The first 72 hours of the SomaliaSpeaks deployment were particularly intense. The purpose of this joint write-up with Al Jazeera and partners is to share some of our early lessons learned in this novel collaboration.  Every deployment teaches us a multitude of lessons, so our partners at Al Jazeera, Souktel and Crowdflower joined us in this effort to share these. We look forward to future collaborations with them as we share this story with you.

This purpose of this pilot project was to let Somalis speak for themselves. For the first time ever, a prominent news organization, Al-jazeera, used crowdsourcing and SMS to let thousands of Somalis express for themselves how the crisis has been effecting their daily lives. More than 4,000 text messages were received within just a few days. Of these, over 1,000 were translated from Somali into English by about 80 translators. The resulting map of Somali voices received over 25,000 page views.

Before reviewing our lessons learned, we first wanted to thank K’naan and Sol for the initial inspiration behind this project. They got in touch with Ushahidi last year because they wanted to use the platform to help amplify Somali voices and show how capable the Somali people are. The initial version of this project was a prototype that was not activated. But thanks to Al- jazeera, Souktel and Crowdflower, we were able to revive the project to help amplify Somali voices in the international media.

Despite being a pilot, the project exemplified valid use cases in the application of pervasive technologies such as the web and mobile phone to news and information gathering. Somalia being a country run down by decades of neglect and war as well being rife with insecurity  provides one of the most challenging operational environments. Within a very short time we were able to curate information traversing through different parts of Somalia. This would have proved futile if not overly expensive or impossible had it been done using traditional news gathering techniques. Furthermore the information collected provides more insight on the realities of life in Somalia.

Projects like this involve a lot of effort and goodwill from the community and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Therefore, building a strong community around the project goes a long way to solving problems and mitigating challenges. The community goes beyond the volunteer translators. We saw lots of support from the Somali blogging community, technology and media enthusiasts as well as innovators or innovation centric minds across the globe who all narrated or reported the Somalia Speaks project in their own ways. Having a strong community and inculcating a community ethos in  project operations and goals goes a long way influencing success. Without the community backing and promoting this project, it would have only been another temporary spotlight on Somalia.

The project worked as follows. Al-jazeera editorial selected the following question for interview:

“Al Jazeera would like to know — how has the Somalia Conflict affected your life? Please also include the name of your hometown in the response. Thanks.”

Our colleagues at Souktel distributed the question via text message to 5,000 of their SMS subscribers across Somalia. The responses were then forwarded from Souktel’s SMS platform to a customized Crowdflower micro-tasking platform. There, Somali-speaking volunteers translated and geo-located the text messages which were then manually uploaded to Al-jazeera’s Ushahidi platform.

There are three points worth highlighting in terms of lessons learned:

1. Messaging

While the question that was posed via SMS in no way asked for individuals to reply with their personal names, a small number of responders still added their names; some even added their full names. So these were deleted as quickly as possible. (Note that the numbers posted in the title of initial reports were not phone numbers but an assigned sequential number generated by the Crowdflower plugin). In hindsight, the SMS sent out with the question should have specifically asked that responders not include personal identifiers in their SMS replies.

2. Volunteer translation

While we had recruited a small number of trusted volunteers to translate the incoming text messages using a Crowdflower plugin, a decision was subsequently made to make the call for volunteers public to cope with the 2,500+ SMS replies received. This means that anonymous volunteers could see the original text messages, some of which initially  included personal identifiers. So we immediately reached out to Crowdflower for guidance to take the plug-in offline. We then began to manually delete several dozen text messages inside the Crowdflower plug-in that contained personal identifiers. Our colleagues at Al-jazeera took over this process and set up their own micro-tasking platform, removing all personal identifiers from the text messages awaiting translation and geo-location.

3. Security

One of Ushahidi’s community members tested the platform and identified a search security issue on Friday, December 9th. We quickly fixed this on the deployment. And, we issued a security patch to all deployers. (http://security.ushahidi.com)

In the future, for this type of “The People Speak” project,  we recommend taking the following steps:

1. On large multi-partner deployments: Global organizations work in multiple timezones, so communications plans need to include 24/7 points of contacts for each organization.
2. Text potential interviewees to ask whether they agree to be interviewed and to have their responses made public before sending out the main question.
3. Text those individuals who have consented to being interviewed with the desired question and ask them to include the name of their town but not their personal names.
4. Recruit trusted translation volunteers well in advance and ensure that the micro-tasking translation platform has no personal identifiers.
5. Stagger the launch of the text messages and the live map. That is, start with the SMS broadcast and spend however many days/weeks doing the bulk of the translation with vetted volunteers. The system that holds the raw text messages should obviously be fully secure. When the majority of text messages are processed, launch the live map and gradually add the already translated text messages to grow the map steadily over a period of days/weeks.

At Ushahidi, we’ve also made some plans to help all deployers in our community:

• We’re building a program for privacy and security education for our users in 2012. (Blog posts, webinars, videos and meet-ups.)
• Best practices for security and privacy will be included as essential documentation on our soon to be re-launched wiki.
• Ushahidi is open source and the community is a large part of what makes it work.  We’ll build a security working group focused on our software, but it’ll take your participation to make it work.
• Alongside our partners within the CrisisMappers community, we will participate in a security and privacy working group. This field is growing and collective lessons can only improve each map action.

Crisis mapping and journalism are both in the nascent stages of collaborating on real-time news connecting diaspora and citizens alike. Al-Jazeera is leading the fray in testing and implementing live maps into their fast-moving news cycle toolkit. We are thankful for all their efforts and look forward to further collaboration.

The joint project combines the efforts of multiple partners including Al-Jazeera, Ushahidi, Souktel, Crowdflower, the African Diaspora Institute and the wider Somali Diaspora. The basis of my pitch to Al-jazeera was to let ordinary Somalis speak for themselves by using SMS to crowdsource their opinions on the unfolding crisis. My colleagues at Al-jazeera liked the idea and their editorial team proposed the following question:

Al Jazeera wants to know: how has the conflict of the last few months affected your life? Please include the name of your hometown in your response. Thank you!

So I reached out to my good friend Jacob Korenblum at Souktel. He and I had been discussing different ways we might combine our respective technologies to help in Somalia. Souktel has been working in Somalia and providing various SMS based solutions to several organizations. Jacob had previously mentioned that his team had a 50,000+ member SMS subscriber list. This proved to be key. Earlier this week, the Souktel team sent out the above question in Somali to about 5,000 of their subscribers. An effort was made to try and select geographically disbursed areas.

We’ve since received well over 2,000 text message replies and counting. In order to translate and geolocate these messages, I got in touch my colleagues Vaughn Hester and Lukas Biewald at Crowdflower in San Francisco. Crowdflower uses micro-tasking solutions to process and structure data flows. They were very keen to help and thanks to their support my Ushahidi colleagues Rob Baker and Linda Kamau were able to customize this Crowdflower plugin to translate, categorize and geo-locate incoming text messages:

They also wrote additional software so that text messages from Souktel could be automatically forwarded to the Crowdflower plugin which would then automatically push the processed SMS’s to a live Ushahidi map hosted by Al-jazeera. While the software development was moving forward, I connected  with colleagues from the Somali American Student Association who expressed an interest in supporting this project. Thanks to them and other members of the Somali Diaspora, hundreds of Somali voices were translated and shared on Al-jazeera’s public Ushahidi map of Somalia within days. But we still need lots of help. So if you speak Somali and English, then simply follow this link.

I wanted this project to serve as a two-way conversation, however, not just a one-way information flow from Somalia to the world. Every report  that gets mapped on an Ushahidi platform is linked to public discussion forum where readers can respond and share their views on said report. So I suggested that Al-jazeera invite their viewers/readers to comment on the text messages directly. The next step will be for Al-jazeera’s editorial team to select some of the most compelling and interesting comments and to text these back to the senders of the original text messages in Somalia. This two-way flow of information can be iterated and scaled given that the technologies and workflows are already in place.

In sum, the purpose of this project is to catalyze global media attention on Somalia by letting Somali voices take center stage—voices that are otherwise not heard in the international, mainstream media. If journalists are not going to speak about Somalia, then this project  invites Somalis speak to the world themselves. The project highlights  these voices on a live, public map for the world to bear witness and engage in a global conversation with people of Somalia, a conversation in which Somalis and the Diaspora are themselves at the centerfold. It is my sincere hope that advocacy and lobby group will be able to leverage the content generated by this project to redouble their efforts in response to the escalating crisis in Somalia.

I very much hope to see this type of approach used again in Somalia and elsewhere. It is fully inline with the motivations that inspired the launch of the first Ushahidi platform almost 4 years ago today: collective witnessing. Indeed, I am often reminded of what my friend Anand Giridharadas of the New York Times wrote last year vis-a-vis Ushahidi. To paraphrase:

They used to say that history is written by the victors. But today, before the victors win, if they win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message, a text message that will not vanish, a text message that will remain immortalized on a map for the world to bear witness. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time:

“I was here, and this is what happened to me”?

Use #SomaliaSpeaks to witness the project on Twitter.

I want to specifically thank the following individuals who put an incredible amount of time and effort (most pro bono) to make this project happen: Robert Baker, Linda Kamau, Michael Moszczynski, Katie Highet, Jacob Korenblum, Vaughn Hester, Mohammed Dini, Hamza Haadoow, Andrew Jawitz and of course the excellent Al Jazeera team in Doha. Thank you all for going above and beyond to make this happen.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/12/08/somalia-speaks/feed/ 29 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/10/18/liberias-elections-map-one-week-on-with-new-features/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/10/18/liberias-elections-map-one-week-on-with-new-features/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:16:54 +0000 kate http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=5869 It has been a week since Liberia’s presidential elections; during that time, the pervasive peace on election day has given way to opposition’s claims of electoral fraud as well as a few incidents of violence including two cases of arson and an attack on a prominent radio host. While the overall atmosphere remains relatively calm, recent events are a reminder that the days after an election are just as critical and worthy of observation.

UP headquarters in Paynesville burned

In the last week, the Ushahidi elections instance has also been updated with new features.  As of last Friday, the instance has been upgraded with latest version of the Ushahidi platform, version 2.1 (Tunis). One of the most exciting features of 2.1 is the Powerful Reports Filter that allows users to quickly sort through reports according to certain dates and categories, verification, media, location and more.

The new Density Map Plugin

Another new feature on the instance is Ushahidi’s first Density Map plugin by John Etherton. Located on the right side of the homepage, just above the categories, the Density Map option makes it easier to separate reports by geographic region – in this case, by county. All reports that have been associated with a particular county will show up using the Density Map. This feature was requested by UN OCHA as well as other local partners, and serves as a small step towards making the Ushahidi platform a data analysis tool.

ECC data operators at iLab

The Elections Coordinating Committee, based at iLab Liberia during the last week, has been compiling detailed reports from monitors at each of the country’s nearly 4,500 polling places; these are being uploaded to the elections instance and can currently be found under the category, “ECC polling place reports”.  The National Elections Commission (NEC) has released preliminary results during the last week that can now be found as layers on the elections instance (go to “other layers” section under the categories listing).

The Ushahidi Liberia team was curious about who was looking at the elections instance, how they got there, and where in the world they were sitting when they looked at it.  After studying our instance’s Google Analytics, we found that in the last week the map has received 3,533 unique visitors that spend an average of 3 ½ minutes perusing its contents. Interestingly, more than half of this traffic is routed via the Liberian Observer, a national newspaper popular on the ground and online. The majority of the traffic came from the United States (not surprising considering low Internet penetration in Liberia), but what peaked our interest was where in the States: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Georgia – states with the large Liberian Diaspora communities.

Elections instance viewers in the US (graphic via Google Analytics)

This was our team’s first indication of the Diaspora’s engagement with the electoral process from abroad (not to say there haven’t been many), and it widened our perspective on the instance’s audience. Perhaps, in a country without much local Internet access, it cannot be simply stated that a tool like Ushahidi is irrelevant. In today’s world, a country’s borders extend far beyond political boundaries, and interactive mapping tools such as the Ushahidi platform start to reveal the interconnected webs that criss-cross our globe.

This evening, the NEC announced that 99.9% of the presidential votes have been collected; with no clear winner, Liberia faces a run-off election on November 8^th.  The first round saw an impressive voter turnout rate of more than 70% (of registered voters), making many hopeful that Liberians will come out in full-force next month. The Ushahidi elections instance will continue to track the electoral process for Liberians at home and abroad, and for all of us who care deeply about the outcome of this country’s first self-run democratic election.

Liberians waiting to vote on election day

There was a quite a strong earthquake in Serbia [last month] with an epicenter near city of Kraljevo in Central Serbia. Local and National Governments started the standard procedures for these types of crisis and the TV news were pretty much the same – everything will be all right, we are doing all we can etc etc.

But, unlike earlier, people are not easy to fool in times of twitter and other real time communication channels. In a matter of minutes after the earthquake we knew where the epicenter is and in matter of hours we had so much information shared via twitter that watching TV felt like watching last month news.

Right away, some people went to Kraljevo to volunteer and sent info that there is no serious organization whatsoever in the city and something needs to be done. Again, a couple of great enthusiasts thought that waiting for the government to do something is like “Waiting for Godot” and in just a couple of days they built www.jazakraljevo.rs (Me for Kraljevo). The website is built on Ushahidi platform which “allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline”.

The website is already recognized as unofficial Crisis HQ as it offers an easy way to submit data about each and every house/building affected and offers a clear image of what needs to be done to the wider public. All information submitted is, of course, been checked and confirmed by an official crisis HQ in Kraljevo.

The project, one of the latest Ushahidi implementations in Africa was led by the US based Sudan Institute for Research and Policy (SIRP)  and Sudan based Asmaa Society for Development, in collaboration with other Sudanese civil society organizations (CSO’s) who deployed certified election observers throughout the country to report using standard paper forms. These reports were then collated and uploaded to SudanVoteMonitor by designated staff members. Additionally, observers equipped with mobile phones were able to send reports directly using the SMS short codes setup by the project. The bulk of the reporting, however, was done by average citizens throughout the country using SMS, and online via the project website. This was one of the project’s biggest successes since this was a first time experience where technology was applied in reporting by citizens and civil societies in Sudan.

As a result of such success, and thanks to strong backing from international groups active in Sudan, the project is gearing up to cover the upcoming Referendum for Self Determination for Southern Sudan and Abyei in January 2011 where the challenges and stakes are even higher.

Executive Summary of Sudan Vote Monitor Report

The purpose of the Sudan Vote Monitor (SVM) project was to utilize simple information and communication technology (ICT) tools in the independent monitoring and reporting of the Sudan national elections held in April 2010. This initiative built on the successful recent experience of civil society organizations (CSOs) and volunteers in several countries (e.g., Ghana, India, Sierra Leone, Montenegro) in harnessing ICT to support the conduct of fair and credible elections. The project’s primary focus is the process of observing and reporting rather than the election results or their implications as significant as these are. Accordingly, SVM, and this report, is only concerned with the reporting activity with no regard to the political climate or political orientation of reporters, CSOs, or candidates. The main objective is to cooperate with and facilitate technological knowhow for civil society organizations in the Sudan (grassroots and other NGOs, media organizations, journalists, and interested private citizens and individuals in general). The project was led by SIRP in collaboration with Asmaa Society for Development and several other Sudanese NGOs, with technical support from eMoksha.org, Ushahidi.com, and Khotawat Consultancy.

During the April national elections, the Sudan Vote Monitor website enabled reporting of the election process by many different organizations and individuals. Through the use of open source software civilians in Sudan were able to report general observations or irregularities via e-mail, short code text message (SMS), or by logging on to the Internet and visiting the sudanvotemonitor.com website. Using the Ushahidi platform reports could be aggregated along with direct feeds from news sites, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. Users had up-to-date information including streaming video from election centers or polling stations around the Sudan, and were able to comment and rate the credibility of the submitted reports in collaborative manner. The site was accessible to all individuals and organizations regardless of their political affiliations or views. The reporting facility was available for public reporting from April 10 to April 30, 2010.

The majority of the legwork and election period activity was based on volunteer work and internal resources of SIRP and its partners. The African Center for Justice and Peace Studies and Save Darfur Coalition facilitated participation in the Nairobi Civil Society Coordination Conference on February 12-14, 2010, where the concept was presented to Sudanese CSOs. A grant from the Open Society Institute, under its Initiative for East Africa, has made possible the continuation of the project through the elections and beyond.

Overall Outcomes:

• The site received a total of 564 reports from 419 locations, covering 26 reporting categories.
• The team developed a comprehensive set of election monitoring categories, some of which are unique to Sudan. These could be utilized for future campaigns.
• SVM helped establish and utilize an SMS short code service through collaboration with Zain Telecom of Sudan and Clickatell (an international Bulk SMS Gateway provider). This service can be utilized for future events.
• The project gave participating Sudan CSOs first-hand experience with SMS and Web based reporting, and the possibilities it offers. Work was completed in close and full consultation with Sudan partner organizations.
• SudanVoteMonitor.com gained wide recognition through a Sudanese-led, recognizable brand name. The site gained recognition despite inaccessibility for 2 days during the election period as a result of external interference.
• SIRP acquired substantial knowledge of ICT landscape and technical capabilities in Sudan, where impressive levels of talent and skill bode well for future collaboration efforts.
• SVM established a wide network of global organizations focused on supporting the democratic transformation process in Sudan through collaboration with Sudanese CSOs.
• Most of the project’s goals were accomplished efficiently, using very limited resources.

Lessons Learned:

• The time factor. Importance of early start in securing funding and necessary licenses early on (SMS gateway, OFAC), launching the website, at least 2-3 weeks before Election Day, and early onsite training of observers.
• A larger core team is necessary to receive, validate, translate, upload reports, videos and photos, and to moderate the Blog.
• Greater availability of mobile phones, at least one per polling center, for CSO monitors to send reports.
• On the ground scenario testing to identify as many problems early on, e.g., content of the SMS short code.
• Securing early agreement among participating CSOs on the type of data that will be shared through the site.
• Developing the back up facility for the website in case of technical difficulties or external interference.
• Accommodation of slower networks by providing “low graphics” option on the website.
• Focusing more attention on regional centers in the South and West.
• Expanding the network of Sudan CSO partners, and improving coordination with other interested organizations.

The project has both tangible, readily measurable results, as well as intangible long-term outcomes. Short term progress indicators include: the extent of use of the web facility, the volume and quality of actual reporting on the election, the speed of reporting, and the number of volunteers trained to use the Ushahidi.com system. We will continue to track these metrics. Long-term, intangible outcomes are less certain. The diffusion of technology inevitably has complex immeasurable outcomes, but at least two broad impacts may be identified: (1) The incorporation of ICT as standard practice not only in election monitoring but other vital areas such as education and health care, in addition to its own rewards, will also improve the connectivity of Sudanese civil society institutions for more effective action in any facet of civil life; (2) Tapping into the resources and professional skills of Sudanese Diaspora to help accomplish relevant goals.

SVM is a pilot project, which will help guide SIRP’s longer-term plans and work with other organizations inside and outside the Sudan. Full assessment of it is on-going, and will be helped with input from our partners as well as any other organizations and individuals who participated in the election monitoring and reporting process. All comments are welcome.

[Cross-posted from Konpa Group Blog, written by Sabina Carlson]

I have read a number of the stories written about the Ushahidi Haiti Deployment, some of which said that it served as a lifeline for many Haitians affected by the earthquake of January 12^th. And as the rescue phase transitioned into the recovery phase, as disaster slowly transitioned into development, and as incidents gave way to indicators, our team decided that our platform  had served its purpose and that it was time to close Haiti.ushahidi.com. Our site would always be kept up to serve as a snapshot of the crisis phase.

But, back in March, I deployed to the ground to serve as the Ushahidi Haiti Project’s (UHP) field representative for local outreach, and spent a month explaining the Ushahidi and 4636 system to a wide cross-section of Haitian civil society: in the middle of IDP camps, in destroyed churches, in local meeting halls, I explained Ushahidi in Creole and listened to what the affected communities had to say. And I made the interesting discovery that, during the recovery phase, Haitians saw Ushahidi not just as a life line, but a communication line – in fact, the only open communication line that seemed to exist between them and the humanitarian community.

And so, it is hard to convey how inspired, relieved, and motivated I was to hear about the Noula platform: motivated by the same drive to broadcast the voices of the affected population, a Haitian ICT company called Solutions had pooled its resources to create an interactive crisis and needs-mapping platform called “Noula” or “we’re here” in Creole. The concept is simple: based on the shortcode 177, Haitians can call into a call center for free that is staffed by trained operators, and communicate critical pieces of information on their situation or request information.  The information is then sorted, categorized, geolocated, and put onto the online platform Noula.ht, where responders can access the information directly or through subscribing to receive alerts.

Although UHP was born in Patrick Meier’s living room and Noula was born in a tent outside of the Solutions’ office, the platforms shared a common core function: to broadcast the voices of disaster affected populations onto a map that the world can see and respond to.

As a team, we saw Noula as having the potential to be that lifeline, that communication line, not just for the current crisis but for the long-term – and so we decided to take our experience, our resources, our networks, and our lessons learned to partner with Solutions to support Noula.

The Solutions team has an incredible wealth of technical experience, and the talent to create an incredibly responsive tool that is tailored to the current crisis and mitigation efforts in Haiti.  And while Solutions has all the networks and knowledge to build a tool for the public authorities in Haiti, they requested extra support in reaching out to the humanitarian community to understand how the tool could be best used by them as well.

This is where I have come back into the complex crisis communications world in Haiti: to act as a liaison between the Noula team and the humanitarian community. I have been here to find out about how information could best flow between the Haitians calling into the call center every day to the cluster leads and logisticians and information management officers that direct the humanitarian effort every day.

It has been an incredible opportunity to work with a dedicated piece of Haitian civil society to build from the ground up a crisis communications platform that is not only specifically tailored to Haiti, but to the complex post-earthquake, pre-hurricane reconstruction and risk reduction environment the country finds itself in.

And I am also grateful that our networks, experiences, and lessons learned from the Ushahidi Haiti Deployment can play a modest but consistent role in supporting what is now, and will continue to be, that channel of communication I found to be so vital back in March.

I landed on the tarmac in Port au Prince a week ago today. It is not my first time in Haiti: I founded a community health initiative in northern Haiti 3 years ago, where I learned basic creole and learned to respect the resilience of Haitian civil society. I had been called on the ground to lend some support to my colleague Jaroslav Valuch, who has been building an impressive network of contacts in the humanitarian sector.

I landed in Port au Prince to compliment what Jaro is building in the humanitarian community with connections, partnerships, and data from the local Haitian communities, and to diversify the methods we use to collect local information. In just under a week, I have begun connecting with a diverse set of Haitian actors who can see the current value and long-term potential of Ushahidi, from local radio stations to community leaders – and I will expand upon the most promising partnership in my first blog post from Port au Prince.

“The questions need to be asked by the people who have lived the disaster.” Agathe Etienne

In the middle of a long, warm morning in an IDP camp on an old golf course in Petionville, Agathe Etienne and I stood having a long, heated conversation in Creole as people walked by with wheelbarrows of assorted distribution items. If anyone knows the true meaning of this quote I referenced above, it is Agathe: during the first days after the earthquake, frustrated at the lack of attention her community was getting, she mobilized members of her community to conduct a cross between a census and needs assessment, and walked it straight to the humanitarian organizations operating in her area.

Agathe called her initiative Quartier par Quarter, “block by block”, and the project replicated itself across Carrefour Feuilles, Fontamara and Tabarre. In Fontamara, the project was taken up by a local Azek, a bit like a mayor, and no fewer than 26,000 people were surveyed. Hundreds of miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, the Haitian Alliance, a Diaspora development group, discovered the project and were inspired to support it.

When Jean-Claude Bourget of the Haitian Alliance, and Shadrock Roberts of the University of Georgia Athens, discovered Ushahidi, they reached out to our team to ask how we could display this dynamic community-generated data that was coming from the ground.

Instantly, the potential was clear: if Ushahidi is a platform for broadcasting and aggregating the thoughts and priorities of Haitians, here was a true grassroots initiative to begin to collect those thoughts. And if Quartier par Quartier is an initiative to collect the thoughts and priorities of people on the ground and broadcast them to the humanitarian community, here was a platform built that could be instrumental for that purpose.

I arrived in Port au Prince almost two weeks ago, and just a day later found myself on the back of a pick-up truck with the lead volunteers for QpQ. All of them are the same age as the Ushahidi crew back in the Situation Room in Boston: university students, the greatest difference being their universities had all collapsed. Over the noise of traffic, MINUSTAH fuel trucks, and occasional helicopters I explained Ushahidi in Creole. “Oh, ou se pwoje Open Source?” one asked back. “You’re an Open Source project?” I nodded, and he said, “Cool.” No joke.

In a half an hour I had my computer open, and showed them the front and back ends of the Ushahidi site, OpenStreetMap and Hypercube. Immediately, the QpQ team simply got it.

In the eyes of the QpQ team, local use of Ushahidi could become an exercise in local crowdsourcing: they and other small initiatives are collecting information about their own communities, capacities, priorities, and problems, but understood they had no standard way to collect and display the data. Here is an opportunity to sort, streamline, and standardize this flow of information, and give them a common language that is actionable.

In looking at the categories on Ushahidi, the QpQ leaders immediately saw a broader potential in the data they were gathering: being able to map problems in the community like broken bridges or highlighting problems like manipulation of aid. If a new category was put on the table, these intelligent university students spent 10 minutes discussing the implications in their communities. In the final minutes of our 4^th conversation, someone got up and said, “We are the eyes and ears of our communities. If we collect this information and make it public, it is up to the organizations, local and international, to act”.

And, the international community is willing and able to act. I spent the morning in a white tent in the UN Logisitcs Base by the Port au Prince airport, sitting down to present, discuss, and coordinate assessments with OCHA’s assessment working group. Impressive and professional teams are currently deploying large surveys with contractors and electronic handheld PDAs, but as important as they are, as Agathe said, these surveys are not being designed by people who lived the disaster. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized how interested the international community is in the kind of community-generated conversations that initiatives like QpQ and Ushahidi can provide.  It is the human layer underneath the statistics, excel spreadsheets, and GPS coordinates.

This human layer is resilient and dynamic. As I said goodnight and shook hands with 8 of my Haitian peers, including a computer science student and coder named Douglas who is excited about building a PhP platform to streamline data flow, I understood the capacity on the ground in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

The Ushahidi team in Boston have been discussing how to put this tool into the hands of the Haitian community, and now I have seen with my own eyes how those capable, confident, and ready those hands are – and how the hands of the international community are also open to receive it.

Some 4 years ago, I began an oral history project chronicling the Haitian Diaspora here in the Greater Boston Area, and lines of the powerful stories still linger in my mind: “Haitians have always known hardship, and will always know hardship,” an elderly man told me in our mixed dialogue of French, Creole, and English somewhere in the basement of  a community housing project. “But the Haitians always have been strong, and always will be strong.”

In the 4 years since, those observations have been confirmed, but layers of complexity added to them. In 4 years of working with the Diaspora, I saw a community that had been through hardship in Haiti, faced new hardships in America, and had no illusions that their community would face hardships in the roads ahead. But I also saw a community that in acknowledging the persistent nature of hardship in Haiti had had developed an equally persistent approach to innovation.

Haitian civil society has always been among the most organized and cooperative in the world. On the ground, community cooperatives are the backbone of day to day life, and informal networks of communication stretch across the most remote areas of the countryside. Outside of Haiti, the Diaspora sends the most remittances home per capita of all migrant populations worldwide; however the flood of money is more of a metaphor for the flood of frustrations and dreams and intentions the Diaspora is channeling across the Caribbean.

That innovation expresses itself in many ways: in my life, that innovation expressed itself in the Diaspora mentoring a poverty alleviation initiative I was helping to develop between Tufts University and a rural community called Balan in northern Haiti, helping us nurture new models of community-led research, exchanges, and project development.

That experience on the ground allowed me the gift of seeing firsthand the elaborate human infrastructure that is what makes Haiti, contrary to popular portrayal, a strong country.  I passed a baz every day, a brightly-colored gazebo that serves as a community center in good times, centers of community defense in bad times, and centers of community communication across the ages.

The principal way the Diaspora organizes itself here in the United States is different but still impressive: in locally- and regionally-based “Hometown Associations”, which are groups of Haitians who collectively support individual towns in Haiti by pooling remittances for small- to medium-scale development projects.  In recent years, Diaspora groups have accelerated their search for ways to maximize their impact on the development of their country by using the technology that is spreading from Montreal to Miami to Mirebalais.

And this is one of the primary reasons why the Ushahidi-Haiti platform can function as a revolutionary tool for both Haitians on the ground and in the Diaspora to direct the flow of aid and influence the reconstruction of their country.  Ushahidi in the long term can serve as a communication tool to create new links between the Diaspora and the ground that are dynamic and quick and close as word getting passed from baz to baz.

In the current crisis, I have seen the faith of a people tried time and time again by crisis battered in a way I have never seen: even our partners on the ground in Balan in the north by Cap Haitian told us they were safe but “shaken” both literally and figuratively. And I have seen our partners in Boston shaken to their feet at a speed that was remarkable for a community already so quick to stand up for its home country.

And if that flood of frustrations and dreams and intentions was formidable before, it has truly been unleashed now.  But it has been unleashed at a time when the airports are clogged, the ports destroyed, the roads crumbled, and the human infrastructure that is what Haiti was truly built on has been torn asunder.

But at the moment, perhaps one of the best channels for those frustrations and dreams and intentions is the one that was perhaps the least shaken: the technological one. Ushahidi can one day become a long-term platform that Haitians can continue to construct the future of their country on; however at the moment, it is the immediate bridge that is attempting to link the communities in America with the communities in Haiti and communities in the humanitarian sphere.

And hopefully,  if this bridge between these communities holds during the crushing weight of the current crisis, it will prove itself strong enough to stand under the shifting pressures of reconstruction and development. And the more frustrations and dreams and expectations are moved across this bridge between the three communities now in the form of goods and ideas and services, the more solid of a platform Ushahidi will be when the dust settles and it is handed over to an innovating Haitian community.

We want to make sure all Haitians outside Haiti know that they can look for lost friends/family on PersonFinder and report incidents on 4636/Ushahidi. We are learning many Haitians still do not know about these resources.

Please share on this Google doc any places to publicize to Haitians outside Haiti:

• Churches
• Newspapers
• Radio stations
• Facebook groups
• Online communities
• Etc…

After we have this list together, a volunteer will outreach to these groups or we may contact you again for some help.

Thank you!

Even though the Foko Madagascar implementation uses a UK number with a cost implication, it shows that a hub can be set up without needing any mobile devices, which in some cases will make it quicker, particularly in the first few days of responding to a crisis.
This is how it works right now.

Someone can SMS from a Madagascar number going to the UK number +447800000197, the message is converted to an email, FrontlineSMS is fed that email and it then posts to Ushahidi using the sync feature.
This shows that collaboration with citizen journalists can happen globally, and information about a crisis can be presented to the rest of the world rather quickly despite problems setting up a local hub.

Here is a link to a video where Mialy Andriamananja explains what type of citizen journalists there are in Madagascar, and Lova goes over the genesis of the Rising Voices Foko
blogging outreach as well as the collecting/filtering process of
information for the Ushahidi project in Madagascar. The video also features prominently other non-Foko twitterers who contributed
immensely to distribution of information during the ongoing crisis: Thierry Ratsizehena and Thierry Andriamitandro.

For more on Foko, please check out the rising voices blogs on Global voices and the Foko Madagascar website. Global voices is continuing to track the situation in Madagascar, by aggregating all information on this special page.