Run-off election results on the map

In the days between the run-off and NEC’s first announcement, the Liberia Media Center published unofficial rolling results from field journalists covering the polling places. These initial results were the first and only vote counts available to the Liberian public, and were published right away on the elections instance as “LMC run-off vote counts” (just below categories, under “other layers”). The Elections Coordinating Committee, active observers during the first round, sent out another 1,750+ monitors on run-off day who have now returned to iLab and are diligently recording the events that occurred at Liberia’s polling places. These ECC reports from the first round can be found under the category “ECC election day monitoring”). Second round ECC reports will appear on the map once the data operators have received all polling checklists.

ECC polling station reports from the first round

During the last week, the majority of the map’s reports have been about the events surrounding Monday’s CDC rally turned violent, and minor incidents during the run-off and the following day. Some of the incidents reported include: attempted ballot box stealing, the torn down polling station results, tear gas fired by police when a crowd refused to give up ballot boxes, the closure of three major radio stations on charges of hate speech, the burning of a major radio station that is still under investigation, and Thursday’s release of 84 persons arrested during the rally.

Picture from the map of an opposition rally turned violent

Young voters proud to cast their ballots

Since Wednesday, the Ushahidi Liberia team has mostly been mapping news from the local media and international observers such as the Carter Center and ECOWAS. We plan to continue updating these vote counts until the final results are released. However, with recent news that opposition leader Winston Tubman will contest the results and seek legal action to hold another election next month, this election map may not go quiet simply because the last vote is counted.

The 2nd round of voting, scheduled for November 8^th, has two candidates on the ballot: Congress for Democratic Change (CDC)’s Winston Tubman, and the Unity Party’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

Friday, November 4^th

- As of Friday, CDC’s Tubman announced a boycott of the run-off election. Just two days before, Tubman said the CDC would participate in the 2^nd round, despite differing statements from within his party. The US State Department said it was “deeply disappointed” by Mr. Tubman’s decision to boycott the runoff and that Tubman’s accusations of fraud were “unsubstantiated.”

Monday, November 7^th

CDC supporters gather for rally near party's headquarters

- Despite warnings from the international community, Tubman called for a rally on Monday, November 7^th – on the eve of the Nov 8^th run-off. Campaigning ended officially on Nov 6^th, and the CDC did not have the requisite permit from the government to conduct the rally by Monday morning when CDC supporters were amassing in the streets. CDC supporters were told in this flier that the 2^nd round as “a cheating run-off” and encouraged to demonstrate in protest.

CDC supporters meet UN peacekeepers' and National Police's blockade

- “CDCians” gathered near the party’s headquarters on the main street that runs through the capital. By noon, a blockade was formed first by UN Peacekeepers and, behind, the Liberia National Police backed by UN armored vehicles. Within an hour of the crowd’s formation, there was a breach at the edge of the blockade and CDCians who broke free began throwing rocks and glass bottles at the officers. Police responded with tear gas grenades, fired repeatedly into the scattering crowd. The police pushed the main crowd backwards to the party headquarters, continuing the tear gas and soon after firing live ammunition at supporters. Five civilians are confirmed dead, with many others injured. A nearby gas station was looted and destroyed, allegedly because the owner was a Unity Party supporter.

National Police officers move towards retreating CDC demonstrators

-  Shortly after nightfall, the court ordered three radio stations be shut down for inflammatory speech. These stations were said to be operated by CDC supporters.  As for the rally’s deaths, CDC’s vice presidential candidate blamed President Johnson Sirleaf directly for the loss of life. President Johnson Sirleaf vowed an investigation would be conducted.

Tuesday, November 8^th

- Election morning saw reduced numbers at the polls. Many more women than men were voting. In CDC strongholds across the capital, voter turnout was little more than a trickle. When an international election monitor asked a lone male voter why the women largely outnumbered the men in the 2^nd round, he said simply, “They look out for their own”, suggesting women were voting for Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf.

Women voting at nearly empty polling station in Monrovia

- While the turnout appeared to be significantly less than the 1^st round, this election did not include the Senate and House of Representatives, and was between two presidential aspirants rather than October’s 16. It is suspected among observers that the short lines may have been in part because of the streamlined process and not only because voters were concerned about violence.

- Isolated reports of instability came in at the end of the day, including attempted ballot box stealing and more rounds of tear gas fired at citizens trying to prevent the police from removing ballot boxes at close of polls. All in all, a calmer day than expected after the events of Nov 7^th.

- Unofficial preliminary results will be released by the Liberia Media Center this evening and throughout the week. The National Elections Commission says official preliminaries will be in on November 9^th with most votes counted by the 11^th. All of these results will be posted on the Ushahidi election instance under “other layers” (just below “categories”) on the homepage. The national Elections Coordinating Committee, with more than 1,700 field monitors, will also have detailed reports from each polling station on the Ushahidi instance as information rolls in.

More to come this week about the Ushahidi elections instance and its role during and after the run-off.

Ushahidi Liberia elections instance

The London (UK) casual event was co-hosted by the Crisismappers Network and the Stand-by Task Force. As you can see from the hat, Patrick Meier was in attendance.

(Photo from the London meet-up)

Linda Kamau held a developer’s meetup in Lusaka (ZA) and Ahmed Mahaay held a technical meet-up in Mombassa (KE). Both Ushahidians provided a deeper technical overview incorporating demos, training and a developer’s discussion.

(Photo from the Lusaka meet-up)

Holding casual meetups provides an informal place for folks like Adeel Khamisa of GeoTime to stop by the Ottawa meet-up or Stephane Giodone of Zonecode to share his project ideas for opening up the alerts for construction in Montreal. We try to hold casual meet-ups if we are visiting a city.

Upcoming Scheduled Events:

October 8th, San Francisco (USA): Ushahidi & Media Hackathon
October 25th, Toronto (CA): Mapping for Media (co-hosted by Innovate News)

Stay tuned for more announcements:

November 7th, London (UK): Frontline SMS and Ushahidi will co-host a workshop
November 11th, Nairobi (KE): Heather Ford and the iHub team will co-host an academic webinar
November 12th, Paris (FR): OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi will co-host a workshop/hackday

When I first started working on www.Indymedia.org in 2000, I was really excited about the platform it provided: a way for people who witnessed news events to immediately publish text, audio, video and photos to an OPEN newswire.  This was unprecedented on the web at that time, and led to an explosion of open multimedia content-posting sites.  Since its inception at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, the Independent Media Center expanded into over 200 local sites worldwide, all funneling featured content into the main (global) site www.indymedia.org.  In many ways, this could represent the way news organizations operate in the future – but most of the major news companies haven’t caught on to this trend just yet.

I got into the world of journalism because I didn’t trust the media.  Time and again, I’d read, hear or watch news stories that were grossly inaccurate, one-sided and oversimplified.  So I took seriously the slogan, “Don’t hate the media, BE the media”, and helped launch a bunch of indymedia centers and microradio stations all over the world, always with the hope of giving voice to the voiceless, allowing people to tell their own stories and to share in the narrative that was developing about them without the often-damaging involvement of advertising dollars and managing editors who presume to dumb things down for audiences they believe they have to entertain as well as inform.

Now, with more and more people turning away from traditional media to get their news online (see chart), it seems those audiences, about whom so many assumptions were made by the management of media corporations, are trying to find their own way in the new media world and find the news that they think is important and valuable.

Unfortunately, this often means that people seek out only news sources that confirm and uphold their existing points of view, and may be just as full of inaccuracies, speculation and oversimplification as the news media that they were trying to escape.

How can we get through the mess of misinformation to find the real tips of breaking news events, as they’re happening, and get this information out to as broad an audience as possible?

I’ve been working with a team at Stanford this year to use Ushahidi’s Swiftriver platform, and specifically Sweeper (one of the multiple tools in the Swiftriver toolbox) to try to extract real newstips from the deluge of 140-character texts and tweets, and try to figure out which newstips are real and accurate.  Our project description and current newswire is at www.newsti.ps

We’re implementing this in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, an area where many news incidents are under-reported in the US, and others are over-reported, giving US audiences a skewed perspective of the reality on the ground.  We’re using the Swiftriver platform to skim the web and twitter for keywords that are then filtered by keyword, location, reputation and duplication and organized into a database.  Our reporters in different parts of the Palestinian Territories (the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem), can follow up on the most poignant of these tips and verify their accuracy.  These reporters have created the International Middle East Media Center (www.imemc.org), currently the most widely-read English-language news site based in the Palestinian Territories.

We’re also working on a way to allow people who witness news events but don’t have the luxury of a smart phone yet (only 2% of cellphone users in the Palestinian Territories have smart phones, and 3G is extremely spotty), to send texts and photos directly into our system as well.  For translation of Arabic texts, we’ve solicited the help of the crowdsourced translation team of www.meedan.net.

Like with Indymedia, we think that this work can be an alternative to the mainstream media – although, as always, they are free to use these news stories, it seems unlikely that many will.  When news corporations are focused on selling advertising dollars instead of providing accurate news for their audiences, they will continue to go the way of the dinosaurs, as they are doing.  Unfortunately what we’re losing right now are lots of good, investigative news reporters who held politicians’ feet to the fire, reported on breaking news events and local issues, investigated wrongdoing by large companies, connected audience members with the stories of people in different circumstances far across the globe, but with whom they could relate due to the strength of the writing and storytelling.  What we’re left with right now, to a large extent, are cable news channels whose focus is on entertainment and advertising, and vitriolic talk radio that exuberantly embraces speculation, rumor and misinformation over fact-checked, accurate news reports.  On the local news front, AOL’s newest branchild, patch.com, threatens to replace real local reporting with half-hearted, badly-written reports that are unapologetically inaccurate.

Can we get a ‘people’s newswire’ based on eyewitness reports of newsworthy events?  I believe we can – if we combine the automation of systems like Swiftriver, the data visualization possibilities of tools like Ushahidi, and the insight of trained reporters who can follow up on potential leads.  Heck, if we can do it in the Palestinian Territories, then we can do it anywhere!

The video below is a short presentation about this project. Be sure to check out our website www.newsti.ps for real-time updates during the upcoming humanitarian flotilla to break the siege on the Gaza Strip.

Here are a few of the must-haves we discovered in setting up this tech lab – we’d love to hear yours!

Must-have #1: great signage

Did you know you need flashy signs that can be seen from far away?  In a place like Liberia where presentation is everything, this is key – and can take a bit of work considering that there are several people involved in the process.  For the metal street signs, first find a reliable and talented sign painter – who will often provide the scrap metal in addition to his artwork.  When the artist is finished, a welder will attach the sign to iron rods, and someone else (often friendly security guards) will insert the sign in the ground with concrete footing.  The artist then comes back, retouches the sign and, ta-da, you’ve made your mark.  For the large tarp banners, there is thankfully a very professional printer in town that created ours for a pretty penny.

Signage on the main road

iLab Liberia and Ushahidi Liberia's office

The lesser-known benefit of the handmade signs is the artist interpretation of the logo – note how there is a two-headed animal on Ushahidi’s signboard where there were originally two giraffes.

Ushahidi Liberia's two-headed mascot

Must-have #2: user guidelines

As our team talked about iLab’s target audience and the absence of another open tech space in Liberia, we realized we should set some ground rules.  These rules may seem obvious and potentially restrictive for users, but we’ve found that having them on the walls and reading through them with users before each training session or event (as well as having regular users sign a detailed MoU) has increased the professionalism of the space and the users’ respect for it.

iLab Liberia's top ten guidelines

Must-have #3: a clear mission

In developing our guidelines, we realized that, while iLab was modeled on the inspirational iHub, its mission and target audience sometimes diverged from iHub’s open space for “techpreneurs”. The iLab’s mission is to assist IT professionals, organizations and institutions in their efforts to more readily share information using ICT – specifically, with trainings in open source tools and systems because they promote interactive communities and shared ownership in a country where information and knowledge are often withheld or at least difficult to access.

Training at iLab

The keywords here are “training”, and “lab” vs. “hub” – the iLab is available for use by appointment and is a community workspace in so far as users may attend events and training sessions for free; it is not a space where, pending membership, users have their own workspace and are granted greater access based on innovation.

The tech community in Liberia is not yet robust enough, by our estimates, to make full use of an iHub; for now, introductions to open source and popular info sharing tools, along with contextually specific trainings based on local techies’ requests, provide structure for the iLab’s pilot phase.  More inline with iHub, we also want iLab to be a meet-up space for the young tech community and for workshops with a similar mission that have technical requirements.

Must-have #4: limited Internet access

Another must for our budding iLab is restricted Internet access.  This, like the guidelines, could come across as a distrustful policy.  Our reasoning: we would rather start out the reduced temptation for users to stray while simultaneously modeling a new policy (in Liberia) towards Internet usage in professional spaces.  This means no Facebook, Yahoo chat, YouTube (with some exception), and blocks on popular sports sites.

Must-have #5: online, not just on the ground

Any new tech lab needs an online presence – and not just a website, but also Twitter, blog, Facebook (and surely more).  Starting with the website, we wanted to walk the walk by using a free Google sites template (iLab intends to host Google site trainings) with content by Liberians for Liberians.  The blog will be a space for details about starting and maintaining a tech lab in Liberia, as well as recommendations from iLab’s staff about different applications and resources for local techies.

iLab's first workshop with the African Elections Project

Last week, iLab Liberia hosted its first Ushahidi training for a dozen West Africa Network for Peacebuilding in Liberia’s (WANEP) field reporters and regional representatives, following WANEP’s launch of a national early warning system. We also hosted PenPlusBytes, a Ghanian non-profit, for a two-day workshop at the iLab where 30 Liberian reporters and social workers received in-depth training in ICT journalism for the upcoming election.

Ushahidi training at African Elections project workshop

Carter Draper going over the iLab's guidelines with workshop participants

At the end of the training, which will be one in a series from PenPlusBytes known as the “African Elections Project”, the iLab was gifted an additional laptop to add to the lab’s 11 computers; now, local media have a dedicated computer in the iLab for reporting on the election process.  The events were a thrilling success, and the feedback was more than enough motivation for the iLab team to continue refining our approach and spreading the word about what iLab has to offer.

To learn more must-haves – along with more details about iLab’s environment – check out IT Director Kpetermeni Siakor’s recent iLab blog post.

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.

We like to say that our mission with the SwiftRiver project is to democratize access to the tools used for understanding information. To me that means taking the hard-work out of drawing insight from excessive quantities of data, to help humans process things more efficiently. That’s why it was huge honor to announce the SwiftRiver project’s ongoing collaborations with software developer Pete Warden earlier this year.

Earlier this week Pete announced a cool project closely aligned with our mission called the Data Science Toolkit:

The Data Science Toolkit is a collection of data tools and open APIs curated by our own Pete Warden. You can use it to extract text from a document, learn the political leanings of a particular neighborhood, find all the names of people mentioned in a text and more. He unveiled it today at GigaOM Structure Big Data in New York City.

It’s available as a Web service, or you download a virtual machine and host it on your own server.

• Street Address to Coordinates – Street Address to Location calculates the latitude/longitude coordinates for a postal address.
• File to Text – Converts PDFs, Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets to text. Recovers text from JPEG, PNG or TIFF images of scanned documents.
• Coordinates to Political Areas – Returns the country, region, state, county, constituencies and neighborhood a point is inside.
• Geodict – Geodict pulls country, city and region names from unstructured English text, and returns their coordinates.
• IP Address to Coordinates – IP Address to Location calculates country, state, city and latitude/longitude coordinates for IP addresses.
• Text to Sentences – Removes any parts of the text that look like boilerplate instead of real sentences.
• HTML to Text – Returns the full text that would actually be displayed in the browser when an HTML document was rendered.
• HTML to Story – Takes an HTML document representing a news article or similar page, and extracts just the story text.
• Text to People – Spots text fragments that look like people’s names or titles, and guesses their gender where possible.

The DSTK project joins a number of similar open data science tools on the market. Increasingly there’s a need for people of all types to own and control their own data in ways that are easy to utilize or deploy. It’s one of the reasons people use Ushahidi products, apps like ours lower the barrier to entry for those who want simple ways to collect or visualize data. Hence the reason we’re actively contributing to GeoDict and the greater DSTK initiative.

Find out more at datasciencetoolkit.org.

I first have to declare that the idea of using Ushahidi to empower local Australian communities was not my own and would like to credit Anand Gridharadas who first introduced us to Ushahidi and planted the seed which was to grow into EveryMap.

In essence, EveryMap.com.au is trying to empower citizens by the simple act of sharing what we already know. If you want change in your suburb, whinging is pointless and apathy is surrender, so we are encouraging Australians to collaborate, because we know that there is power in transparent and recorded collaboration.

While many Ushahidi deployments deal with crisis situations we believe EveryMap can help deal with another kind of ‘crisis’, that of disconnection and powerlessness that comes from disengagement.  Disconnection is especially evident in local communities, a place ironically where collaboration and communication was once strongest.

The community holds 100% of all the valuable information but the knowledge is dispersed among thousands of citizens.  When we lived in small communities, this wasn’t a problem.  We regularly meet and socialised together, at Church, in the market or town square but as our towns grew, we lost access to this decentralised “treasure trove” of history, events & opinion.  In the place of complex formal and informal networks most Western societies outsourced communication of community information to media organisations.  The only problem is, much of what we still want to know isn’t news worthy and therefore isn’t covered by local media.

Through the power of collective and collated information, locals can make a difference on issues ranging from potholes and graffiti to neighbourhood crime, volunteering, road trouble spots to pedestrian death traps, garage sales and community protests.  These may seem trivial things to report, just everyday conversations that we should be able to have directly or through other means, but the truth is that there are few broad and open public communication spaces for this ‘everyday information’.  Information is controlled, “managed by spin doctors”, hidden for “our own protection” or sent off to government departments never to see the light of day again.

I want to know that my neighbour’s house was robbed yesterday, that 100 locals have been waiting for 9 months to have a dangerous pedestrian crossing signposted, and that there is a great garage sale four streets away and a local charity that would like my help to deliver meals to the elderly on Christmas Eve.  And for my relatives in the bush, a locust sighting two farms away is essential information. This stuff isn’t news worthy but is matters to me.  And there is something locally that matters to everyone.

We also tried in the design of the site to soften the look, with the hope of making it more appealing and friendly.  Unfortunately, we were working with the prior version of Ushahidi and since upgrading to Version 2.0 (Luanda) we’ve lost some of Nighean’s beautiful work, including a number of birds which have flown off the page into who knows where, so we’ll have to have another go at trying to make the site look ‘warmer’.

www.EveryMap.com.au went live on 17^th of December 2010, having been in beta testing for a few weeks and we have 550 reports across Australia, mainly in Sydney.  A number of local councils and councillors (elected local government representatives) have already signed up to receive report and as with another project I am involved with www.streetcorner.com.au (a hyper-local news network) we are finding that a surprising number of local politicians are embracing the principles of openness, transparency and direct dialogue and are very supportive of EveryMap’s vision.  Something old becomes new again perhaps.

So with EveryMap only two days old, I cannot yet share any insights into its successes or failures, but hope to have the opportunity to share more of our journey with you in the future.

A few months back Jon Gosier dropped by the Twitter offices in San Francisco to discuss the importance of Twitter as a resource for crisis mapping and humanitarian response community. For our own platform, Twitter often accounts for much of (if not most) of the dataset that groups deploying the Ushahidi platform will map. With it’s 190 million global users and 50 million tweets per day, Twitter has proven itself to be one of the most valuable (and accesible) real-time information sources.

Twitter for Disaster Response

The SwiftRiver project was, in fact, born out of the need to help Ushahidi users cull and curate data because of the overwhelming flood of data aggregated from sources like Twitter, SMS, Web feeds and email. Part of our mission is to make the process of mining these real-time information channels easier for the crisis response groups who need to sort actionable information from the ‘noise’ using the most efficient methods available.

Twitter’s Claire Diaz Ortiz (Manager of Philanthropic and Social Innovation) explains their company’s role in the disaster response community…

It is important to remember that mobile updates in disaster response not only serve to inform, but to provide direct aid as well. As in the Haiti earthquake and the floods in Pakistan, crisis-mapping tools that collate data received via SMS and other means and then plot it on interactive maps take a key role in connecting victims sending mobile updates with rescue workers and aid organizations who can offer help. This week here at Twitter HQ, we were happy to speak with Jon Gosier, Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi. Organizations like Ushahidi build interactive mapping tools that democratize information, increase transparency and lower the barriers for individuals to share their stories.

First Responder is an Oxymoron

Below, Jon from Ushahidi’s SwiftRiver team explains how Twitter empowers first-responders, a word we’ve co-opted to refer to the survivors and victims of disaster as opposed to the groups who it traditionally refers to (paramedics, security etc.)