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/2011/11/03/crowdmapping-the-van-earthquake-in-turkey-with-al-jazeera/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/11/03/crowdmapping-the-van-earthquake-in-turkey-with-al-jazeera/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:25:57 +0000 patrick http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=6098 Our colleagues at Al Jazeera launched this Crowdmap within hours of the earthquake that struck eastern Turkey on October, 23, 2011. The crisis map includes information on needs, help facilities and salvage work. Most of the information mapped on the Al Jazeera deployment was sourced from this wordpress blog. As is becoming standard practice, a disclaimer in the green message area just above the map notes that Al Jazeera cannot guarantee the accuracy of all the information provided on the map, which means that users/viewers of the information should make their own assessment regarding the validity of the reports and use the contact numbers  and links provided to investigate the information themselves.

Right after launching their Crowdmap, Al Jazeera reached out to us for support, but less on the technical side than the volunteer side. So I sent out a call for volunteers to the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and received dozens of replies within minutes. At last count, there were 42 volunteers on the dedicated Al Jazeera Crowdmap Skype chat. Volunteers included included Suha Ulgen, Assistant to the UN’s Chief Information and Technology Officer for the Secretary-General, and students currently taking a crisis mapping course taught by CrisisMappers.net co-founder Dr. Jen Ziemke at JCU. The SBTF is a global network of some 700 volunteers in 70 countries who join the Task Force to train in live crisis mapping and support organizations around the world like the UN when they request help. If you’d like to join, please follow this link.

In the meantime, we’re continuing to support the Al Jazeera team and are already looking at next steps for future deployments of the Ushahidi ecosystem.

The purpose of this blog post is to share some early lessons learned on this project. These come directly from my involvement in the project and hence reflect the actions I took over the past 48 hours. Please do add your own lessons learned and observations in the comments section below if you were involved in the Recovery Map. I’d like to categorize these lessons into two areas: Strategy and Technology. Since I personally focused more on the strategy side of the project, I’ll invite my technology colleagues to share their lessons on the tech side in the comments section.

On the strategy side, one important point worth noting is the URL or domain name chosen for the deployment. If the domain name is tied to an existing company or organization, this can make it more difficult to partner with another organization and in particular a media company. The URL necessarily brands the site so the more neutral the title the better. This is why we switched to Irene Recovery Map.

You’ll want to put together a media and outreach strategy earlier rather than later. So recruit colleagues who have strong links with the media and ask them to reach out to their contacts to help publicize the map. Create a Google Doc where these colleagues can draft a short introductory text that they can each use when reaching out. This keeps the messaging consistent. Obviously, make as much use of social media as possible to get your message out.

Another piece of advice on the strategy side is to really think through the purpose of the live map and to find a niche. A generic or vague description is simply not compelling. Think through the comparative advantage that you and your partners have in launching a live map. We didn’t have any partnerships with official responders, for example. So I decided to “rebrand” our efforts and added a new tag line: “For Ordinary People Helping Ordinary People” and added a “Clean Up Efforts” category. In addition, I added a succinct rationale for the project in the text box above the map: “Disaster responders cannot be everywhere at the same time. The purpose of this site is to help ordinary people help themselves.”

On a related note, provide a very simple way for people to understand how they can use the map. We borrowed the graphic below from an earlier deployment (Snowmageddon NY) and added it to the Recovery Map. The point here is not to assume that new users of the map will necessarily know how to leverage the information displayed. Don’t make them have to figure it out. Make it easy and intuitive.

Next, promote the use of smart phone apps as early as possible in the launch of your live map. Publicize these on the home page and provide the necessary links to download the apps as well as a Google Doc like this one on how to make best use of these apps when reporting information to the map.

Finally, make sure you have an “About Us” section. If would-be users have no idea who is behind the initiative, they are far more likely to hesitate in using the site. Be sure to list all the organizations in your broad coalition of partners working on the initiative. This not only recognizes individuals who are working around the clock, it also helps to increase the credibility and trustworthiness of the project.

On the technology side, Ushahidi needs to make an embed map function directly available on every Ushahidi deployment. This is important because having other websites embed the map (particularly media websites) helps to spread the word and extend the credibility of the efforts. Ushahidi also needs to make a wide range of standard icons directly available from the backend of the platform. The shape of the map on the home page should also be modifiable from the backend. In terms of the smart phone apps, Ushahidi should have a feature that displays the download links directly on the home page.

There were at least 3 other live maps (powered by Ushahidi) that were launched in response to Hurricane Irene. One of these is particularly noteworthy given that it was launched by the Office of Emergency Management of New York City. The NYC Severe Weather Map above is thus definitely a first in this respect. We’ve worked with the NYC team over the past few days to make modifications to their Crowdmap and look forward the team’s feedback after the recovery efforts.

Update: We’ve connected the Office of Emergency Management  with Mobile Commons who have set up an SMS number for the map which WNYC and The New York Times are starting to promote. Text IRENE to 877877.

This is a quick infographic I made while thinking about a phenomenon that often occurs around Ushahidi deployments. You can sort of think of this as a ‘spectrum of interest’ over the life of a disaster or crisis event. I’ve mulled this over for a while, but the idea for the graphic came on a call this morning with Steven Longmire, Catherine Graham and Nicholas Bartlett (from GeoOp) who wanted to discuss the Christchurch quake deployment.

On one side you’ve got peak concern, enthusiasm and interest. An event occurs, the media explodes with coverage and people get involved. This is what I define as the attention stage. It also happens to be where the most data gathering or surveillance occurs. Participation, whether it be experts to experts, volunteers to volunteers or experts to volunteers is critical because everyone needs as much information as possible. Meanwhile, the public’s (the victim’s) needs are also at their peak. Urgency and momentum is highest here.

As the scenario unfolds, we move into what I call the advocacy stage. This is usually where public attention, and mass media coverage tends to stabilize and decline. The focus becomes less about what’s occurred, and more about mobilizing resources to do something. This is also where knowledge is transfered, groups tend to convene on the ground to begin the next phase.

The last stage is what I call the accountability stage. It’s where recovey happens, public attention was waned as people are drawn to whatever big event is now in the news. Groups who’ve made themselves accountable now deal with the real difficulties, the expectations of the public to do something with the data they’ve collected.

Now obviously, there is no clear linear separation between the three of these, it’s much more diffuse, and individual interactions or actions may move through all of these phases at different paces. For instance, the request from someone in the public for help, equally is urgent, requires analysis/action, and needs someone accountable for following through. Also, where these ‘stages’ meet, it’s important to consider the role of the technology in place. A tool in place to manage one process, may not be the same tool required to manage another. However, I’m well aware of efforts to make the Ushahidi platform more efficient at traversing each of these stages, if only to allow it to communicate with tools that were designed for each vertical (for instance GeoOp really shines in the Advocacy and Accountability stages).

Anyways, this is just my own visual brainstorming. I’d love the feedback from anyone who has thoughts on this and how I can improve the graphic.

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.

Currently in Sweeper and soon in Ushahidi, users can translate real-time content from one language into another, on the fly, as they receive it. This is done using our Google Translate plugin. Google Translate currently supports 50+ languages.

For the Sweeper deployment we’re using to monitor the situation in Japan internally, we’re using this feature to monitor events, since we can’t manually translate every single message coming through. We’ve found it a significant timesaver. You can also see below that we’re showing the user what language the message was translated from, or if it’s been translated at all…

Before:

After:

It’s important to understand, that this is machine translation, so it’s far from perfect. But if you’re monitoring feeds from multiple countries across Twitter, RSS, Email or SMS it’s sometimes useful enough to get a quick sense of what’s being said, where to potentially look for more info, or perhaps where to direct human translators.

We are shocked by the incredible devastation that the earthquake and tsunami have caused. Like everyone else, we want to find a way to help. So we reached out to our Japanese colleagues in Tokyo and they did have some specific requests for help. They would like to have the following Ushahidi guides translated from English to Japanese as quickly as possible:

1. Verification Guide
2. User Interface section of Ushahidi Manual
3. Admin Section of the Ushahidi Manual

We’ve created links to Google Doc versions of these documents to facilitate translation via crowdsourcing. If you speak Japanese, we’d be most grateful for your help. Simply provide the translated version in the designated document.

These 3 guides above are the priority items right now. Other documents are listed on this link. Once we complete that we can undertake translation of the actual platform, to help with that, please request an account on our translation platform Tafsiri, be sure to select the Japanese language on the list.

We will continue to touch base with our Japanese colleagues to know how else we might be able to support their efforts.

As someone on Twitter recently said, “Today we are all Japanese”.

Other ways to help: Please refer to this page on Architecture for Humanity.

People we are following on twitter: Joi Ito of Creative Commons @joi and Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times @hirokotabuchi; The Open Street Map Japan wiki is a good source of information, and the Google.org page.

Johnny Diggz from Geeks without Bounds coined it the Crisis Voltron. Within an hour after the earthquake in New Zealand, christchurch.crowdmap.com was launched,  piratepad.net (collaboration tool), a blog post circulated, multiple tweets sent and a skype group chat formed. We connected volunteers from New Zealand, United States, Canada and around the world including people from various volunteer technical communities: CrisisCommons, Sahana Foundation, CrisisMappers, Standby Task Force, Ushahidi, Geeks without Bounds, Humanity Road, Tweak the Tweet and others. The Google Crisis Response () team contacted us after seeing a note on the CrisisMappers mailing list.

The earthquake struck New Zealand on February 22 at 12:51 (February 21 at 23:51 UTC). In the first hour after the quake, Chad Catacchio, co-lead of the CrisisCommons Community Working Group, began situational awareness, set up a  piratepad.net and launched Crowdmap.com instance. I joined the team shortly before 9pm ET, 6pm PT ( 14:00 NZDT). Migrating to skype, we divided ourselves into four simultaneous conversations:

• Situational awareness
• Crisis coordination and emergency response
• Technical migration from Crowdmap to Ushahidi
• Volunteer plan and management

Leadership from New Zealand included Gavin Treadgold, emergency manager, director of the Sahana Foundation and member of CrisisCommons. Gavin began connecting the group to official emergency management response. Robert Coup began leading the technical response and Tim McNamara joined to help with the volunteer plan.

The map was launched before the processes and people were in place. Patrick Meier and George Chamales (Konpa Group) provided their expertise. Plans and processes began to solidify. George recommended a migration to Ushahidi as soon as possible to handle the expected high load.  And, he referred to the essential Ushahidi resource to help guide (PDF) the team.  The CrisisCamp NZ team reached out to two other map projects and merged their efforts. Patrick, Cat Graham (Humanity Road) and myself coordinated to launch the Crisismappers Standby Task Force to assist with the 50 volunteers that Tim had massed. The SBTF was a perfect fit to handle the transition.  The migration to an Ushahidi instance – eq.org.nz happened within 6 hours of the earthquake. The SBTF officially completed their tasks yesterday.

The Sydney Morning Herald also noted that: “Another site, eq.org.nz, is taking pressure off emergency services by plotting official and user-generated information and reports on a Google Map.”

The work of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the recent floods in Queensland has been nothing short of remarkable. ABC was in the middle of piloting some of our new products internally when a true disaster struck in the form of sever flooding in the north eastern Australian state. In a matter of hours their trial of our products escalated to an actual emergency deployment, with their staff, and our own racing to assist the victims of the flood, as best as our technology allows. They’ve done a great recap of their experience here, which I encourage you to read for details.

What was different about the Queensland deployment for our staff, was that ABC was the first organization to embrace the new Ushahidi ecosystem of products in a big way. This included SwiftRiver, Sweeper, SMSSync, Crowdmap, and Ushahidi 2.0. Some of these products were direct responses to inefficiencies we’ve faced in the past as an organization, others were completely untested at this scale.

SMSSync as an Alternative to Buying a Shortcode

SMSSync is a product we developed to allow people to turn their Android phone in to a low to no cost SMS gateway. Basically your phone number becomes the gateway, with people texting your phone number while a script passes incoming messages to the Ushahidi deployment. ABC used this to quickly deploy a number the public could use to populate their deployment without the need for cooperation from mobile telcos.

Of course you lose the benefit of a ‘short’ number and reverse (ex. 4636) but it’s a working alternative for groups who don’t have other options.

Sweeper for Twitter Curation

ABC was dealing with the common problem Ushahidi users have: an excessive influx of data from Twitter. Using our Sweeper application the team experimented with curating Tweets outside of Ushahidi using a plugin called Ushahidi Report Push which simply takes verified content from Sweeper and auto-maps it in Ushahidi. Because Sweeper uses natural language processing and the Yahoo Placemaker API to auto-geolocate content, while using user interaction to prioritize incoming data, the workflow is easier than curating Tweets in Ushahidi.

ABCs staff was keen to try out Sweeper and helped us identify a lot of bugs and inefficiencies we’re now working to improve.

Crowdmap

The default way to deploy Ushahidi these days is to use our cloud product, Crowdmap.com which lets one get started with Ushahidi in minutes. The Queensland Floods deployment was so popular though, that they quickly brought down our servers with traffic! We worked with them to move them to their own server and have spent the past week making sure their private server stays up.

This much traffic, speaks to what a critical resource their team was able to offer to the community affected by the floods.

SwiftRiver API for filtering out duplicate content

Although our Duplication Filter API crashed, we eventually got it back up and are now using it to ‘sanitize’ feeds of realtime data (ex. retweets).

Queensland is one of the biggest Ushahidi deployments to date, both in terms of popularity and in terms of just how many of our apps they were willing to utilize. I’m glad we were able to help, but more importantly, I wish our new friends well as their efforts shift to reconstruction and cleanup.