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

The recent Net Impact conference in Portland proved to be an ideal space to take a few steps back and reflect on the bigger picture. There was much talk of new and alternative approaches to traditional development. The word “participatory” in particular was a trending topic among both presenters and participants. But exactly how “participatory” are these “participatory” approaches to develop-ment? Do they fundamentally democratize the development process? And do these “novel” participatory approaches really let go of control? Should they? The following thoughts and ideas were co-developed in follow-up conversations with my colleague Chrissy Martin who also attended Net Impact. She blogs at Innovate.Inclusively.

I haven’t had the space recently to think through some of these questions or reflect about how the work I’ve been doing with Ushahidi fits (or doesn’t) within the traditional development paradigm—a paradigm which many at the confer-ence characterized as #fail. Some think that perhaps technology can help change this paradigm, hence the burst of energy around the ICT for Development (ICT4D) field. That said, it is worth remembering that the motivations driving this shift are more important than any one technology. For example, recall the principles behind the genesis of the Ushahidi platform: Democratizing information flows and access; promoting Open Data and Do it Yourself (DIY) Innovation with free, highly hackable (i.e., open source) technology; letting go of control.

The Ushahidi platform is not finished. It will never be finished. This is deliberate, not an error in the code. Free and open source software (FOSS) is by definition in a continual phase of co-Research and Development (co-R&D). The Ushahidi platform is not a solution, it is a platform on top of which others build their own solutions. These solutions remain open source and some are folded back into the core Ushahidi code. This type of “open protocol” can reverse “innovation cascades” leading to “reverse innovation” from developing to indus-trialized countries (c.f. information cascades). FOSS acts like a virus, it self-propagates. The Ushahidi platform, for example, has propagated to over 130 countries since it was first launched during Kenya’s post-election violence almost four years ago.

In some ways, the Ushahidi platform can be likened to a “choose your own adventure” game. The readers, not the authors, finish the story. They are the main characters who bring the role playing games and stories to life. But FOSS goes beyond this analogy. The readers can become the authors and vice versa. Welcome to co-creation. Perhaps one insightful analogy is the comparison between Zipcar and RelayRides.

I’ve used the Zipcar for over five years now and love it. But what would a “democratized” Zipcar look like? You guessed it: RelayRides turns every car owner into their own mini-DIY-Zipcar company. You basically get your own “Zipcar-in-a-box” kit and rent out your own car in the same way that Zipcar does with their cars. RelayRides is basically an open source version of Zipcar, a do-it-yourself innovation. A good friend of mine, Becca, is an avid RelayRides user. The income from lending her car out lets her cover part of her rent, and if she needs a car while hers is rented out, she’ll get online and look for available RelayRides in her neighborhood. She likes the “communal ownership” spirit that the technology facilitates. Indeed, she is getting to know her neighbors better as a result. In this case, DIY Innovation is turning strangers, a crowd, into a comm-unity. Perhaps DIY Innovation can facilitate community building in the long run.

The Ushahidi platform shares this same spirit. The motivation behind Ushahidi’s new “Check-In’s” feature, for example, is to democratize platforms like Foursquare. There’s no reason why others can’t have their own Foursquares and customize them for their own projects along with the badges, etc. That’s not to imply that the Ushahidi platform is perfect. There’s a long way to go, but again, it will never be perfect nor is that the intention. Sure, the technology will become more robust, stable and extensible, but not perfect. Perfection denotes an endstate. There is no endstate in co-R&D. The choose your own adventure story continues for as long as the reader, the main character decides to read on.

I’m all for “participatory development” but I’m also interested in allowing indivi-duals to innovate for themselves first and then decide how and who to participate with. I’d call that self-determination. This explains why the Ushahidi team is no longer the only “game in town” so-to-speak. Our colleagues at DISC have customized the Ushahidi platform in more innovative and relevant ways than we could have for the Egyptian context. Not only that, they’re making a business out of customizing the platform and training others in the Arab World. The Ushahidi code is out of our hands and it has been since 2008. We’re actively promoting and supporting partners like DISC. Some may say we’re nurturing our own competition. Well then, even better.

Freely providing the hackable building blocks for DIY Innovation is one way to let go of control and democratize ICT4D. Another complementary way is to democratize information access by promoting automated Open Data generation, i.e., embedded real-time sensors for monitoring purposes. Equal and public access to Open Data levels the playing field, prevents information arbitrage and disrupts otherwise entrenched flows of information. Participatory development without Open Data is unlikely to hold institutions accountable or render the quality of their services (or lack thereof) more transparent. But by Open Data here I don’t only mean data generated via participatory surveys or crowdsourcing.

The type of public-access Open Data generation I’m interested in could be called “Does-It-Itself” Open Data, or DII Data. Take “The Internet of Things” idea and apply this to traditional development. Let non-intrusive, embedded and real-time sensors provide direct, empirical and open data on the status of develop-ment projects without any “middle man” who may have an interest in skewing the data. In other words, hack the Monitoring and Evaluation process (M&E) by letting the sensors vote for themselves and display the “election results” publicly and in real time. Give the sensors a voice. Meet Evan Thomas, a young professor at Portland State, who spends his time doing just this at SweetLab, and my colleague Rose Goslinga who is taking the idea of DII Data to farmers in Kenya.

Evan embeds customized sensors to monitor dozens of development projects in several countries. These sensors generate real-time, high-resolution data that is otherwise challenging, expensive and time-consuming to collect via the tradi-tional survey-based approach. Evan’s embedded sensors generate behavior and usage data for projects like the Mercy Corps Water and Sanitation Program and Bridges to Prosperity Program. Another example of DII Data is Rose’s weather index insurance (WII) project in Kenya called Kilimo Salama. This initiative uses atmospheric data automatically transmitted via local weather towers to determine insurance payouts for participating farmers during periods of drought or floods. Now, instead of expensive visits to farms and subjective assessments, this data-driven approach to feedback loops lowers program costs and renders the process more objective and transparent.

There is of course more to the development field than the innovative processes described above. Development means a great many things to different people. The same is true of the words “Democracy”, “Participatory” and “Crowd-sourcing.” For me, crowdsourcing, like democracy, is a methodology that can catalyze greater participation and civic engagement. Some liken this to demo-cratizing the political process. Elections, in a way, are crowdsourced. Obviously, however, crowdsourced elections in no way imply that they are free, open or fair. Moreover, elections are but one of the ingredients in the recipe for  a democratic, political process.

In the same way, democratizing ICT4D is not a sufficient condition to ensure that the traditional development space obtains a new hashtag: #success. Letting go of control and allowing for self-determination can of course lead to unexpected outcomes. At this point, however, given the #fail hashtag associated with traditional development, perhaps unexpected outcomes driven by democratic, bottom-up innovation processes that facilitate self-organization, determination and participation, are more respectful to human dignity and ingenuity.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/11/03/democratizing-ict-for-development-with-diy-innovation-and-open-data/feed/ 3 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/07/01/ushahidi-and-google-team-up-in-liberia-for-elections/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/07/01/ushahidi-and-google-team-up-in-liberia-for-elections/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:58:36 +0000 kate http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=4481 iLab Liberia was bustling last week with Ushahidi Liberia and Google’s event, “New Tech at Work: Planning for Liberia’s Elections and Beyond.”  The event was broken into two sections – a two-day session at iLab and a public one-day session at the delicious and spacious PA’s Ribhouse (good bbq and a big hall – what else is there?).  Here’s a bit about what we covered and how it went.

The idea behind these events was 1. share tools for data management (storage, curation and web interface) and with Liberia’s leading IT specialists and election monitors ahead of the referendum and presidential election and 2. to introduce Liberians to a variety of freely available online tools that can serve as megaphones – ways to grow Liberia’s online presence at a critical time in its history when so many Liberians want to encourage a democratic election at home but may not know how many tools are out there for sharing their perspectives locally and abroad.

IT officers and election monitors get settled in for a full day of data management tool talk

The participants for the first two-day event at iLab included IT officers and GIS specialists from the National Elections Commission, Liberia’s GIS Institute, election-related iNGOs such as NDI and IFES, and the Elections Coordinating Committee that represents more than 20 NGOs. According to interviews conducted with each participating organization, many of the inefficiencies that currently exist can be traced back to poor data storage, inconsistent formatting and outdated websites with a non-intuitive user interface.

Participants at iLab going through tutorial in how to use Google Sites

Our sessions were full of lively discussion and it was clear what tools and topics resonated most with participants: some include Dropbox for file sharing, Google sites using online Forms to simplify data entry with election data, Skype for remotely viewing other person’s screen during conversation, and internal wikis.  We also went off-topic a bit to offer some solutions to perennial problems like corrupted USB sticks infecting computers; Kpetermeni Siakor offered a tutorial in how to recover files seemingly lost forever when a corrupted USB stick takes over – you should have heard the eruptions of applause when these tricks were revealed!  The topics of these sessions may sound droll – data management doesn’t exactly give most people goosebumps – but it is where so much of the rich data collected during this election process gets stalled and improperly – if ever – shared.  As one of the Elections Coordinating Committee’s IT officers said, “How you enter [data] is the kind of analysis you will get out of it”, and everyone in attendance was ready to get more out of their data.  John Etherton joined the Ushahidi Liberia and Google team for the events, and led most of the data management sessions; as I watched from the back of the room, I could see National Elections Commission and NDI participants pulling up their own data on the screen and standardizing data formats as John spoke, following his suggestions and cleaning up scores of spreadsheets.  Now again that may not elicit goosebumps for most, but I have to say it was thrilling to see changes happening in real-time that may significantly improve data storage and collaboration between these leading institutions for Liberia’s election.

Carter presents on data curation techniques

The third day – our public event – focused on free online tools that can be used to monitor the electoral process and increase citizens’ engagement within and outside of Liberia.  We weren’t sure how many people would attend; we’d sent out fliers, advertised in the paper, but we knew the tech community is small and the event’s focus was fairly specific.  Much to our delight, nearly 100 people showed up and were very engaged in the presentations and the breakout sessions.  Some of the tools presented were FrontlineSMS, Twitter, Blogger, Google Map Maker and Ushahidi; we also had very exciting breakout sessions on Google’s app engine, FOSS and its applications, setting up virtual box as a way to transition from Microsoft to FOSS, mapping for social change (led by Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier!), and file sharing via router without internet.

Ushahidi's own Patrick Meier was present at the week's events and shared some insights about mapping for social change

With this larger audience, we wanted to drive home the role of social media in promoting a democratic election where the concept alone is still new and the process fragile.  It was interesting to see what excited this audience the most; FrontlineSMS was a big hit as a way to send SMS blasts regarding important election info, the Ushahidi instance for Liberia’s election generated a lot of interest, and Map Maker both revealed the paucity of detail on Liberia’s maps and generated excitement about applying local knowledge to grow those maps.  Interestingly, Twitter did not immediately appeal to the audience – in a country where texting is still new and computer access is less than 5%, tweeting seems like a lot of effort without clear advantages. But Twitter’s new SMS feature would make this a much more popular tool in Liberia; we’re following up on this with local operators and Twitter to make the tool more useful and accessible in Liberia.

Another interesting note: Luther Jeke of Ushahidi Liberia presented Facebook Groups as a social organizing tool around the elections and most of the questions generated by this presentation were about the security of the groups- whether or not a group could be overtaken by a rogue member.  Again, a reasonable question in a country recovering from civil war and still not convinced that any tool used to connect and organize people is secure; more often, each new approach to information sharing (even switching from the popular Yahoo email account to Gmail) is usually met with concerns about security.  This is an important element to the adoption of these various tools, and one that our team now realizes we have to consider more seriously in future trainings and assumptions about what stands in the way of IT working in Liberia.

It was a whirlwind of a week, and we were so grateful to work with Google on these events.  As we continue to receive feedback on these sessions and create follow-up trainings at iLab, we’ll provide updates – and we welcome your thoughts on any of what we’ve shared including your experiences introducing these tools in similar contexts.

People have made all sorts of remarks over the years about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the Ushahidi platform because that’s where it’s often perceived the most value is. But the value often isn’t in the platform itself, it’s in the momentum built around a given deployment and subsequently the value that collaboration offers others:

This is a diagram illustrating some of the value exchanged in the typical collaborative crisis mapping platform. Green lines represent monetary transactions, white lines indicate direct use or utility, orange lines indicate flows of less tangible value that are more difficult to quantify.

The smaller bubbles indicate what I call ‘multipliers’. Multipliers are players that reinforce what would otherwise be loose ties, making the ties between two entities stronger and more binding.

Jon Gosier, Director Swiftly.org at Net Prophet 2011, May 11, 2011

Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica 2011 is Germany’s largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to 10-20 minutes, the organizers gave us an hour to share our stories. So I’m posting the video of my presentation below for anyone interested in learning more about new media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, live maps, crisis response, civil resistance, digital activism and check-in’s. I draw on my experience with Ushahidi and the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and share examples from Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Japan, the US and Egypt to illustrate how live maps can change the world. My slides are available on Slideshare here.

The outcome was about looking outwards while fixing inwards, and through discussion forums, and shared housekeeping tasks, achievements included:

• Translating targets into achievable milestones and see how they mesh with the various arms- Core, SwiftRiver, Mobile, iHub, Crowdmap – so that if this was a relay race, a visual of where passing the baton fits into the race.
• A better understanding of the products and how they fit across platforms.
• Realignment of the structures of the various teams to improve on product quality.
• Evaluation of the performance of team members and a framework was developed for future evaluations.
• First steps to develop frameworks for future Ushahidi project and community participation.
• Affirmation of achievements in the last year by both internal and external partners. This included a demonstration of the Liberia project, which is very unique in terms of the challenges faced in deploying crowd-sourced platforms in Liberia, which are different from other African situations.
• A chance to hear and respond to various queries of team members around the world, and appreciate the challenges they face in the countries they live.
• A better understanding of the tools the enable internal working & virtual collaboration across  nine time zones (soon to be 16).
• Introduction of new team members (including myself), and immediate bonds were formed that will be vital for collaboration over the next few months.  I also learnt to appreciate the sacrifice of time that team members make by frequent travels around the world, and that the “Up in the air” lifestyle is not as glamorous as it looks from the outside.

Finally, what was refreshing was that, in this this 3-year old company, there was the willingness to break down structures and tear up established models in recognition that the next three years may be radically different. Plus, in all this, there  was fun as people got crowned with, among other titles, ‘Governors’, ‘Dictator’, ‘Mr. Goosebumps’, ‘Director of SWAG’, and ‘Director of Insanity’!

I landed in Moscow in the end of October. It was still relatively warm, but already nothing reminded the unprecedented wave of heat and smog caused by wildfires that affected lives of entire population of Russian capital and many Russian regions. The primarily goal of my visit was meeting my friends and relatives. My visit, however, turned to be extremely intense due to the “Help Map” project that Alexey Sidorenko and I launched last summer.

The “Help Map” (Russian-fires.ru) was the first use of Ushahidi in Russia to coordinate assistance between victims of this summer’s wildfires in Russia, and citizens who wished to help them. Shortly after the platform was launched, hundreds of citizens wrote in with appeals for help, hundreds of people wrote in offering help, the site had several thousand unique users within a very short span of time, receiving extensive coverage in Russia’s media. A “situation room” that was set up in Moscow coordinated and delivered aid, based on information that “Help map” received and accumulated. The peak of the unique visitors per one day was more than 17 thousand. The total number of unique visitors is more than 187 thousand. We received more than 1600 messages. When the emergency situation passed and wildfires were stopped if not by firefighters then by the rains, the interest in platform significantly decreased. Once the emergence situation has passed, the motivation of its participants decreased as well. Everyone is back to normal life with common concerns about jobs and families.

This brought to a number of situations, every Ushahidi team once experienced. What should we do with the platform that we already have? Should we focus on the further development of “Help Map” or initiate new projects? How to make Ushahidi-based projects sustainable in post-emergency period? Do we need Ushahidi at all, after situation has normalized?? Who can be our partner? Should we find any local organization that will lead the issue?

All these questions turned to be one of the major issues on the agenda of my visit to Moscow.

First of all the visit to Moscow was opportunity to meet the virtual colleagues. I haven’t met ever most of the people who joined to the “Help map” project, and knew the names only from Google group mailing list and Skype discussions.

We met close to Lubyanka Square, a symbol of Soviet power where KGB/FSB headquarters are placed. Unfortunately, the forum was not full without some important people – Alexey Sidorenko, Warsaw-based co-founder of the project, among others. The good news was that Elena Kobyakova, one of the “Help Map” activists, came from Saint Petersburg especially for our meeting. Getting together was important not only for discussion of various issues, but for the fact of the meeting itself.

Ethan Zuckerman suggests Virtual-Person to Person-Virtual (VPV) model for development of networked projects:

People discover the community online, and connect based on their sense of shared identity and values with the people already participating. They come together, face to face, either at the biennial meetings we run or at the other people’s conferences  That, in turn, builds the trust and relationships we need to survive working together for the next months or years until we see each other face to face.

Russian-Fires Help Map Team

The meeting in Moscow was a move from first V to P in expectations of further V-based cooperation.

The meeting discussed the past and the future of platform and raised ideas about continuation of “Help map” as well as about other possible usage of “Ushahidi” that our core team can support and move forward.  At the same time it was also clear that the “Ushahidi” based projects can’t be sustainable based only on core team of “Help Map”. Therefore the visit was not only meeting the old colleagues but also an opportunity to introduce the project to new audience and engage it.

In my opinion, one of the best partners could be students and university programs that focus on research of information technologies. I was glad for any request to talk about the project and Ushahidi.  Giving lectures about social and political aspects of crowdsourcing and “Help map” as a case study at political science departments of Moscow universities –Moscow State University and Higher School of Economics was a wonderful opportunity for introduction of Ushahidi as well as discussion if ICT can create new platforms for governance and civil society.

Another type of discussion about “Help Map” took place at Department of Psychology of Moscow State University. This time the lecture was focused on the evolutionary role of ICT and crowdsourcing as tools that can facilitate network cooperation and mutual aid. Lectures at universities were not only the opportunity to discuss but to find partners for future projects, both on institutional level and among the students.  It’s too early to talk about any results, but the idea of creating experimental platform that will make possible engaging students in managing crowdsourcing projects and doing research is currently under consideration. Some of the students also expressed their interest in writing papers about Ushahidi and taking part in future projects.

Photo courtesy of Alexander Zolotov

Not only universities expressed interest in “Ushahidi” and “Help map” project.  The Civic Chamber of Russian Federation, a governmental body that incorporates leaders of various civil society organizations, held a special meeting “About options for coordination of volunteer activities based on case study of Internet-project “Help Map”. The meeting was attended by representatives of the chamber, leaders of NGO organizations that took part in firefighting and volunteers.

After presentation of the project that we made with my colleague, a head of “Help Map” coordination center Anastasia Severina, a long discussion took place. We were asked if we would like to create our own non-profit organization “Help Map” that will continue working on the project and launch new crowdsourcing platform for facilitation of volunteer activities. The issue if network based project can be facilitated through creation of organizational structure is complicated and controversial. I tried to claim that the power of the project is being based on self-organized networks, and once you try to transform it to organizational structure, it might threaten its networked nature. Another threat that might be caused by this type of transformation is bureaucratic responsibilities that have any non-profit organization.

Later on, another aspect of this question was raised during the meetings with people from e-government community. Should government support development of crowdsourcing projects for emergency situations? Can the resources, cooperation with government structures, and outreach assistance make projects like “Help map” more effective? Or, vice versa, will it threaten the independent self-organized people-to-people nature and will reduce the motivation of volunteers to take part in it? The answer to this question is not easy and ambivalent. It’s clear though that it depends on a political context and a degree of trust between government and its citizens.

At the Civic Chamber we claimed that the most effective way of further development is finding new partners among NGOs and academic community. One of our requests was to support university-based projects for crowdsourcing experimental platforms. On one hand it might create some institutional platform. On the other hand, the non-partisan status of universities can reduce the threat to networked organization. Moreover, it can create new research options and engage students in social responsible activity. There is a doubt if a type of meeting as we had at “Civic chamber” can lead to any significant results, however the main effect of it is raising awareness about role of IT in general and crowdsourcing in particular in emergency situations. Therefore, even the title of the official summary of the discussion that was published by the Civic Chamber “Help map will be developed” might be approached as an achievement.

Another channel for cooperation is local NGOs. Following the discussion in Civic Chamber we had meetings with local environmental groups. We discussed the possible transformation of “Help map” for wildfires to a map that will collect information about any forest-related issues (e.g. monitoring of violations, coordination of restoration). At the same time we will be prepared to provide help again in emergency situation (according to forecasting of Russian environmentalists, the wildfires next summer can be even worse). The Russian environmentalists emphasized the role of crowdsourcing in early warning and prevention of fires. According to their data, most of the fires that destroyed villages started few days earlier in the deep forest, and slowly moved forward towards populated areas.  Local authorities, however, were not ready to take any measures before the fire reached the villages. Therefore, monitoring the wildfires should use crowdsourcing together with the analysis of satellite images (Russian NGO “The transparent world” provides alternative source of satellite images). This solution will not only help to coordinate the response to wildfires, but would also show the real degree of the disaster and make pressure on the authorities to start providing early response.

As a small group of volunteers “Help map” team is not able to create or support many projects. But as those who had an experience of launching and managing crowdsourcing platform, we can make any effort and be as open as possible to share our experience with others.  We already received many requests for lectures and presentations about “Help map” including a conference for regional journalists and conference about the role of IT in improving the life in Saint Petersburg.  In November “Help Map” and “Ushahidi” will be presented at big e-government conference in Moscow and new media readings at Moscow State University. At the same time “Help Map” example makes possible to raise awareness about role of information technologies for solution of social problems within software developers’ community. Pavel Sutyrin, one of “Help Map” leading programmers, already held a seminar dedicated to this issue. We also consider idea of writing a guide of how to use Ushahidi in Russian that will include the story of “Help map” as a case study for launching crowdsourcing projects.

Raising awareness about crowdsourcing is as important as supporting the next projects. We can see some “Ushahidi” chain effect in Russia. A prominent Russian blogger Alexey Navalny works on project for monitoring problems with roads and forcing the authorities to fix it. One of NGOs considering launching a platform that will monitor violations in regard to military service in Russian and provide an option for soldiers to send an SMS if their right were violated. Other group is working on a platform that will collect information about various types of right violations. And certainly another project is the further development of russian-fires.ru as an environmental platform that can also provide response in emergency situations.

Another possible direction of further development is incorporation of crowdsourcing practices within e-government. Despite some concerns and skepticism, we may still hope that platforms as Ushahidi can play a role in bridging the gap between government and citizens. The Russian e-gov efforts already showed few interesting and inspiring projects like rosspending.ru , that in a user-friendly way tell people about the public procurement and main government contractors.  Maybe at some point we will be able to see if Haitian Noula model can work in Russia.

A lot of questions about dynamics of crowdsourcing development are still open… However, we may conclude with a high degree of confidence that after having a significant experience this summer Russia is ready to join to international crowdsourcing and mapping community.

Participants engaged in discussions, case studies, and practical exercises involving how technology can be used for building peace. The course made use of new technology-focused teaching techniques to ease the learning process. (Read more about the course on the AshokaPeace blog and TechChange blog).

One of the highlights of the course was a two-hour simulation of the Ushahidi crisis mapping software.  The goal of the exercise was to have participants understand the possibilities and limitations of crisis mapping through a practical application.

To make the simulation realistic we built it around the upcoming Wolesi Jirga elections in Afghanistan, set for September 18^th 2010. This election has been postponed several times due to corruption and many experts are concerned that it might lead to new violence by the Taliban to intimidate voters.

The process

1. Software: Ushahidi’s open-source software was installed onto a Web-based server. Because of the location and limited participants with cell phones that worked in Costa Rica, I decided not to install FrontlineSMS. The campus did have wireless Internet, so participants used laptops and smartphones to send messages from the field.

2. Designated Polling Stations: Four polling stations were scattered around campus. Each polling station had a piece of paper with detailed conditions about the level of violence and whether or not the station was open.  Once underway, I circulated around campus to change the papers and post new conditions.

3. Four Groups: The class was organized into four groups of four people each:

Group 1: UN Officials: UN officials were based in the classroom or UN headquarters in Kabul. Their goal was to use Ushahidi on their computers to (1) ensure as many citizens as possible made it to the right polling stations and (2) ensure that international media had an accurate account of what was happening on the ground.

Group 2: Election Monitors: This group played the role of election monitors stationed in Kandahar. They were tasked to work with the UN headquarters staff in Kabul to ensure as many people as possible made it to the right polling stations to cast their vote.

Group 3: Citizens: This group played the role of Afghan citizens eager get out and participate in the democratic process but concerned about their safety. They had to figure out as a group how to use Ushahidi’s alert system to receive updates about polling center violence.  Citizens were asked to vote one by one at 10-minute intervals, regardless if any alerts had been sent out.

Group 4: Taliban: This group was tasked with the goal of disrupting the election process and the Ushahidi platform in any “cyber” way possible.

The Action, Resulting Learnings, and Aspects for Further Reflection

1. Communications Strategy: The UN team and volunteer election monitor group came up with a strategy to ensure only messages coming from election monitors were validated by UN staff. Because the Taliban could read the same reports off of the Ushahidi platform, the election monitoring team assumed that hashtag or number systems might not work so they devised a code based on the placement of word “violence” in the sentence. The Taliban group never cracked the code but the reports from Citizens at polling stations were also not validated.  This points to a very real challenge NGOs and governments face when using Ushahidi—do they accept crowdsourced information from the public or limit their scope to NGO staff? There are tradeoffs with each strategy.

2. Trade-Off Between Time and Accuracy: After ten minutes, the first citizen voted but the UN staff group and election monitors had not figured out the Ushahidi system in time to validate and disseminate reports. After approximately 15 minutes they learned the system. 40 minutes into the simulation, the Taliban group decided instead of trying to subvert the process with accurate-sounding bad data, they would try and overwhelm the system by sending as many reports as they could. Even though the UN knew the reports were erroneous it took them precious time to consider and dismiss them. I am eager to see how SwiftRiver and other filter systems might be able to combat this strategy.

3. Email Alerts Didn’t Seem to Work: The citizen group signed up to receive email notifications but never received alerts during the exercise. I’m not sure if this was a human error on our end or some kind of built-in software delay.  Instead the citizens monitored the map on the website and read the live feed of validated reports coming through the system to make decisions about where to vote.

4.  Password Security: During group orientation I wrote the login, password and URL for everyone to see. The defaults were “admin” and “admin.” Halfway through the simulation I reminded the Taliban group that the passwords might still be the default. Indeed, the UN staff had not changed the password and the Taliban group was able to log in and start validating their own erroneous reports. Once the UN staff realized their system had been compromised, they tried to change the password but it was too late.

Some critics maintain election monitoring may not the best use of Ushahidi, and that it is really best for logistical coordination and mapping, as we saw in Haiti. Perhaps, but election monitoring provides a great context to run a simulation examining Ushahidi’s potential and limitations. After two hours, all 16 participants came away with a great command of how to use this important technology.  I’m eager to work with others to design similar simulations. Please leave feedback, questions and suggestions in the comments, or e-mail nick@techchange.org

Ushahidi wins the Weblog of the Year Award

I’ll say here what I said there yesterday. Ushahidi’s blog is an extension of the community. Many of the blog posts here are written both by our team and by those who use Ushahidi all over the world. A lot of time is spent writing and coming up with the blog posts to educate and share the experiences of how to better crowdsource information in very trying times.

The list of winners from the different languages and categories was stunning. I had a chance to speak with a couple of the other winners and was struck with just how fortunate we were to win this award, as any one of them could have as well.

A big thank you to Deutsche Welle for putting this event on and honoring us with this award. An even bigger thank you to the Ushahidi community that earned this award with us.

Asante.

I kicked off the presentation by asking the following: “What do martians, Tom & Jerry and Venice have to do with Freedom of Speech 2.0?” An unlikely way to start, I admit.

But lets take our Martian friends. You may recall H.G. Well’s “War of the Worlds” drama about a Martian invasion of planet earth. The story was read as a radio broadcast in 1938 using a series of simulated news bulletins. The radio station ran no commercials during the broadcast which prompted many listeners in the US to believe an actual invasion was taking place. The panic this caused even made it to the front page of the New York Times:

How was this possible? The information ecosystem in the 1930s was not only sparse but also mainly broadcast—one to many. Not particularly democratic compared to today’s information ecosystem which facilitates a considerable amount of user-generated content. The ecosystem we’re used to looks something like the graphic below. Not only are there more platforms but these are increasingly interconnected and interoperable. This makes the freedom of speech 2.0 possible.

The Ushahidi platform is a tool that facilitates the aggregation of information across many of the technologies displayed above. In Kenya, where the platform was first used to document the post-election violence, Ushahidi aggregated information coming from SMS, web forms, social media and mainstream news. Individuals in Kenya could text a dedicated short code number to report any violence they had witnessed.

The platform has since been deployed by partners around the world. At it’s heart, the platform allows users to increase transparency and accountability, and to improve coordination in a more distributed, democratic manner. One of the most recent deployments of Ushahidi is MapKibera, a project run by our good friends over at OpenStreetMap. MapKibera gives voice to people who don’t necessarily enjoy freedom of Speech 1.0 to begin with.

So that explains what Martians have to do with Freedom of Speech 2.0—at least indirectly! Next is Tom & Jerry, the cartoon. With Freedom of Speech 2.0 comes Repression of Speech 2.0. In other words, a cyber game of cat-and-mouse quickly evolves between those seeking more ways to express themselves and state officials who see this as a direct threat. One recent example of this dynamic is the SudanVoteMonitor project which was run by Sudanese civil society organizations. Apparently, the site was blocked a couple days into the elections. The group found another way to get the site back up within a few hours.

So it’s clear that in non-permissive environments, there will be push back on Freedom of Speech 2.0. The key is to recognize that both technologies and tactics are important when communicating in repressive environments. Technologies alone won’t circumvent repression 2.0. One of the tactics commonly used, for example, is to use code for the indicators being monitored, eg, 1 = fraud.  There are many more which you can read up on here.

If this cat-and-mouse game continues, perhaps repressive regimes will come to see the futility of trying to censor or block certain websites—much like the music industry vis-a-vis the likes of Napster, e-Mule, etc. So if censorship becomes more difficult, then perhaps launching campaigns of disinformation may be the way to go for authoritarian states; this would dilute attempts at Freedom of Speech 2.0. Open crowdsourcing platforms like Ushahidi are certainly susceptible to misinformation. There’s an obvious trade-off: open up entirely, and get more crowdsourced information, but run the risk of some clowns gaming the platform.

But I’d like to argue that falsifying crowdsourced information is perhaps not as easy as one might think, particularly in today’s ecosystem where multiple witnesses can report on unfolding events in near real-time. The picture below is a good illustration of this ecosystem in action.

The fact that crowdsourcing can generate a lot of information is a distinct asset, and one that can be used to weed out disinformation. Take the screenshot below of the Ushahidi-Haiti deployment.

Multiple witnesses can be using different technologies to provide a better picture of what is actually happening. The different text messages, pictures, tweets, etc, can be triangulated and validated when they overlap. This prompted my colleague Anand from the New York Times to ask whether the triangulated crisis map might be the new first draft of history? They say that history is written by the winners. Will future history be written by the crowd thanks to Freedom of Speech 2.0?

The above graphic reminds me of Photosynth, which is a neat platform that stitches pictures together to form an overall tableau. This is where Venice comes in. Taking pictures from Flickr or other sources, one can veritably recreate Venice in 3D. Really great stuff. So the question I posed during my TEDx talk last week is, can Ushahidi become the ALLsynth to facilitate Freedom of Speech 2.0? Can we crowdsource crisis information across diverse media and stitch these together to recreate what truly happened—not just over space but across time as well?

And if we could, what would it take to game the Ushahidi ALLsynth system?

• Dozens of pictures from as many different camera phones of an event that never happened.
• Text messages using different wording to describe an event that never happened.
• Tweets (not retweets!).
• Fake blog posts, Facebook groups and Wikipedia entries.
• Fake video footage. Heck, you’d probably want to hack the international media and plant a fake article in the New York Times home page.
• If you really want to go all out, you’d want to get hundreds of (paid?) actors like in The Truman Show.
• You’d likely want to cordon off an entire area of the city or city outskirts.
• Then you’d want to choreograph a few fight scenes with these actors.
• A few rehearsals would probably be in order too.
• Oh and of course props, plus lots of ketchup if you want things to look like they went badly.

So in a way, a repressive regime interested in diluting Freedom of Speech 2.0 by falsifying crowdsourced information would probably have to move to Hollywood to recreate entire scenes that never happened.