We are honoured to have our local community and some guests like UNHCR and NetHope join us to talk about best practices and improvements for deployments and Ushahidi.

Here is our Ustream for the day: (recorded)

Streaming live video by Ustream

Our live blog:

Back to it,

Heather L.

Building Bridges

Rukia and Tobias provided further feedback on their deployment: successes, observations and things to improve.

Highlights:

• OUTREACH: Communication targeting of audiences differed for rural and urban areas and diverse age groups. For example, rural areas were reached by radio rather than newspaper. However, the radio programs were sometimes aired in different vernacular language to accommodate all listeners. The impact was great, even neighbouring countries such as Uganda received the information from the website and created their profile online. This required more intensive report verification based on location. The power of mobile in .ke is amazing. Telco providers like Safaricom will allow short codes to accompany hash-tags which will redirect to a website, like Building Bridges. The campaign was successful due to the SMS program and pervasive use in .ke.
• REPORTS: As part of the campaign, the Building Bridges team telephoned over 6000 people. These calls were often to verify the content or to request clarification. Some content was translated into English for the map from telephone calls. Some reports were web-based submissions in Swahili. It would have been useful to have a bilingual map: Swahili and English. People who filed reports often required feedback or follow-up on their content. These involved counselor-type telephone calls. This community approach was essential to build comfort and trust. Some report providers preferred that their content be provided verbally and their report listed by “peacemaker” to maintain their privacy. The majority of the reports were submitted via SMS with the other reports far below in numbers (in descending order): telephone calls, email and, lastly, web-based form reports.
• KEY LESSONS: The plan was revised to accommodate more SMS reports (sometimes 700 a day). Education (digital literacy) was a large component of the telephone calls for feedback loops. The number targets were given less weight over time in lieu of qualitative content and relationship-building with the reporters. And, this type of project is easily replicable in other regions using Ushahidi’s platform.

A very special thanks to Rukia and Tobias for their contribution to this project and for their time today. Check out their other projects including mobile education games such as Get H20.

There are still a few spots left open for the Ushahidi .Ke Evaluation Launch. Register via Meet-up. We will be testing toolboxes, talking best practices and building forward.

Heather L.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Ushahidi are collaborating to build educational tools to help community users. Three toolboxes have been built by and for the community. The Assessment, Implementation, and Output toolboxes are interactive and will allow people to self-assess and evaluate the different stages in using Ushahidi or Crowdmap for their projects. For more information about the project check out the blog series:

Ushahidi Kenya Evaluation First Steps

Wrapping up phase 1 of the Ushahidi Kenya Evaluation

Kenya Ushahidi evaluation phase 2: Making progress with community feedback

The Ushahidi .ke Evaluation Launch has two goals:

*introduce you to some of the research findings, and

*give you a chance to interact shape the content.

We need your help to test Ushahidi toolboxes. Your feedback will help Ushahidi users in Kenya and around the world.

Register today:
Thursday, August 25, 2011 10:00 – 16:00 EAT
iHub
Nairobi Kenya

Schedule (subject to change)

10:00 – 10:30 Introductions and Research overview
10:30 – 10:45 iHub Research Program
10:45 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 11:15 Ushahidi .ke demos
11:15 – 12:30 Toolkit interactive sessions
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 14:45 Policy working groups (eg. usability, security)
14:45 – 15:00 Break
15:00 – 16:00 Group Brainstorm and Next steps

We will provide lunch and toolbox documentation. We ask that participants register to help us plan accordingly.

The Ushahidi .ke Evaluation Launch is in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and supported by the Knight Foundation.

More details

We will be using Meetup to build community events around the world. Whenever possible, we’ll provide streaming and interactive participation. There will be more event announcements soon. If you have ideas or want to host a meet-up, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Thanks!
Heather L.

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, visits the Ushaidi and iHub Nairobi stand at the Kenya Open Government Data Portal launch

Ushahidi welcomes the launch of the Kenya Open Government Portal. Openness is one of the three guiding principles of Ushahidi together with innovation and community. At our core, what Ushahidi does is build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.

“Data is the foundation of improving accountability and governance.”
President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki,
Speaking at the launch of the Kenya Open Government Data Portal

For the past 8 months Ushahidi has been working on Huduma. Huduma is a citizen initiative of Ushahidi and SODNET. It is a strategy and platform that enables citizens to amplify their voices in the demand for services. The goal of the strategy is to contribute to the improvement of service delivery by providing simple technology/media based tools and channels to amplifying citizen’s concerns, dis-pleasures, complaints or suggestions emanating their perception of performance by duty bearers.

Daudi Were demonstrates the Huduma platform for senior government officials at the Kenya Open Government Data Portal launch

The Huduma platform can operate independently of government data but the availability of government data allows the roll out to be faster and more comprehensive. A key policy of the Ushahidi team has been to engage with data holders in government to negotiate the release of data to use on the Huduma platform. This has placed Ushahidi at the forefront of the initiatives calling for the Kenyan government to make data sets available to the public.

Ushahidi joined the taskforce lead by the Ministry of Information and Communication of Kenya and the Kenya ICT Board working towards the launch of the Kenya Open Data Portal in order to share our experiences and our concerns. It was important to us at Ushahidi that local developers were represented at the table.

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, watches a demonstration of the Huduma platform at the Kenya Open Government Data Portal launch, looking on is Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communications

Ushahidi was selected as one of the key partners to get access to the data on the portal before launch to demonstrate how this data could be used by local developers. In just under two weeks Emmanuel Kala one of our developers who is also the Huduma Platform Lead working together with other Nairobi based team members Henry Addo, Linda Kamau, Ahmed Maawy, Erik Hersman, Hamilton Juma and Daudi Were, developed Open Data web, mobile and sms portions on the Huduma platform to demonstrate how local developers with access to government data can develop tools useful for policy makers as well as the general public.

Using the Huduma platform we were able to demonstrate how different counties in Kenya with similar populations have a widely different numbers of health facilities. We were also able to demonstrate how these differences are being addressed through the development of new health facilities in line with Kenya’s Vision 2030.

While we recognise and appreciate that the launch of the Kenya Open Government Data Portal is a major milestone, what happens next is also important. We would like to see more data sets and better data set released. Even more important is that developers, activists, policy makers start work on the existing data sets in innovative ways so that the conversation stops being about the technology behind the data and progresses to what can be done with the data.

In 2010 it was noted on the Ushahidi blog that when running a full Ushahidi campaign, installing the software was only 10% of the work. The Toolkit we have just launched aims to cover the other 90% including a ‘How To’ and a Case Study, plus guidelines for evaluating the efficiency and impact of your campaign. Also the visual graphics we used in our campaigns are in the Kit.
We hope it will inspire and assist others in their campaign design processes.

Toolkit pdf Cover

The contents are based on our experiences running two peace campaigns using Ushahidi, to name: ‘Unsung Peace Heroes‘  which was run in the aftermath of the post election violence in Kenya, 2008 with early Ushahidi software and later the Building Bridges Peace campaign in 2010. This again was rung with Ushahidi only this time incorporated into a Joomla! Site. In both campaigns we partnered with Media Focus on Africa and NairoBits.

The Toolkit, called Butterfly Toolkit No. 1: Designing social change campaigns also includes the zipped software to run Ushahidi in a Joomla! site and the necessary documentation.


Who’s it for?

Joomla! Developers, Social Change activists, researchers and perhaps you.

Joomla! Developers who want to have the Ushahidi mapping tool incorporated into their Joomal! Sites.
You can see how we combined it here in the Building Bridges site, the advantage to us was that we had more control over the visual styling and could add the functionality, that a project could be updated over time. If you install community builder component swell you can easily expand) you your Ushahidi mapping site with profile functionality for all your users. In the software section can download the software, the documentations and see a demo version.

Toolkit website

Social Change activists who want to know more about how a crossmedia campaign can help their cause. In the How To section of the toolkit there are steps to follow in order to focus, design, run and evaluate your campaign. And for the non-designers out there, we have shared all the graphics, logo, t-shirt designs and poster designs from the Building bridges campaign, for others to use as they please.

Images and designs for download

Researchers, in the Case Study, based on our and Media Focus on Africas’ experiences and the research done by a Kenyan research team we share the lessons learned. We sought answers to questions such as:
- what motivated folk to take part, (was it the competition element or the chance to interact with like minded peacemakers) and
- was it meaningful to their peace work to take part in such a mapping campaign.

We were pleasantly surprised by the engagement expressed by participants and their wish to continue to invest in a sustainable peace movement. On the other hand the prevailing gap between rural and city in patterns of new media usage was confirmed. Despite our best efforts, for example engaging more than 12 rural radio stations and working with Peacenet local counterparts throughout the country, and making it posible to engage with the campaign using only sms or voice, the campaign strategies still favoured an urban public.

Case Study contents



Relevant Links

Butterfly Toolkit No.1: Designing social change campaigns

Building Bridges Peace campaign (website)

Unsung Peace Heroes campaign, (website)

Download the Case study PDF, about Building Bridges campaign

Download the ‘How To’ PDF, Design a Social Change campaign


You, for whatever causes or plans one has, we hope the Toolkit will find many applications. Our partner in Cambodia is using the Toolkit (amongst other strategies) to run a country wide two year fair elections campaign there, in Mexico an underground music group are starting to map and connect the upcoming music scene and in Pakistan a partner is looking into mapping school quality in relation to cases of teacher absenteeism and other indicators.

If you have suggestions we’ll be glad to hear, the software has some known issues which could be improved and if you have plans for social change campaigns we’ll be glad to connect and support if possible. Of course mainly we hope this toolkit will inspire and help other to do social change campaigns for a better world.

We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool.  The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web based interactive tool, also with a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post.

In Nairobi, Jennifer met with organizations and individuals that have used the Ushahidi platform for election monitoring, peace campaigns, crisis response and other community programs.

She also met with new organizations interested in the toolbox. They will be testing Toolbox #1 and #2 for their projects and also providing recommendations on how to improve them.

Here are some examples of what they look like. Each toolbox will have different sections that will help you work through different stages of your project.  Like this one from the Toolbox #2:

In Toolbox #1 you can select a type that best fits your program, and click on links to other Ushahidi instances to learn more about what people have done in the past or even doing right now.

You can also take a technology assessment. There will be rotating panels where you see the RED circle arrow that will show you more tips and examples.

Thank you everyone for sharing very helpful tips and examples and for testing out the tools! It’s still a work in-progress but we’re looking for more people to test the toolbox, especially if you have used Ushahidi in the past. Please let us know if you would like to help out by adding a comment to this post.

The Ushahidi-Kenya evaluation is off to a strong start. Since returning from Nairobi in January, 2011 we have worked on the self-evaluation and assessment tool for individuals and organizations interested in using Ushahidi. The purpose of the tool is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform via a web-based learning tool and to provide access to community resources and to actively plan their Ushahidi project, through a project cycle. An off-line manual will also be available for those with limited bandwidth. The learning tool has three parts:

1. The assessment module will help new users a) incorporate Ushahidi into project goals and objectives b) plan to collect information that will be mapped, c) identify partnerships and technology resources. This tool may include budget and project timeline templates.
2. The implementation module will help users go through setting up the instance and further plan any media/publicity campaigns to help information collection and much more. It is meant to support organizations as they launch and maintain their Ushahidi project.
3. The analysis & evaluation module will support users as they actively collect, map and make decisions with their Ushahidi instance. It will also provide tools with which to evaluate the project – helping organizations report their successes and challenges to donors, the user community and others.

The below image is an example of a screen shot of the Assessment Tool.  Organizations can learn about the instance types (icons on the left) and link to examples of how other organizations have used Ushahidi. We hope that this will help new and existing community users learn and make decision for their projects and programs.

Jennifer is off to Nairobi this week to share our progress and get feedback from the local Ushahidi community.

We are completing our first case study on Unsung Peace Heroes and Building Bridges. These two projects used Ushahidi to map peace related information. Unsung Peace Heroes was designed to recognize individuals who participated in peace efforts in the violent aftermath of the December 2007 Kenyan General Election. These heroes often risked their lives to help members of their community. Building Bridges is an extension of Unsung Peace Heroes. Building Bridges was designed to map peace initiatives throughout Kenya as well as recognize and reward Kenyans who participate in peace initiatives and promote conflict resolution.

These two projects offer interesting lessons for the greater Ushahidi community. Media Focus on Africa Foundation and Butterfly Works, the implementing organizations:

• Relied on strong partnerships with local organizations.
• Used multimedia strategies including radio, television, newspaper and online advertising; interpersonal communication at events throughout Kenya; mobile communication and social media.
• Produced materials in English and Kiswahili.
• Had clear goals and timelines.
• Customized the Ushahidi platform to meet their needs. This was particularly true for Building Bridges as they integrated Ushahidi with Joomla, a free and open source content management system.

The full case study will be available for download later this year.

As we wrap up this phase, we will move onto phase two, which includes a case study of Uchaguzi in both Kenya and Tanzania and completion of the self-assessment tools. We look forward to continued feedback from the Ushahidi community.

Read more about what’s going on at the iHub blog.

During the first two weeks of January, we traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, to begin phase one of a 9-month evaluation of Ushahidi-Kenya projects. As part of a team, Jennifer and I met with individuals and groups who have incorporated the Ushahidi software into their programming as well as other partners to better understand how organizations have implemented and used the platform to improve their programming and organizational goals.

This evaluation has multiple purposes. In addition to writing case studies of some interesting and dynamic projects that use the Ushahidi platform: Unsung Peace Heroes and Building Bridges, and Uchaguzi in both Kenya and Tanzania; we plan to document our progress through a series of blog posts; and to create practical and interactive tools.  These resources can help organizations decide if Ushahidi is right for them through a self-assessment and evaluation process. Implementers can use these resources throughout the entire project period to track their progress and strengthen monitoring and evaluation. We’re in the very early stages of development, but based on discussions with people in Kenya who have used Ushahidi and members of the Ushahidi team and community, we think we’re developing some very useful stuff. Currently, we’re focusing on the “pre-implementation assessment” and “implementation” resources so that we can get feedback from current and future deployers on these key areas.

We’re working closely with the Ushahidi team and others involved in developing the Ushahidi Community page to integrate the case studies and tools into this part of the site and to add to the already existing resources for Ushahidi users. Another goal is to link to guides, case studies, tips and tricks or anything else out there created by the vast Ushahidi community worldwide to better serve the entire user community.

Ushahidi: Creating a New Narrative from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

The Ushahidi Platform allows everyone to create the narrative.

In this video, the Ushahidi founders and others discuss the origins of, and rational behind, the Ushahidi platform.

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Produced by Jon Shuler & Sarah George
Directed and Shot by Jon Shuler
Motion Graphics by Mancel Lindsey
Photography by Boniface Mwangi
Music by Saregama – saregama-music.blogspot.com