The purpose of PeaceTXT is to leverage mobile messaging to catalyze behavior change around peace and conflict issues. In the context of Chicago, the joint project with CeaseFire aims to leverage SMS reminders to interrupt gun violence in marginalized neighborhoods. Several studies in other fields of public health have already shown the massive impact that SMS reminders can have on behavior change, e.g., improving drug adherence behavior among AIDS and TB patients in Africa, Asia and South America.

Our mobile messaging campaign in Kenya builds on the very successful interruption and behavior change work performed by CeaseFire in Chicago. Note that CeaseFire has been directly credited for significantly reducing the number of gun-related killings in Chicago over the past 10 years. In other words, they have a successful and proven methodology; one being applied to several other cities and countries worldwide. PeaceTXT International simply seeks to scale this success by introducing SMS.

PeaceTXT Chicago builds another successful campaign in the US: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink and Drive.” Inspired by this approach, the PeaceTXT Team in Chicago is looking to launch a friends-don’t-let-friends-get-killed campaign. Focus groups recently conducted with high-risk individuals have resulted in rich content for several dozen reminder messages (see below) that could be disseminated via SMS.

These messages are user-generated in that the content was developed by high-risk individuals themselves—i.e., those most likely to get involved in gun violence. The messages are not limited to reminders. Some also prompt the community to get engaged by responding to various questions. Indeed, the project seeks to crowdsource community solutions to gun violence and thus greater participation. When high-risk individuals were asked how they’d feel if they were to receive these messages on their phones, they had the following to share: “makes me feel like no one is forgetting about me”; “message me once a day to make a difference.”

Given that both forwarding and saving text messages is very common among the population that CeaseFire works with, the team hopes that the text messages will circulate and recycle widely. Note that the project is still in prototype phase but going into implementation mode as of 2012. So we’ll have to wait and see how the project fares and what the initial impact looks like.

In the meantime, PeaceTXT is partnering with Sisi ni Amani (We are Peace) to launch its first international pilot project. Rachel Brown, who spearheads the initiative, first got in touch with me back in the Fall of 2009 whilst finishing her undergraduate studies at Tufts. Rachel was interested in crowdsourcing a peace map of Kenya, which I blogged about here shortly after our first conversation. Since then, Rachel and her team have set up the Kenyan NGO Sisi ni Amani Kenya (SnA-K) to leverage mobile technology for awareness raising and civic engagement with the aim of preventing possible violence during next year’s Presidential Elections.

SnA-K currently manages a ~10,000 member SMS subscriber list in Baba Dogo and Korogocho, Kamukunji and Narok. SnA-K’s SMS campaigns focus on voter education, community cohesion and rumor prevention. What SnA-K needs, how-ever, is the scalable SMS broadcasting technology, the type of focus that PeaceTXT brought to CeaseFire Chicago and the unique response methodology developed by the CeaseFire team. So I reached out to Rachel early on during the work in Chicago to let her know about PeaceTXT and to gain insights from her projects in Kenya. We set up regular conference calls throughout the year to keep each other informed of our respective progress and findings.

Soon enough, PopTech’s delightful Leetha Filderman asked me to put together a pitch for international applications of PeaceTXT’s work, an initiative I have “code-named” PeaceTXT International. I was absolutely thrilled when she shared the good news at PopTech 2011 that our donor, the Rita Allen Foundation, had provided us with additional funding, some of which could go towards an international pilot project. Naturally, Sisi ni Amani was a perfect fit.

So we organized a half-day brainstorming session at the iHub last week to chart the way forward on PeaceTXT Kenya. For example, what is the key behavioral change variable (like friendship in the PeaceTXT Chicago project) that is most likely to succeed in Kenya? As for interrupting violence, how can the CeaseFire methodology be customized for the SnA-K context? Finally, what kind of SMS broadcasting technology do we need to have in place to provide maximum flexibility and scalability earlier rather than later? Answering these questions and implementing scalable solutions essentially forms the basis of the partnership between SnA-K and PeaceTXT (which also includes Revolution Messaging). We have some exciting leads on next steps and will be sure to blog about them as we move forward to get feedback from the wider community.

Conflicts are often grounded in the stories and narratives that people tell themselves and the emotions that these stories generate. Narratives shape identity and the social construct of reality—we interpret our lives through stories. These have the power to transform relationships and communities. We believe the PeaceTXT model can be applied to catalyze behavior  change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues at the community level by amplifying new narratives via SMS. There is considerable potential here and still much to learn, which is why I’m thrilled to be working with SnA, PopTech & partners on launching our first international pilot project: PeaceTXT Kenya.

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.

Community Development Open Call

We are restarting the Ushahidi development community open calls and invite you to join a skype chat/ustream call. Our team of developers (Mobile, Swift, and Ushahidi) will be available to answer questions, take your feedback and brainstorm with you on the best ways to open up. This chat will be focused on technical development. We will hold future community chats focused on other topics.

The call will take place at 18:00 EAT/11:00 EDT/08:00 PDT. (Your local time)

This call will be part of the hackathon day and is set to be time zone friendly.

Also, we want to let you know that we are working on streamlining the communication points (wiki, blog, forums, dev chat and mailing lists) to make it easier for you to participate in features, bug fixes and more. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more on this topic. We know this is a top community concern.

Nairobi Ushahidi Hackathon: Mobile, Crowdmap, Swift River and Ushahidi

We’re holding a Nairobi Ushahidi hackathon on Saturday, August 27, 2011 for some braining and hacking:

Register today:

Schedule:
Date: Saturday, August 27, 2011
Duration: 12:00 – 20:00 EAT
Pizza for 19:00 EAT.

Some of the hacks or bugs that we will focus on include:

• River id and some of its components for Openid, OAuth
• Ushahidi API
• J2ME app
• Your plugin ideas
• Web designers: we could use a hand testing a design theme process.
• Non-techs are welcome to work on documentation, some communications tasks, photos and video fun

We welcome virtual participants to join the hackathon via skype dev chat.

Talk with you on Saturday,

Heather L.

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.

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

Emmanuel’s role is going to be focused on Ushahidi core architecture work, but with some time split on helping with major deployments in East Africa (much like Linda Kamau). It’s a challenging role, mixing the ability to sit behind your computer custom coding plugins for real-world deployments with the need to understand and build what works into the core platform as well.

In typical Ushahidi fashion, he’s traveling his first week on the job, giving some training sessions to groups in Uganda on how to use the platform. This is normal… poor Henry was sent to France to give a talk and Linda was sent to Burundi in their first couple week on the job.

Please join us in welcoming Emmanuel to the team!

Jason explained the Kohana framework, a php framework that follows the MVC style of object oriented programming and how Ushahidi utilizes it. He demystified perceptions around plugin development. It may seem difficult to write extensions or plugins at first, but with an understanding of the framework, events and filters, it becames easier for the developers to grasp how they can add functionality to Ushahidi. During the meetup, Linda Kamau went into more detail, giving the attendees a better sense of how to create a plugin.

Mikel stopped by to highlight some of the ideas he and the MapKibera team had, to view their wishlist, check out this link.

For more information on how the plugin architecture, the plugin architecture screencast by Caleb Bell and David Kobia is quite instructive and useful. An example of a plugin developed with the new architecture is the Cloudvox plugin which allows people to call to report an incident.

The next meetup is scheduled for October 28th 2010, Kenya based developers are welcome to join us again.

Pics from the meetup are up on this flickr set.

The Uchaguzi project brought more than 70 volunteers to the iHub August 3rd and 4th (with at least 12 others joining remotely).  Volunteers helped map and process over 1400 messages as well as assisted our team of Ushahidi developers fix bugs that popped up during the Uchaguzi deployment.  The volunteers met the challenge with incredible enthusiasm, focus, patience, and a spirit of fun!  We couldn’t be prouder to have such a wonderful Ushahidi community!

Some volunteers opted for couches and carpet to comfortably process incoming reports.

The Sisi ni Amani team (Rachel & Cody) did an amazing job of supporting training volunteers!

Linda, Tegan, Charles and Lee won’t be distracted.

Gloria brings smiles to the Uchaguzi Situation Room.

Lilian, Julius, Erica and Steve from Kibera News Network update Uchaguzi with reports and video.

The remote volunteer team working together on the Uchaguzi Volunteer Skype Chat

Developers, Urgent Response and the Troubleshooting Team in action.

We are so appreciative of the incredible response from everyone who gave time and energy to make Uchaguzi a success!  Thank you all!  We never could have done it without you.

• We’ll be updating our Situation Room with reports and updates during the deployment.
• More information in our last blog post on the Uchaguzi deployment.

Here’s our press release on Uchaguzi in Kenya.

News Release:

Contact name: Erik Hersman
Phone: 0729 157 257
Contact email: info@ushahidi.com

TEXT #3018 via PERSONAL CELL PHONES to REPORT FRAUD, VIOLENCE, OR PEACE DURING KENYA’s CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM VOTE

NAIROBI, Kenya (August 3, 2010) —The crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi announces a short code to monitor Kenya’s constitutional referendum on August 4, 2010. This will be the second attempt to give Kenya a new constitution. The first was in 2005, and the motion was defeated. It has been noted that the failure to adopt a constitution was one of the causes of the post election violence in 2008 that killed thousands, displaced 300,000 and affected all Kenyans. The first instance of the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi was created in the midst of the 2008 post election violence as a tool to map violence and react to the crisis.

The Ushahidi platform is able to accept SMS text messages from the “crowd” or any person with a cell phone or computer to record events happening at any location instantly. People are also able to call in reports by voice or via email and Twitter. However, the SMS feature remains one of the most powerful communication tools for developing countries. In Haiti, it was reported that the first thing people would do when they regained power or found a battery was to charge their cell phones.

This election is emotional for many Kenyans as the “Yes” and “No” camps have been parading their colors of green and red respectively at rallies, demonstrations for the last few months.

Since the first deployment of Ushahidi in Kenya, the platform has been used as a crisis map after the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, as an election monitoring service in places like India, Burundi, Mexico and Afghanistan, and by major news services such as Al Jazeera and the Washington Post.

Uchaguzi (“decision” in Kiswahili) is a customized version of the Ushahidi platform to monitor incidences of electoral offences, violence and even peace activities during the August 4th Constitutional Referendum vote. The Constitution & Reform Education Consortium (CRECO) is providing 500 monitors located at various polling stations around the country as well as administrative support. The Social Development Network (SODNET) is offering Uchaguzi its total partnership and the shortcode #3018 that is being used for SMS messages countrywide. With the support of Uraia, HIVOS and Twaweza; Uchaguzi is the most collaborative deployment of the Ushahidi platform to date.

The short code for Uchaguzi has been advertised on the cover of the Kenyan Daily Nation Newspaper, on monitors in grocery stores, on TV and radio. In addition to these media outlets, 20,000 text messages were sent to cell phones around the country alerting the users to their ability to SMS voting concerns to Uchaguzi.

The hope is that the Kenyan referendum vote will be peaceful, but if there is any violence the 600+ Uchaguzi volunteers will be ready to map concerns and fears sourced in the most democratic way possible for this 21st century: personal cell phones.

About Ushahidi
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone. This initial deployment of Ushahidi had 45,000 users in Kenya, and was the catalyst for us realizing there was a need for a platform based on it, which could be use by others around the world. For more information: http://ushahidi.com.

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