On November 28, 2011, elections began in Egypt as part of the political transition plan overseen by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Armed Forces. The full plan calls for elections for the People’s Assembly, followed by elections for the Shura Council, a more consultative body that along with the People’s Assembly comprises the Parliament. According to the plan, the Parliament will then choose the members of a constitutional assembly to draft a new constitution before presidential elections begin in late June 2012.

The Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC), an Egyptian NGO, is using Ushahidi to crowdsource election monitoring during the Egyptian transition. The project is called U-Shahid or Enta Shahid, which in Arabic means, “You witness.” DISC first set up U-Shahid to monitor Egypt’s 2010 parliamentary elections. This year, it has so far been used to monitor elections for the People’s Assembly, the third and final round of which came to a close on January 11, 2012.

In getting the word out about U-Shahid, DISC counted on social media. DISC utilized its online following, which includes, for example, over 65,000 Likes on Facebook. In addition, many people working on U-Shahid, whether as employees or volunteers, have thousands of followers.

With our partner NGO, the Egyptian Democratic Academy, we trained volunteers to act as monitors and send in reports during the voting and a team to help manage incoming reports. DISC employees acted as backup.

Those sending in reports were asked for a quick description of what they were observing. They also had the option to attach a photo or video as evidence backing up their report, or to include a link to such evidence. They also categorized their report in categories such as “Intimidation” in the larger category of “Violence” or “Polling station closed early” under the larger category of “Polling Stations.” And it wasn’t all doom and gloom, “All Went Well” was an often used category for reports. Visitors to the U-Shahid site could vote (yes or no) whether they believed received reports to be true, allowing people to contribute in a small way to verifying the accountability of reports. Additionally, Egyptians could sign up to get alerts about reports, particularly reports within a certain proximity to their home or location, allowing access to dynamic and personalized news.

Volunteers receiving incoming reports then checked the classification of the reports, expanded the description, and filled in the location, if it was absent. The final responsibility of verification fell to the administrators.

Our most common verification strategies were to corroborate reports by checking online news, looking at attached photos or videos, asking our local volunteers to investigate personally or through their local contacts, or contacting the sender. We had an additional team on the ground that could travel to investigate and verify reports of large-scale fraud.

Our verification volunteers also had two additional trainings. First, they learned how to use ICT4Peace’s verification matrix plug-in, which helped administrators ascertain the reliability of reports. Second, they had training from Reuters reporters, as traditional media has developed a range of intricate verification strategies in the face of their need to draw from social media.

In broad strokes, the reports recorded widespread illegal campaigning (such as campaigning to people waiting in line to vote – a banned practice), some evidence of vote buying, and plenty of examples of disorganization, but relatively little evidence of violence being used or systemic fraud. While all reports were of course made available in real time, reports such as this one, on the first stage of voting, were emailed to journalists and organizations that we believed would benefit from the information. As the Egyptian military proved hostile to the idea of election monitors, and in fact banned official international monitoring, our reports were only as valuable as the attention they gained among the public and among groups with a role in policy.

In evaluating the project, DISC found that U-Shahid was less successful than in 2010, receiving fewer reports and less media attention. A number of lessons can be learned and observations made:

-       U-Shahid was less well known in comparison to 2010, when it became so popular that it inspired four additional Ushahidi maps to monitor the election. This can be attributed to media focus being on the violence and protests in Tahrir Square in the lead up to elections, as compared to 2010 when a number of television programs featured U-Shahid. Also, in 2010 DISC purchased advertising space on Youm7, a popular Egyptian news service, but could not do the same this year, as our grants were less generous. This should serve as a reminder of the inadequacy of social media by itself and the necessity of a robust marketing campaign.

-       Two additional factors led to a decreased volume of submitted reports. First, this year saw even more election monitoring projects with and without the use of Ushahidi by organizations and newspapers offering cash to monitors. Depending on volunteers, we could not compete for reports with those organizations offering cash. And the proliferation of maps reduced the attention given to each. Attempts made to build a coalition with other NGOs and newspapers to work with DISC on U-Shahid were rebuffed due to a culture in Arab countries of organizations being more interested in getting credit than in forging effective partnerships. Second, monitors feared violent reprisals for documenting cases of fraud at the hands of police, the military, or hired thugs. During clashes on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the run up to the election, for example, people recording abuses on camera were specifically targeted.

-       The feature allowing visitors to the U-Shahid site to vote on whether they believe a report to be true was rarely used and of no particular benefit

-       In December, the military raided a number of international and local NGOs as part of an “investigation” into the foreign funding of NGOs and their potentially suspect motives. This complements an ongoing smear campaign against NGOs. While this threatens DISC’s ability to continue work on the project, it also points to the resilience of crowdsourcing, as traditional election monitoring projects were cancelled by a number of NGOs in response to the military closing their offices and leaving their legal status in limbo.

-       DISC is planning a complementary follow-up project called Enta Sharek (“You Share”) in which focus groups in five areas will be shed light on their experiences during the elections. No reason that traditional information gathering techniques can’t be used to complement our efforts!

The world was shocked to learn about Kyrgyzstan’s second revolution within five years. The country’s anger resulted in the ousting of two presidents, and the 2010 revolution was followed by interethnic violence in the south of the country – making 2010 a challenging year. Some doubted whether Kyrgyzstan could remain independent and sovereign.

At the time, UNDP sent experts to the country to assess the situation and provide  technical support. Jens Wandel visited the UNDP office in Kyrgyzstan to learn about our projects including our support to the elections.

He asked me if I had heard about Ushahidi, a free, and open source software for collecting, visualizing and mapping information. Ushahidi is Swahili for “witness” or “testimony” and was used  for the first time in the 2007 Kenyan elections.

Since then, I have become addicted to the idea, especially since it coincides with our plans to use information and communication technology in our work to support democratic governance.

Since Jens arrived just before the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, we didn’t have time to properly explore how the platform had been used, and ways to adapt it to the Kyrgyz reality.

Later, we learned that Ushahidi had already been used in Kyrgyzstan several years ago by a local NGO that recruited local election observers. However, they used the available software without adapting it to local circumstances and didn’t coordinate their activities with other partners.

I consulted local software developers and not only did they know about Ushahidi, but they also knew about the first time it was used in Kyrgyzstan and had a clear idea how to adapt the open source software to moderate activity on election day.

The beauty of the concept is that the final product would become a universal platform focused not only on electoral violations, but on other issues such as natural disasters like the earthquakes inHaiti and Japan.

The next step was also quite challenging: Could I convince my colleagues and our national partners that this is a useful and inexpensive way of exposing electoral violations during elections day?

Some of my colleagues were skeptical, mostly because of the complexity of information and communication technology. There were some doubts that local civil society would buy into the concept and participate.

In the end, proponents of the Ushahidi software prevailed and we hired a local group to develop the supplementary software and to moderate the process on election day.

Another requirement was to ensure strong coordination at all stages between the developers, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), and key NGOs that would be providing information on violations to the system.

About 3,000 text messages with information on electoral violations were verified and posted online. More than half the violations were observed and reported in Osh and Bishkek, the biggest cities in Kyrgyzstan, and there were more than 27,000 hitswith an average duration of about  two minutes.

Kyrgyz NGOs gained experience with the Ushahidi platform and adapted it to the country’s needs. We saw firsthand that the platform can be used to monitor and increase the transparency of elections.

The CEC not only supported the idea and monitored the site, but also used some of the information for their own purposes.

Well, the statistics shown are quite impressive, however, the main question is this:

What is a non-expensive way of making sure that information from the website reaches each potential voter right way? Especially to the first voters, to demonstrate that the electoral processmust be and can be transparent, and any violation will be recorded and shared with the community?

What do you think?

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

“For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com (the elections were held on 11 October). Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi…but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information. In total, only 23 reports were submitted to the web platform on election day for all of Liberia. Many of these reports were of dubious news value…”

Ushahidi Liberia response:
-    The majority of the reports on this site are contributed by Ushahidi Liberia’s partner organizations; each organization has their own protocols and metrics for report verification and publication
-    It has been Ushahidi Liberia’s intention from the beginning not to crowdsource information regarding the electoral process. Given the potential for unreliable information and volatility from the crowd in Liberia, we have intentionally sought information from partner organizations – a crowdseeding approach rather than crowdsourcing. This differs from other deployments of the Ushahidi platform. Clarification about this is now provided on the elections instance; Timo’s blog post reminded our team that this was not apparent on the instance, and we appreciate the chance to clarify the assumption that the instance was composed primarily of crowdsourced information
-    In many cases, report quality and content reflects how much training reporters have received from their parent organizations on sending information to the platform. Sometimes the Ushahidi Liberia team is invited to conduct trainings for reporters, at other times they are not; it is the choice of the partner organization with which our team works. Our team believes these reports reflect the reality in Liberia that detailed and useful reports are not easily acquired due to larger issues such as the disruption of the education system by the recent civil war.
-    As for the number of reports shared on the map during election day, we received an additional 126 messages that are currently being verified and approved on the backend, so the numbers of those published do not reflect the number received by our partners. Again, it is the responsibility of partner organizations to approve their own reports as we hope to build sustainable use of the platform in Liberia beyond our on-the-ground presence.

“The bigger issue is that a large number of reports were automatically posted on 11 October at 00:00 by the Elections Coordinating Committee…Obviously these reports are wrong: either, they really were published before the polls opened, in which case they are completely fabrications, or the posts were backdated, which is a serious mistake…For a project like this, that is a disaster.”

-    Ushahidi Liberia’s Tech Lead oversimplified the date/time when he bulk uploaded the ECC polling data. The rest of the ECC’s polling data is accurate – in the upload that our Lead did not list the exact time each was uploaded at the ECC data center; we apologize for this mistake. All former ECC polls reports have been corrected on the elections instance with the same reports and the exact times they were entered into the ECC database. We often receive large datasets collected offline and automate the uploading process for partners that otherwise would not be able to add the data themselves due to limited bandwidth.

“On October 12, only two reports were posted to the platform. This shows how thin the network of contributors really is. While the results of many polling stations had already been posted on the doors of the local police stations, none of this information made it onto the web platform. Obviously, there were not enough monitors in the field to report that information.”

-    Regarding results, the elections instance never claimed that it would post this data. What is posted on this instance is the result of our partner organizations’ priorities and scope; none of these partners intended to collect results, and the information is otherwise being announced for the first time (preliminary results) as I write this post by the National Elections Commission. This website by the Liberia Media Center provides the only preliminary results that existed before the NEC’s announcement, and is admittedly unofficial. After the NEC’s prelims announcement today, the LMC website will display NEC’s results alongside LMC’s.  In addition, the Ushahidi platform is designed to display discrete data points; it is not well suited to displaying summations, averages or other forms of numerical analysis. Thus the platform does not currently lend itself to displaying vote results. When it comes to monitors in the field, there are thousands of monitors gathering results; if anything, it is simply too early to determine results.

“I had been very curious to see, how well the Ushahidi platform would work in a country with as limited an infrastructure as Liberia. Unfortunately the answer is: it doesn’t work…As I mentioned before, many Liberians don’t have mobile phones and even those who have one, frequently don’t have credit on the phone or the electricity to charge it, or they are living in one of the many areas which have no mobile phone reception. Of the remaining people, I doubt that many were even aware of the monitoring initiative. Internet access is even rarer…Last but not least, the low quality of maps of Liberia certainly posed an additional challenge…”

-    We agree with many of the challenges you have listed when it comes to using the Ushahidi platform in a setting like Liberia. Please refer to the following blog posts we’ve written regarding these issues and how we’ve addressed them:
— Liberianizing the Platform
— Getting better data on Google Maps
— Lessons Learned by end of 2010
— Launching the elections instance with new features
— Patrick Meier on wrong assumptions regarding technology use in places like Liberia
— Meeting with community crime watch groups to improve use of platform
— Trying to make SMS gateway work amid Liberia’s limitations
— Lessons from recent local trainings

As you suggest, the challenges of implementing this tool in Liberia are significant and not to be underestimated or ignored.

“All of this limits the size of the crowd almost exclusively to the nine partner organizations that were supposed to feed information to the platform. Some of these organizations, like UNMIL, would certainly have been able to contribute something of value. But in the end they didn’t – UNMIL for example did contribute a single report.”

-    UNMIL asked the team to create a link to their Facebook and website pages for them on our instance because it was getting more traffic than their own sites, however they have not been officially sharing data with the instance. We have since moved their links to the election info page on the instance and have removed their group page.

I hope that these explanations clarify some of the questions and concerns raised, and the Ushahidi Liberia team welcomes further conversations about these or other aspects of the Liberia elections instance. Our team will be sharing further posts in the coming days regarding the latest additions to the elections instance and the possibility of a run-off for the presidency.

Liberians waiting to vote

Ushahidi Liberia’s election instance has been up and running since December 2010, displaying reports from a dozen partner organizations working on the elections. The Ushahidi Liberia team has trained these partners’ trusted reporters to submit information about everything from security issues to polling station logistics to voter education activities. In addition, the map displays all the polling stations, senate and presidential candidates and political parties by county, making the map a one-stop shop for election information.

Ushahidi Liberia's elections instance

One of these partners is the Elections Coordinating Committee, a coalition of 30 election-related organizations monitoring the electoral process. The ECC planned to send 2,000 monitors into the field for the elections that would call in critical incidents and polling station logistics to a Monrovia data hub. Because iLab Liberia already had the facilities, ECC has moved in for a couple weeks and bolstered iLab with additional computers as well as doubling the VSAT Internet connection speed. Twenty data operators were hired and trained by ECC and iLab last week and showed up bright and early this morning to get started.

Liberia's Elections Coordinating Committee at iLab

The word soon spread beyond the ECC, as we hoped it would, that iLab was ready and eager to support other election trackers. Throughout the day, Ushahidi and iLab hosted a variety of guests, including: journalists from Guinea unable to call their colleagues when rain intercepted the phone lines (we connected them to Skype and they got their story home); the BBC, NDI, OSIWA and the ECC who set up in iLab’s conference room for an impromptu briefing; a film crew from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that streamed their elections broadcast from iLab’s balcony, a feat otherwise impossible in Liberia without an expensive portable satellite connection.

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation at iLab

The Chief Information Officer for the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) called Ushahidi Liberia in the morning, saying she noticed UNMIL’s senior leadership viewing the Ushahidi instance and wanted to know more. By the afternoon, Ushahidi Liberia was presenting the election instance and this conflict-tracking instance to the Elections Crisis Management Team. Afterwards, we got a glimpse of the Joint Elections Operations Center – UNMIL’s own elections hub – where UN peacekeepers watched a large monitor toggle between the latest information on Google Earth and the election instance.

UNMIL's Elections Hub - notice the Ushahidi tag!

Several ex-pat colleagues dropped by to volunteer and we sent them out into the field to check on critical incidents. We couldn’t help but give them these T-shirts – inspired by the great crowdsourcer Patrick Meier:

Ushahidi Liberia volunteers = elections crowdsourcers

The elections instance received more than 70 messages from trusted reporters on election day, the majority of them describing long lines of patient voters and relative calm nationwide.  Only a handful of messages indicated inconsistencies or tension – such as a political candidate accused of busing in and buying votes for her county, a later-refuted report of 18 new polling stations, and illegal campaigning. But for the most part, the day was remarkably peaceful according to our partners and UN colleagues – a promising sign that Liberians are indeed ready for lasting change.

Ballot counting at local polling station

When the sun set and the ballots were cast, the Ushahidi Liberia team grabbed our official observer badges and walked to a nearby polling station to watch the ballot counting. The polling station was dark except for the small LED lanterns in three separate rooms, giving just enough light to read the unfurled ballots. Polling staff carefully sorted each ballot among the 16 political parties, counting out-loud to an attentive audience.  After sorting the ballots, some observers requested the two major political parties’ ballots be recounted, and the polling clerk dutifully did – one by one. As a few members of the audience started to nod off, another polling clerk spoke up, “this is a human being working, not a machine! We beg you, please be looking!” And that drove home the point – Liberia’s democratic electoral process is starting from the beginning, and is working because humans are working long hours in dark classrooms and churches to count the hand-marked and finger-printed ballot papers received via canoe and truck and hardy porters.

Observers watch ballot counting

As I write this, sometime after 2am, iLab is buzzing with 20 ECC data operators taking calls and recording vote counts from the field, one station at a time. These are human beings working and, while there are some machines and technical tools like the Ushahidi platform involved, the most remarkable part of this process is the people committed to a peaceful outcome.

ECC receiving calls late into the night

A deserted downtown Buchanan

Much of Liberia’s identity remains wrapped up in the war that ended a short seven years ago. One of the more promising efforts to heal war wounds and prevent future conflict is the formation of County Peace Committees (CPC). The committees are composed of trusted leaders in the community – youth and elders, men and women – and exist at the district and county level, each one closely linked to nearby police and courts. The initiative started about two years ago and is supported by the United Nations Mission in Liberia’s (UNMIL) Civil Affairs department and the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Peacebuilding Office. It has taken some time to organize these voluntary committees, but they are now resolving disputes big and small and, this week, were regionally organized to learn early warning incident reporting via the Ushahidi platform.

County Peace Committee members gathered in Ganta

This week’s trainings were held in four different regions of Liberia with 73 CPC focal persons in attendance. When we reached the Ushahidi portion of the training, CPC members were quick to catch on to the utility of the platform. I have found that when I explain how the tool has been used in other settings to report conflict, peacebuilders throughout Liberia immediately relate to the need for more reliable and rapid methods of disseminating information as conflict is breaking out. When I show pictures of the post-election violence in Kenya, or the DRC map populated with SGBV reports, there is a knowing concern on people’s faces that yes, these are familiar situations and no, we do not have all the tools we need to be informed. Even more important, in the context of Liberia, peace committee members are seeking methods to identify instability before actual conflict erupts; they know from experience that a fire spreads quickly once all of the conditions are present to light it.

CPC members in Buchanan learning the Ushahidi platform

During each of this week’s trainings, I introduced the concept behind the Ushahidi platform and then conducted a simulation where members sent in sample SMS describing the kind of issues they often encounter. Together, we looked at the PBO instance’s backend to see messages coming in and evaluated the contents of each message to see if it was “mappable”.  This is usually where I found a gap between participants’ conceptual understanding and their ability to use the necessary technology to send information to the platform.

CPC elders seeing Ushahidi for the first time

A good example came from our session in Buchanan. When we came to the simulation, I asked how many people send one or more texts per week; two of 12 people raised their hands. How about one per month? One person. Judging by the silence of the remaining nine people, I conducted an impromptu intro to texting: how to create a message, change the predictive text setting, delete and insert punctuation and send. Much to my surprise, most participants were riveted – responding to the basic instructions as if learning them for the first time. Afterwards we sent simulation texts, sharing the four phones participants had among them. Those who were the most proficient with texting (two participants) took 15 minutes to send one message.  Those who were new to texting took 20-25 minutes with one-on-one instruction. Here are a couple of text examples from the simulation:

1. “100pm there was fighting number 2 compound in vedier town grand bassa county” (20 minutes, new texter)

2. “There is a growing threat of electoral violence in Liberia, where young people are divided on political lines. Two days ago in the city of Buchanan, there was a brutal fight between groups of young people on the 27 of Sept at about 12.00am” (15 minutes, experienced texter)

To complicate matters, some participants had phones like the one pictured below that had been so completely worn down that some or all of the numbers and letters were gone.

A well-worn phone without numbers or letters

Sometimes it is a mystery unraveling the reasons why certain people in the room can send a message and others cannot.  When I spoke with my colleague conducting a similar training this week, he said several participants sent detailed messages and in a shorter timeframe – 10 minutes. The same was true of our training in Monrovia, where about 60% of the members sent messages in 10 minutes (the rest in 15-20). There seemed to be a positive correlation between participants from larger population centers and their ability to text.  There was also a clear divide between the older participants and the youth; those under 35 were generally more familiar with texting or picked it up more quickly.

CPC members teaching each other how to text

Another trend within the CPCs is that many participants were elders or middle-aged; they started their peacebuilding work at the beginning of the fourteen-year civil war and, while these peacebuilding veterans are now well-equipped to lead CPCs, their age group is less familiar with SMS. And here’s an interesting assumption that many of us might have also made: when the PBO was recruiting CPC focal persons to attend these trainings, they specifically asked for individuals who could read and write, thinking this meant they could also text. If it were simply a matter of learning a new skill, then the trainings could serve to introduce texting; but with hardly any emphasis on critical thinking in Liberia’s education system, it becomes markedly more difficult to transfer such a skill.

Nat Walker of the Peacebuilding Office shows CPC members how to text

But Liberia’s education system is not the only reason why texting might prove difficult for CPC members. It’s a simple truth that only so many leaps can be made at once. When I first started using the Internet as a teenager, I only used email – it didn’t occur to me to do anything else. And while more exposure and familiarity with the Internet has changed the way I use it, there were many other factors at play: I owned my own computer, my Internet connection was fast and reliable, my education and upbringing encouraged me to investigate and play when I didn’t understand a new tool, and my peers were doing the same exploring and experimenting. In the case of many Liberians attending the CPC trainings, the following was true: they shared ownership of one phone with their family or entire community, the phone was left on charge at a local charge shop for long periods, they lived in a place with spotty network coverage, credit is added to the phone sparingly and calls or messages are not made without considering the cost, and participants’ education and access to technology were disrupted by more than a decade of war. The conditions that need to be present to text in Liberia do not necessarily exist simply because someone has access to a phone; if there is one major assumption that many of us in ICT for development are guilty of, it’s this one.

CPC member shows off his "how to text to Ushahidi" card

But here’s the good news. After hours of “texting 101” sessions and practice simulations, I asked each exhausted group of participants if they could now send texts whenever something unsettling happened in their communities. “We can make it!” one elder said emphatically; “I am overwhelmed that I can now text” remarked another man with a big smile, who was already composing his first SMS to his teenage daughter. And since the trainings, many have made it: we have received 20 early-warning texts in the last three days from these participants. This is a reminder of what must be present, perhaps above all else, to learn a new skill: motivation.

Androids running SMSSync at Ushahidi Liberia

These days technology just works. There’s no magic and very little rocket science; put in some 1s and 0s and get out 1s and 0s. The days are gone when bugs, actual insects, would chew their way through the computers wire and cause mayhem.

Now some of you right now are saying, “Yeah, but I still can’t figure out how to make my Facebook profile private.” That’s a user interface issue; the underlying technology is working perfectly. The layer that exposes that technology to you may be poorly designed, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

Yes technology hums along gloriously – until certain assumptions no longer hold true. Such assumptions usually include constant electricity and Internet, two things that are not constant in Liberia. Thus what seems like a perfect combination – SMS technology and Liberia – has a few obstacles to overcome before riding off into the sunset happily ever after.

For us at Ushahidi Liberia, we wanted SMS and Liberia hit it off. SMS is a great way for people on the ground to send in reports of what’s really happening. All you need is a phone and a cell phone signal. Most places in the world have cell phone coverage, and an increasing number of people have cell phones. The Ushahidi platform even has built-in support for SMS because it has worked well in other deployments. So let’s get to know more about the compatibility of this couple in particular – SMS and Liberia.

SMS

Simple Messaging Service is a GSM standard that uses extra bandwidth in the signaling path that controls call flow. The signaling path is used to tell a cell phone that a new call is coming in, that the call has been hung up, the number of the incoming call and so forth. Since the signaling path isn’t used when there is no phone call, phone companies realized they could add a messaging service on top of this unused signaling path – and SMS was born. Because the signaling path is only intended for short messages like, “incoming call +231-6-555-343”, SMS messages can only be 160 characters long.

Liberia

Liberia is a small country in West Africa still recovering from a civil war that devastated the nation’s infrastructure.  Despite the lack of power lines, power stations and any kind of hard-wired telecommunications infrastructure, Liberia now has a relatively robust cell phone network. While less than 1% of Liberians have access to the Internet, at least 20% own cell phones and even more have access to shared phones. SMS seems like a natural choice for Liberians to send messages to our Ushahidi Liberia sites, given that even the cheapest cell phones available in-country support SMS.

Half a powerline: Liberia's damaged infrastructure

The Trials of Matchmaking

At this point, things look good for our two lovebirds. A simple global standard for sending short messages and a country where the telecommunications infrastructure is best equipped to handle short messages. In fact, such a partnership has worked so well in other countries that the wonderful people at kiwanja.net created FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS is a program that turns your average laptop and a cell phone into an SMS gateway for bulk messaging and routing incoming SMS to the Internet. By connecting a cell phone to a computer via a data cable, FrontlineSMS can intercept incoming SMS and automatically send them to a website of your choosing – an ideal matchmaker for SMS and Liberia.

However, it is here we encountered our first obstacle. Computers need power. You can get around this requirement for a few hours by using a laptop, but the problem persists. Ushahidi Liberia’s first office used a diesel generator for electricity, like most Liberian workplaces that do not have access to a power grid. Diesel isn’t cheap in Liberia, so the generator only ran from 9am to 7pm; that leaves 14 hours without power.  In other words, 14 hours without the ability to send and receive SMS via a desktop SMS gateway.  Because many of the reports sent to our Liberia instances about conflict and instability, we could not afford to be operational for only 10 hours a day.

The second obstacle was an unreliable Internet connection. In Liberia, all Internet connections are via satellite – far slower and more expensive than fiber optic connections. Ushahidi Liberia’s first ISP leased a satellite Internet connection comparable to a slow DSL connection in the US – comparable until the ISP splits that connection among all of its customers, who then split their slice of the connection amongst all the users in the office/home.  During peak working hours as many as 500 people were using that one Internet connection, causing it to drop out when bandwidth was exceeded, and causing any user to grind their teeth in frustration when it was working but oh so slow.

When the Internet dropped out in our office and FrontlineSMS received an SMS to forward to Ushahidi servers, the sending would fail and FrontlineSMS would drop the message without resending. At that time, FrontlineSMS did not notify the sender or the receiver that a message failed to send, so it could be days before the person running the FrontlineSMS instance might realize that half the sent messages were missing. FrontlineSMS, like many platforms, is designed with the assumption that the Internet works.  Granted, we were using FrontlineSMS as an SMS gateway to the Internet and not solely as a bulk messaging system, so our needs were specific.

SMSSync to the Rescue

Considering these glitches, our couple might not be as compatible as we thought – that is until SMSSync came along. SMSSync is an Android app written by the Ushahidi team that replaces the computer as the intermediary and runs the SMS gateway program on the phone itself. Since Android phones can connect to the Internet via WiFi and GPRS, they can receive an incoming SMS and then send it out over the Internet all by themselves. This solved our first problem of power. Phones can easily run 14 hours, or a couple of days, without recharge; that’s what they’re made to do. But we still have the issue of unreliable Internet.

SMSSync Android app

To address the Internet, our team worked closely with SMSSync’s creator, Henry Addo, to incorporate a resend function that repeatedly tries sending a message until it is received by the target URL. Now messages can be received by SMSSync even when the Internet is out and they stay in a holding pattern until the connection returns.

At this point it seems like everything is going to work out for SMS and Liberia, but not so fast.

There’s still one more assumption suggested earlier – that humans will interact with technology correctly. Even the most well-intentioned, experienced user will occasionally get it wrong. The civil war held up the arrival of the latest technologies, and as a result many Liberians don’t have extensive experience with technology.  We noticed that every so often we’d receive a blank message from our users in the field; someone probably hit send prematurely. At first we didn’t pay much attention to this, but then we noticed that SMSSync would stop sending messages after receiving blanks.

After a lot of hair-pulling, we realized the glitch was related to the Ushahidi platform itself. It was programmed to reject blank SMSs as erroneous. SMSSync would try to forward the blank SMS to Ushahidi, Ushahidi would reject it, SMSSync would wait 5 minutes and try again, meanwhile all the other messages were waiting in line. We reprogrammed the Ushahidi platoform to accept all messages, blank or otherwise. Messages that appeared to be errors would be marked as such for the users of the Ushahidi platform to decide what to do with them.

We also had a similar problem with promotional SMS from the cell phone companies. They’d send out things like, “Talk free this Saturday” and often these messages wouldn’t be from numbers like, “06-555-123”, but rather from “winBig” or “LonestarCell.” Again, we didn’t think much of this, but SMSSync stopped working shortly after receiving these messages. It turns out that the Ushahidi platform is also set to reject SMS from numbers that aren’t numbers, sending an app like SMSSync into a never-ending loop. We also fixed this in the Ushahidi platform.

At this point we’ve accounted for assumptions about electricity, Internet and human users. The final assumption we had to overcome is that the technology will always, from now to eternity, until you tell it otherwise, do what you want. But here’s a twist: in an effort to save battery power, Android phones are programmed to turn off their WiFi radios after a certain period of inactivity. Thus SMSSync would work brilliantly for awhile, but then stop forwarding messages for no apparent reason. We’d look at the phone, see the unsent SMS, and since we were now using the phone the WiFi would come back on and mysteriously work. Much to our embarrassment, this also took a long time to figure out.

It’s the Simple Things

At this point I’d like to make it clear that 99% of the time it’s the simple things that get in the way. It wasn’t some small manufacturing defect in our phones, it wasn’t a rogue bit of code deep in SMSSync, it was just a simple feature of the phones that, when they aren’t working as SMS gateways, works to the user’s advantage.

KeepScreen Android app

We fixed the WiFi automatic sleep by installing KeepScreen on the phones. KeepScreen is a free Andoid App that just keeps the screen on all the time. By keeping the screen on, and making the Android think the user is still using the phone, the WiFi also never goes off.

Now our phones work perfectly, day and night, through power and blackouts, high bandwidth bliss and connection timeouts, to send SMSs from our users on the ground to our servers high in the Internet’s metaphorical cloud. And after much hardship, Liberia, a beautiful country, and SMS, a messaging protocol of elegant simplicity, are together at last.

We’ve told you a bit about iLab on this blog before, but now we have a visual aid to better introduce ourselves.  We started the space as a way to train people in the Ushahidi platform with adequate connectivity and equipment, and now we’re holding FOSS trainings for the Liberian legislature and serving as the data entry hub for national Elections Coordinating Committee. So many good and unexpected things start with a tool that serves to connect, and to ask people – what is your story?  Now we are asking, who is your community?

It’s an exciting time to be in Liberia – with a presidential election next month, broadband Internet landing offshore in 2012 and increasing overlaps between Liberia’s development and tech communities. We hope you’ll take a look and see what iLab is doing to promote IT access and innovation in Liberia.

Wood Camp and Soul Clinic communities outside of Monrovia

James was one of 10 participants who recently completed the Universities 4 Ushahidi training in DC this June.   He returned to Paynesville, a city well-known for crime and corruption, with renewed dedication to address security risks at the community level.  James identified two areas of Paynesville that are hotbeds for criminal gangs: Wood Camp and Soul Clinic.  Youth Crime Watch invited members of these communities to their Paynesville office to discuss the Ushahidi platform.  It had been months since my last visit to the Youth Crime Watch office, and the trip reminded me of how quickly urban Liberia becomes rural.  The back roads had ditches steeper than our vehicle, most houses were made of patched together zinc roofing, and the number of decayed and overgrown houses often outnumbered the occupied dwellings.

Community members discuss security threats they face on a regular basis

When I arrived, twenty residents from Wood Camp and Soul Clinic were sitting in Youth Crime Watch’s office.  We went around the room and introduced ourselves, sharing one or two things we would like to see change in our communities.  It was heartening to see teenagers, men and women as well as elders represented in the crowd.  Some common themes emerged: armed robbery happens so often that many residents are unable to sleep soundly at night, and the criminals – called “rogues” – are highly organized.  Everyone in the community knows exactly where the rogues gather, who leads them, and which gangs are responsible for each crime.  If you are robbed, you can go to one of the ring leaders the next day and ask about your stolen property; he will ask where you live and what time the crime took place, and he will then call on the rogues he assigned to that robbery the day before.  Gang members are given shifts each week just like any job. “I can tell you exactly where the criminals are,” one of the crime watch leaders said.  “But no one wants to face them.”

Sharing the Ushahidi platform at the Youth Crime Watch Liberia office

When I explained the Ushahidi platform and how it can be used to notify authorities about these incidents, other complications arose. “Security officers have a share in every harassment that is carried out,” said one woman from Wood Camp. The local police often arrive at robbery sites and arrest the criminals, however these rogues are back in the community the next day boasting about their release and looking for anyone who might have reported the incident.  The police are known for brokering deals with the gangs, splitting the proceeds, releasing the perpetrators and charging the victims a fee if they want to retrieve their stolen items.  But even if you pay, one resident complained, “you will walk up and down and you will not get a thing from them.”

Where to start when the crooks and the cops are working together, when the country has turned a blind eye to places like Paynesville, and community watch groups become targets simply for standing up?  One place to begin is with organization.  It is clear that the rogues are organized and well-networked, and the community has to fight with the same weapon of order, starting with new ways of supporting the crime watch groups.  This is where the Ushahidi platform comes in.  The platform be used by the crime watch groups across communities as a catchment for all reports of crime and violence in Paynesville; Youth Crime Watch already has a customized instance for this purpose. Once an archive of testimonies is created, it can be used as evidence of specific events and overall trends that cannot be as easily ignored as Paynesville’s eyewitnesses have been to-date.  But to what end, residents asked, if the local police are the end users of the information and they are benefiting from the current arrangement?  This is where Ushahidi Liberia’s relationships at the national level can play a part – specifically, with high ranking officers in the National Police, the Liberian Armed Violence Observatory (LAVO), Early Warning and Early Response Working Group, and other coalitions and institutions seeking to eradicate security threats and corruption among responders.

Discussing how the Ushahidi platform can be used by local crime watch groups

Wood Camp and Soul Clinic residents were hopeful that their reports might eventually reach these entities, but they were also notably daunted by reporting to the platform via SMS.  Very few residents at the meeting knew how to send texts, and even more challenging was communicating the detail of a crime in this condensed and unfamiliar format.  During a simulation, each member at the meeting sent in a message reporting an event; many of the messages received did not include a specific location or description of the event, such as this message that read “this is the creamer rate for Paynesville” (the crime rate).  But upon asking each reporter to describe what happened, they explained in great detail what took place.  Youth Crime Watch decided it would be best to call each reporter after the message was received and transcribe the details from the call on the final report.

When we distributed business cards with SMS reporting instructions, we asked residents at the meeting to share these freely in their communities; immediately, there was pushback.  Residents were concerned that this number could be used by rogues to send false information, and for this reason we should not open up reporting to all of Wood Camp and Soul Clinic.  Once again, crowdseeding trumps crowdsourcing in Liberia.  But there is no need to push; there are several elements of the Ushahidi platform that are brand new to users in Liberia, and not all of these have to be adopted at once for the tool to be effective, or for that matter to plant the seed of change within communities.

Since this meeting less than a week ago, Youth Crime Watch has heard of several robberies, murders and an attempted suicide in these communities, however none of these incidents were immediately reported via SMS.  As implementers of the Ushahidi platform, our team finds that the most dynamic aspect of this tool remains the unpredictable human element – how human behavior, cultural norms and familiarity with communication technologies can determine whether or not the platform is useful.  In two weeks time, we will be meeting again with the residents of Wood Camp and Soul Clinic to show them how their reports look on the map, and together we will continue to unravel the questions around how tools like the Ushahidi platform can be localized to serve communities like Paynesville.