform for public consumption of real-time, dynamic data in the world.

On the platform side this requires three things; more attention to Crowdmap, a redesign of the user experience and tight integration with the SwiftRiver web services so it can scale.

Organizationally this means tightening the focus of what we do, putting in place a business plan that brings in significant revenue, and increased outreach and broadening of the user-base.

We believe that technology scales and people don’t. some additional team growth will be required, and most of these changes will come from a need to support a growing user base on our hosted systems, where the need for more specialized roles and team members will have the greatest impact.

Most of all, continued support by Omidyar Network means that everyone benefits, as Ushahidi’s platforms allow all of our voices to revolutionize the world.

Who is the Ford Foundation and why do they care about Ushahidi?

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For 75 years it has worked with courageous people on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

What are these funds for?
Ushahidi’s tools are used around the world in various activities, from Crowdmapping, Crisis Mapping, Citizen based reporting of elections like what is happening now in Egypt and DRC, and so many other uses that are too numerous to mention. Ford foundations support will help Ushahidi continue providing the tools and support to organizations using its technology worldwide.

Localization and outreach is key to adoption of Crowdsourcing tools. Ushahidi is committed to exploring ways of extending its reach and availability of its tools around the world. Continuing to prod the humanitarian technology community to explore new ways of data gathering, aggregation and visualization through Crowdmap.

When the Ushahidi platform was written as an open source project in 2008, the vision was to have a platform that any individual or organization could easily deploy in any situation. While providing the software for free to anyone to install on his or her own servers has worked well so far, we have realized that there was a need to rapidly deploy Ushahidi without any required technical acumen in the shortest amount of time possible. The answer to this challenge is Crowdmap. This ability is useful to change agents big and small. From small NGOs to international organizations like Amnesty International who recently used the platform to gather information about human rights in Saudi Arabia.

Special Plugins and enhancements to Ushahidi software
Our focus on 2012 will be to continue to make both the Ushahidi core platform and Crowdmap accessible by decoupling features from the core code and continue to grow the plug-in applications. In addition, we will be working on improving the user-interface and increase the available themes for customization. Finally we will be working on making both faster and more secure and as always easier for the wider community to contribute to.
Making a version of Ushahidi that takes into account the special needs of activists or people working in highly repressive regimes is a challenge and an opportunity to work on in 2012 and beyond. We have began working on a debian module that has special hacks to help with privacy issues. Ford Foundation support will help us to continue this.

The challenge of using Ushahidi in areas of low bandwidth still remains; we will continue our development efforts to tackle this problem. Localization and worldwide adoption are interlinked, thus efforts to improve the translation of the tools will require continued support.

Mobile Applications have always been part and parcel of not only the Ushahidi platform, but also part of the strategy as the tools are used around the world. The iPhone and Android apps are already in use, and we are working hard on getting a Java app rewritten for use on Blackberry and other Java enabled phones. The mobile development team is continually responding to feedback and updating the various mobile apps.

SwiftRiver Integration into Crowdmap
The SwiftRiver technology that Ushahidi has been working on will need to be integrated into Crowdmap to enable current users to benefit from a curation and data analysis capability.

Training and Outreach
Based on our early realization that technology is only one small component of what it takes to implement a tool like Ushahidi successfully We are increasing our focus on building and growing the community around Ushahidi. We currently have a wiki and support forum online, a community resource guide page on our website, and have already hosted regular “intro to Ushahidi workshops”, or Ushahidi 101 sessions that cover different aspects and different use cases for the platform. We host these sessions at various places around the world and live stream online.

The community section of our website that will be dedicated exclusively to the wider community of Ushahidi implementers. It hosts resources, case studies, themes, plugins and forums for the end users to learn, interact and share.

Finally, the one of the biggest use of the funds is in community engagement. We have an incredible Community Engagement Director on our team, Heather Leson, whose job it is to connect and communicate between our diverse network of deployers. The people who use Ushahidi in 132 countries around the world.

What we’re finding is that we can have many tools, even leverage outside volunteers and community members to help carry the load for training and linking between the communities of deployers globally, but that it is not enough. We strive to do more, and are grateful to The Ford Foundation for helping us reach our goals.

The organizations being honored today are:
SODNET – Social Development Network (Kenya) For the work on Uchaguzi Kenya, and Huduma.info
Pamoja Media – Joshua Wanyama (Kenya) For the Wildlife Trackers Deployment
Citivox – Oscar Salazar (Mexico) For Cuidemos El Voto
Small World News – Brian Conley (Afghanistan and Bahrain) 3 deployments for elections in Afghanistan and in October 2010, elections in Bahrain
Digital Democracy – Mark Belinsky (USA)
Emoksha – Selvam Velmurugan (India)

• Clickatell - an SMS Gateway
• FrontlineSMS – A simple way to turn your mobile and laptop into a communication hub
• SMSSync (An application that will turn your Android phone into an SMS hub.

In addition to the options above, there is the standard email, twitter or reporting form as channels of participation. A mix of these channels can be made in consideration of the context, duration, and scope of the Crowdmap. With this in mind and the fact that we have varying levels of connectivity around the world. One of the ways the organization is working to help deployers and users of the different Crowdmaps to know what is available to contribute to is by:
1. Adding deployment search functionality to the mobile applications. This has been incorporated into the Ushahidi iPhone/iPad and Android applications.
Using your smartphone, you can search for Crowdmaps based on your location by specifying the radius you are interested in. For more on that either click on the graphic below or read more in the recent blogpost from Henry Addo regarding the new Android application.

2. Adding deployment search on Crowdmap.com. You can search by any Keyword, e.g elections, uganda, Amnesty International – Give it a spin and see which Crowdmaps are available for you to contribute to.

3. Our community site has a listing of deployments and is the congregating point for sharing information, plugins/add ons with the rest of the global Ushahidi community. You can add your deployment onto the listing on the site. These two systems are currently separate but we plan on integrating them soon.

The decision to be listed on this public listing remains that of the deployer. For instructions on how to change your settings so that your deployment is more discoverable, please see this brief video made by Brian Herbert.

We welcome your feedback regarding these steps in helping our users and deployers deal with discoverability. There will be more enhancements in future. As always let us know how we can make things better.

Ushahidi and the ICT4Peace Foundation have agreed to jointly develop an enhanced ICT4Peace Crisis Information Management Platform Demonstrator (CIMD), based on Ushahidi’s existing platform and as deployed e.g. in Libya including further upgrades such as the ‘Luanda’ version of the Ushahidi platform and based of specifications provided by ICT4Peace.

The new generation of crowd sourced crisis information management tools have made extraordinary progress in proving valuable information to decision makers in crisis, it is generally recognized, that further developments are needed to provide the necessary tools to validate information through assessing the reliability of the source and the probability of the occurrence. Several stakeholders have different ways of dealing with incoming data relating to a crisis and there is a need for ‘bounded’ crowdsourcing and ‘unbounded’ crowdsourcing. Bounded crowdsourcing entails the reporting of information from vetted sources and for that information to be available only to view by the ‘bound. The proposed ICT4Peace enhanced CIMD tool will feature the updated ‘Luanda’ Ushahidi platform with all its built in features and two key plugins.

The Matrix Analysis plugin as outlined on ICT4peace website and as provided on Ushahidi plugin repository.

For instance, multiple groups plugin for several separate “bound” and “non bound”-reporting reporting communities on the same platform. This keeps data centralized while allowing each of the groups to keep reports and messages private until they decide to make them public. This can allow for collaboration of different agencies that have varying levels of comfort with sharing data publicly.

In the coming weeks and months Ushahidi will be launching several initiatives; and I would like to take this opportunity to give you a high level view of the main things we have in store, and some of the considerations we are keeping in mind as we continue laying down code, working on projects and doing outreach.

Community: It has been incredibly gratifying to see Ushahidi grow from an ad-hoc group of techies in Kenya and the diaspora to what it is today. The developer community has grown in leaps in bounds, with many direct contributors and 150 forks of the code on Github. This is something we celebrate and invite more developers to join us. Our community has grown to include deployers, researchers doing evaluations, designers, volunteers and most of all tinkerers. The tech community in Kenya has also grown in leaps and bounds, with the iHub as the connector and incubator, this is something we will be celebrating as the 1 year anniversary comes up; and committed to working on in the coming year. In a few days, we will be launching a community page and we’d like to welcome you to share how you are using the tools that Ushahidi creates. An announcement will be made on this blog and on our twitter page.

The Technology & Services: The Ushahidi platform is a continuing work in progress, where we will continue to fix bugs that arise and have a roadmap for the features to be included in the next release. Do check out the Luanda version released in November of 2010, which offers so much more than previous versions of the platform, most notably the ability to use different plugins and themes. We will be running a theming competition in the near future, so designers, start tinkering with the platform! We continue to translate the platform and invite you to help us by signing up for an account on Tafsiri (our translation platform).

Crowdmap is the cloud based service of Ushahidi, which offers an easily deployable way to not collect, aggregate and visualize data. The number of crowdmap deployments have grown, with uses that continually surprise and delight us as we see people trying out the platform. Expect several exciting initiatives (think Mobile!) from our Crowdmap and mobile development team.

Mobile Apps have always been part and parcel of not only the Ushahidi platform, but also part of the strategy as the tools are used around the world. The iPhone, Android and mobile apps are already in use, and we are working hard on getting a Java app rewritten for use on Blackberry and other Java enabled phones. The mobile development team is continually responding to feedback and updating the various mobile apps.

SwiftRiver – our platform that helps to make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels like Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. The SwiftRiver platform offers organizations an easy way to apply semantic analysis and verification algorithms to different sources of information. We will be making announcements soon as to the progression of this very important tool and providing a new version of the ‘Sweeper’ product amongst others.

Consulting and custom work: In January, Erik delineated our strategic focus for the year, and in it he mentioned our ability to do custom work and do joint partnerships that touch on some or all of the tools that Ushahidi develops. This is something that is already in play and we shall continue to work with our joint partners to realize projects that range from short government transparency initiatives like Huduma.info, to real-time data dashboards for newsrooms just to name a few.

It is already an exciting year for us at Ushahidi, being listed on Technology Review’s 50 most innovative companies of 2011 is a great honor for us.
We invite you to join us, collaborate and learn along with us as we change how information flows!

The emergency situation that was caused by unprecedented wildfires in the Western Russia and was followed by the first Russian Ushahidi deployment “Help Map” is far behind. However in Russia, a state of emergency is a common situation, especially, when it’s winter. During Russian winter many people suffer from the lack of heating, electricity and other support systems.

Russian liberal newspaper “Novaya Gazeta” approached the “Help Map” team and suggested to launch a new crowdsourcing project to address the problems of people who are affected by cold weather. As consequence, a new platform “Holoda.info” was born. A co-founder of “Help Map” Alexey Sidorenko developed a new special design for Ushahidi platform that took into account the previous experience with “Help Map”. The visual side of the new platform also reflects the atmosphere of Russian winter. The platform is based on the new version of Ushahidi and includes several modifications that were made by Russian developers.

The first goal of the platform is raising awareness about the problems of people who are affected by winter, especially in the distant regions. Such transparency should contribute to effort of holding government accountable and push local authorities to solve the problems as soon as possible. However, in the places, where the authorities fail to provide appropriate response, we hope that the platform will contribute to solution of problems by people themselves through facilitation of mutual aid. Therefore, the platform includes categories as “Need help” and “Want to help”.
The “Help Map” team was planning to launch platform after New Year, however the ice rain that paralyzed Moscow, Russian major airports and left hundreds of thousands people stranded on New Year eve, forced us to do it earlier than we planned. So far, the platform has received about seventy messages, and was covered by several major Russian media outlets.

Making the platform effective is a special challenge since the project has a different nature comparing to “Help Map” and many Ushahidi deployments. It addresses not a crisis that suddenly emerged, but a permanent “common crisis” situation, that has less attention from media and government. Our main goal is expanding the range of sources and reaching people in remote areas. We are also looking for the most effective mechanisms that will not only cover the situation, but engage authorities, various organizations and people in providing solutions.
At the same time, the “Help Map” team continues to work with the first “Russian Wildfires” platform and make preparations for the next summer.

Floods are unpredictable and when it happens it proceeds quickly, there is always not enough time to prepare for that and to provide enough supplies, tools and support as needed. Then it is important to have robust information flow and quick access to updates about the current situation. IT solutions and support can help and with them one can have an overview about the flood progress as well as important events.Such case was in Poland in 2010. Besides “normal” needs during such a situation, there were no IT systems nor portals about the situation, current status and events. There was also no time to develop a system from the scratch and provide a full functional solution. Here Pretius – a company from Warsaw, Poland – was approached by Stocznia (http://stocznia.org.pl) – an NGO organization from Poland – to help fill this need.

Their development team came to an idea that they could use an existing system and tailor that to the particular needs. The requirements have been gathered, defined and based on them the research has begun with one target – find an open source product to quickly develop the requested disaster management system. Two potential solutions have been investigated – Sahana and Ushahidi. The choice was not obvious as both systems didn’t offer all the needed functionality and Pretius even thought about developing their own solution.

The approach Pretius took in this case was gaining the open source tool, identify all the missing parts based on the requirements gathered before and finally develop those features by themselves. The time-to-deliver period was very short – about two weeks – so they have decided to go for one of the software options: Ushahidi. That application offered the most features they wanted yet missing few important ones.

Pretius development team has thoroughly analyzed the product and found out that one of the versions of Ushahidi suits best the current needs for Polish flood disaster management. That was the Haiti instance that was merged with current (in those days) version from github site (https://github.com/ushahidi). There was one problem though. The rush and lack of time in development of the Haiti disaster release (as it was a sudden and completely unexpected event) made the Ushahidi development team concentrate on the features, and not on the quality of the source code. There were lots of tweaks, hacks and uncommented parts which Pretius had to analyze, understand and alter into the source code. They have perfectly managed the task and the result was the Polish version using most of the Haiti features with many extensions developed by Pretius themselves. There were many important customizations made, including the look&feel part – the original layout was not perfect as well as the Polish localization was done. That version can be downloaded also from github (https://github.com/pretius-ushahidi).

The software Pretius prepared was launched under the following URL: http://alert.powodz.ngo.pl. The visits were increasing every day after launch and one of the mostly used features was the possibility to subscribe to new alerts in the defined area radius what caused users subscribe to the newsletter and track all the surrounding accidents where some help could be useful. A lot of people in need have received goods, food, utilities and other help from users who were tracking what was going on and reacting. There were even some cases where the amount of help was overwhelming and exceeded the survivors’ expectations. In general for now there are 229 reports between June 25th 2010 and October 22nd 2010.

Although the site based on the open source product was created in such short period of time it was useful and many people got help after publishing their alerts and the feedback was very positive. In this case Pretius presented not only their development and technical skills but also the positive attitude that they want to bring help to people who are in need. The side effect of this commitment is the new version of the software that can be further used by anyone in similar circumstances with silent hope that it won’t be needed anymore.

Pretius has been created by the group of experienced project managers specializes in realizing projects for companies from the telecommunications and governmental sectors in Poland. In recent years the company has been developing in a dynamic way, assembling around a team of great talented specialists, who are successfully realizing other projects for a wide range of customers and also their own products.

We put strategic emphasis on partnership and long lasting relations with our clients. If you are interested in co-operation with us you are very welcome to contact us.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/12/23/poland-how-the-ushahidi-platform-was-used-to-respond-to-flooding/feed/ 0 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/11/18/ivory-coast-presidential-election-ushahidi-platform-use-case/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/11/18/ivory-coast-presidential-election-ushahidi-platform-use-case/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:09:07 +0000 juliana http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=3030 This is a guest blogpost by Julie Owino and Archippe Yepmou, some of the team members behind Wonzomai.

The Ushahidi platform was deployed during the first round of the presidential elections in Côte d’Ivoire which happened on 31 October 2010. Implemented under the name of Wonzomai (Sentry in Bété, Ivory Coast Local language), the project gathers teams from Ivorian NGO Akendewa and from the French NGO Internet Without Borders

The purpose of the project was to give a space of expression to Ivory Coast citizens where they could give a glimpse of the general atmosphere surrounding the vote, and help prevent sensitive situations: in fact this presidential election is considered crucial for a country that faced 10 years of a war which ended officially with the Treaty of Ouagadougou (4th March 2007) that prepared the ground for the electoral process.

Technically, the platform was deployed using the mashup google maps and Frontline SMS. For reasons related to local network, we had 3 SMS Numbers functioning and encountered a few difficulties to gather information received by SMS on the platform.  But this was tackled.

As a first experiment in Ivory Coast of a citizen based reporting of elections, the result is interesting and highlights the importance of developping presence of francophone African citizens in the cyber world.

One of the most interesting contribution of the platform is that the latter has been since its launching a real catalyst of twitter conversations surrounding Wonzomai itself, and the elections in general through #wonzomai #peacevote and #civ2010. These hashtags were created by different members of the project team. On 3rd November 2010, #wonzomai already Counted 514 Tweets. The same day, our main hashtag counted more thant 1000 tweets according with this tool

The real challenge during the second round of the presidential election, which will be held on 28th November 2010, will consist in the coordination of the different international institutions and national public services involved in the election : for instance Electoral monitoring mission.

Another lesson for the second round, and probably for further elections in the region, was learned through this first use of Ushahidi; in fact, in addition to political tension, there is a culture of defragmentation and dissemination of rumors via SMS. The challenge will be to transform this participation through the SMS channel in a positive piece of information. A beginning of response was given thanks to the platform as citizens could send Messages fostering a peaceful vote and those were received on Wonzomai and re-disseminated.

But finally beyond technical aspects of the deployment, what is interesting is that  the community of Ivorian Twitter Users in the screening of the information. This consciousness created an emulation of projects around the question of presidential elections : For instance the
Peace Vote Project which is a website where peace messages can be sent to Ivory Coast citizens ; Or this website where an attempt to present histograms of the results of the first round.

All this shows in conclusion the necessity to adapt the Political Science, studies trends and results, to tools which aim at a better understanding and apprehension of these results. To be more accurate, sometimes an ethnic vote would be interpreted through the results of a ballot; a mapping of results would corroborate or invalidate such an assertion.

Julie Owono
Internet Without Borders
http:www.internetsansfrontieres.com
Africa Desk