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.

The joint project combines the efforts of multiple partners including Al-Jazeera, Ushahidi, Souktel, Crowdflower, the African Diaspora Institute and the wider Somali Diaspora. The basis of my pitch to Al-jazeera was to let ordinary Somalis speak for themselves by using SMS to crowdsource their opinions on the unfolding crisis. My colleagues at Al-jazeera liked the idea and their editorial team proposed the following question:

Al Jazeera wants to know: how has the conflict of the last few months affected your life? Please include the name of your hometown in your response. Thank you!

So I reached out to my good friend Jacob Korenblum at Souktel. He and I had been discussing different ways we might combine our respective technologies to help in Somalia. Souktel has been working in Somalia and providing various SMS based solutions to several organizations. Jacob had previously mentioned that his team had a 50,000+ member SMS subscriber list. This proved to be key. Earlier this week, the Souktel team sent out the above question in Somali to about 5,000 of their subscribers. An effort was made to try and select geographically disbursed areas.

We’ve since received well over 2,000 text message replies and counting. In order to translate and geolocate these messages, I got in touch my colleagues Vaughn Hester and Lukas Biewald at Crowdflower in San Francisco. Crowdflower uses micro-tasking solutions to process and structure data flows. They were very keen to help and thanks to their support my Ushahidi colleagues Rob Baker and Linda Kamau were able to customize this Crowdflower plugin to translate, categorize and geo-locate incoming text messages:

They also wrote additional software so that text messages from Souktel could be automatically forwarded to the Crowdflower plugin which would then automatically push the processed SMS’s to a live Ushahidi map hosted by Al-jazeera. While the software development was moving forward, I connected  with colleagues from the Somali American Student Association who expressed an interest in supporting this project. Thanks to them and other members of the Somali Diaspora, hundreds of Somali voices were translated and shared on Al-jazeera’s public Ushahidi map of Somalia within days. But we still need lots of help. So if you speak Somali and English, then simply follow this link.

I wanted this project to serve as a two-way conversation, however, not just a one-way information flow from Somalia to the world. Every report  that gets mapped on an Ushahidi platform is linked to public discussion forum where readers can respond and share their views on said report. So I suggested that Al-jazeera invite their viewers/readers to comment on the text messages directly. The next step will be for Al-jazeera’s editorial team to select some of the most compelling and interesting comments and to text these back to the senders of the original text messages in Somalia. This two-way flow of information can be iterated and scaled given that the technologies and workflows are already in place.

In sum, the purpose of this project is to catalyze global media attention on Somalia by letting Somali voices take center stage—voices that are otherwise not heard in the international, mainstream media. If journalists are not going to speak about Somalia, then this project  invites Somalis speak to the world themselves. The project highlights  these voices on a live, public map for the world to bear witness and engage in a global conversation with people of Somalia, a conversation in which Somalis and the Diaspora are themselves at the centerfold. It is my sincere hope that advocacy and lobby group will be able to leverage the content generated by this project to redouble their efforts in response to the escalating crisis in Somalia.

I very much hope to see this type of approach used again in Somalia and elsewhere. It is fully inline with the motivations that inspired the launch of the first Ushahidi platform almost 4 years ago today: collective witnessing. Indeed, I am often reminded of what my friend Anand Giridharadas of the New York Times wrote last year vis-a-vis Ushahidi. To paraphrase:

They used to say that history is written by the victors. But today, before the victors win, if they win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message, a text message that will not vanish, a text message that will remain immortalized on a map for the world to bear witness. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time:

“I was here, and this is what happened to me”?

Use #SomaliaSpeaks to witness the project on Twitter.

I want to specifically thank the following individuals who put an incredible amount of time and effort (most pro bono) to make this project happen: Robert Baker, Linda Kamau, Michael Moszczynski, Katie Highet, Jacob Korenblum, Vaughn Hester, Mohammed Dini, Hamza Haadoow, Andrew Jawitz and of course the excellent Al Jazeera team in Doha. Thank you all for going above and beyond to make this happen.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/12/08/somalia-speaks/feed/ 29 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/12/02/un-and-ushahidi-collaboration-suggests-an-interwoven-future-is-inevitable/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/12/02/un-and-ushahidi-collaboration-suggests-an-interwoven-future-is-inevitable/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:15:50 +0000 kate http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=6385 Guest post by David Foster: Lieutenant Colonel Foster has served over 24 years in the US Army.  He is currently assigned to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) as a Plans and Operations Officer.  He recently led the development and implementation of a Joint Elections Security Plan for Liberia’s 2011 General Election.  He developed and served as the Officer-in-Charge of the Joint Elections Operations Center (JEOC) that leveraged geospatial technologies and social media to achieve and maintain situational awareness for mission leadership in support of the Government of Liberia, and its people. The following post is based on a presentation LTC Foster gave at the UN-SPIDER meeting in Geneva this November.

During the 2011 Liberian Election process, Ushahidi Liberia proved to be an invaluable team member for the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL).  Their crowdseeding efforts provided the people of Liberia, UNMIL and others, with timely access to objective reports from around the country.  Lighter and more agile than the UN structure, the Ushahidi Liberia team was able to collate nearly 5,000 reports from perspectives previously not readily accessible to most observers.  Additionally, the constant communication by phone, email and in person between Ushahidi Liberia and the UNMIL Joint Elections Operations Center (JEOC) personnel allowed for cross fertilization and information vetting, improving the fidelity of reporting for all consumers.

Situational Awareness Tools

The best sensors are the human senses. Broadly leveraging what these sensors acquire is impossible without standards, tools, training and leadership, structure that is both formal and informal.  The affected, on-the-ground responders, and providers with reachback capabilities create a circle of dependency that is often broken because of the lack of structure. On the flipside the ability to achieve and maintain situational awareness was and remains bound by the lowest common denominators of an organization and its personnel. The Ushahidi platform allowed UNMIL to break through some of the challenges of:

• Knowing what information is important, available and where to find and leverage it
• The End user’s
  • Education level
  • Language skills
  • Computer skills
  • Motivation level
  • Access to tools (power, computer, internet, phone)
  • Training on the tools

Information flows during Liberia's 2011 election

In the end, success was based on preparation and relationships.  The Ushahidi Liberia team provided access to resources and information that UNMIL simply could not have leveraged in their absence.  Constant communication by phone, email and in person between Ushahidi and the UNMIL JEOC allowed for cross-fertilization and information vetting.

About Ushahidi Liberia

1. Ushahidi Liberia has direct partnerships with 16 different NGOs (international and local), civil society coalitions and the government. Among these partnerships there are many other indirect partners (example:  Elections Coordinating Committee is a partner, but they are composed of 30 organizations; IFES has 20 CSOs that Ushahidi has trained who are out in the field reporting to them, etc). Ushahidi has also provided a map for UN OCHA made at their request.

2. Ushahidi had about 7 volunteers during the first run-off.

3. Total reports on elections instance since January = 4,954 (that are public)

4. Androids – Ushahidi had 4 of them running the free election shortcode and also the free long number for a national early warning map (LERN).

5. Ushahidi Liberia’s VSAT connection during the election was 1054/512 kbps (the fastest public internet connection in Liberia), now reduced (due to high costs) to 768/256 kbps – it is a dedicated C-band connection available to Ushahidi Liberia users in their facility. They have 16 computers running open source software. Their Dir. of IT, Dir. of Training, and Program Director are based in-country, with a Tech Lead based in the US.

Data from USAVE to end users

The geography of crisis and response

Geographic location, type of crisis, responder specialty and organization greatly impact the way in which the individual will operate.  However, each shares common, basic geographic (map) data requirements.  Imagery, terrain, political boundaries, infrastructure and hydrography are the minimal data sets required for any type of fieldwork.  Depending on the event, political, social, demographic, medical, refugee, reported violence and other kinds of information may become most critical to obtain.  For the purpose of this thought process we will focus on the base geographic data requirements.

LOCATE: Where am I?  Where is the disaster?  Where are those in need?  Where are response resources?  How do I get to the resources?  How do I get the resources to the affected?

- Country, city, town, base camp and devastated area

- Affected, other responders, and external partners

- Infrastructure (water, power, communications, sewer, medical, transportation, and security)

- Resources (water, food, shelter, medical, transportation, communication, security)

COMMUNICATE: Information, requirements, coordinates, coordination, challenges and successes.

- Affected, other responders, higher headquarters and external partners

- Collected field data, open source

- Data, space and ground based sensor data

- Needs, challenges and successes

FACILITATE: Response, assessments, support, capacity building, documentation & retrograde.

- Information collection and sharing

- Resource acquisition, delivery and employment

- Initial and sustainment training

- Documentation, configuration control

- Responsible turn-over to and departure from Host Nation

Just on the tip of what is possible

Looking to the future

If space-based providers can push data down to the lowest common denominator in a timely manner, in a format they may leverage, the future is bright.  If not, expensive space-based products will remain tools employed by the elite and an educated few “in the know”, remaining invisible to those it would best serve.  Using geographic information systems is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity across the spectrum of United Nations mission sets.  Manual procedures of reporting, filing and analyzing information should be placed behind us.

The success of the next crisis response begins today.  With the right equipment for the mission, end users may even operate disconnected from the grid, know where they are, collect and share information with others on the ground and, when finally connected, receive and transmit vital information to all interested parties. Each scenario requires the end user to pack appropriately based on factors such as financial resources, logistics restrictions, availability of infrastructure within the impact area, on-ground transportation and individual capabilities.

To give the end user access to harnessed capabilities one may consider providing equipment and training so the value may be broadly shared amongst operators instead of unintended hoarding amongst technical specialists.  If the end user connects to the grid, they will be able to receive timely ground and space based data like high resolution post-event imagery from numerous sources, as well as interface with the “cloud.”

The future is already here

A circle of dependency has become apparent between organizations, formal and informal, and the crowd.  They are intertwined, even though some resist.  The bounds have become tighter and the value greater among those parts of the circle working with, rather than against, each other.  During the election season, Ushahidi Liberia provided an environment of professional cooperation necessary for the cultivation of numerous complex relationships.  Together, we have taken a very large step forward into the future. Although, likely never to be the same, the road has now been traveled.  There is no going back.  Know the past, anticipate the future, show the way!

Guest post: WITNESS is an international human rights organization that empowers others to use video to create meaningful change in laws, policies, practices and behaviors. Ryan Schlief has led local and global human rights campaigns in several countries around the globe – primarily involving economic, social and cultural rights. Ryan manages WITNESS’ global forced evictions campaign. With an international coalition, WITNESS is using Crowdmaps to profile cases of forced evictions, land grabbing and activists at-risk for working on both during World Habitat Days 16 September – 31 October. The United Nations officially recognizes the World Habitat Day as today, 3 October.

Collectively representing hundreds of organizations and thousands of activists, WITNESS, our partner the Habitat International Coalition, and 5 housing and land rights networks have organized the World Habitat Days to draw global attention and actions to housing issues around the world – as part of our larger focus on forced evictions.

The global theme, Right to Habitat: Resistance and Alternatives, will highlight the local resistance to forced evictions, alternatives being presented and collaborate action and research among the hundreds of members of these major networks. During the campaign, the participating networks will expose the causes and effects of forced evictions, the suffering and impoverishment of people affected by rural and urban habitat problems and create solidarity with activists for the right to habitat who have been victimized by repression and violence against their civil and political rights. Watch our video about forced evictions in Cambodia:

If you are already working to stop forced evictions or land-grabbing or know about an activist at-risk for fighting on either, add your campaigns and examples of how communities our resisting to a global mapping project. Include any actions or ways others can get involved. If you are not working on a campaign, learn more about campaigns around the world simply by clicking on the map. Some cases will be profiled further on the main World Habitat Days website during the next six weeks.

Also if you or your organization have planned events during the World Habitat Days, please add them to a global map showcasing events and actions taking place around the world. Over the next six weeks, we’ll update you through the blog about particular campaigns and events that relates our global campaign on forced evictions.

The platform for the World Habitat Days was drafted and signed by dozens of organizations and collectives at this year’s World Social Forum in Senegal. World Habitat Days run for 6 weeks from 16 September – 31 October. Read more at the website.

To help promote World Habitat Day:

Sample Tweet: MAP IT: Add your campaign on #forcedevictions, #landgrabs and activists at risk for World Habitat Days 2011 http://ow.ly/6FMxc #WHD2011

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.

The curriculum for the program is available here as a PDF. If you’d like to follow the program, we’ll be tweeting with the hash tag #u4u.

On Friday, we’ll host a public panel entitled “From Crisis to Community: Mapping as a Peacebuilding Tool.” There has been a surge of enthusiasm and activity around crisis mapping recently, thanks to rapidly expanding access to mobile devices and social media, as well as to some high profile success stories. Crisis maps were used in Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Kenya, and elsewhere, providing real-time information for everything from disaster relief to political violence and election monitoring.

But, as the field matures, how do we turn this information into insight that engages and empowers local communities in conflict prevention and peacebuilding? How do we move from “map making” to “problem solving” using the crowdsourced data generated by these powerful technology platforms?

Join USIP and Ushahidi, the crisis mapping pioneer, as we explore these questions with mappers from conflict zone countries and policymakers in Washington, DC. Register now, space limited! This panel will also be webcast live beginning at 10:00am EST on June 17, 2011 at www.usip.org/webcast. Online viewers will be able to engage panelists and each other through live chat and Twitter discussions (hashtag: #u4u).

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

Toolkit pdf Cover

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

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


Who’s it for?

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

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

Toolkit website

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

Images and designs for download

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

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

Case Study contents



Relevant Links

Butterfly Toolkit No.1: Designing social change campaigns

Building Bridges Peace campaign (website)

Unsung Peace Heroes campaign, (website)

Download the Case study PDF, about Building Bridges campaign

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


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

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

As mentioned briefly in Patrick Meier’s last post, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) created a CrowdMap instance on January 25, right at the start of the protests in Egypt. However, the last reports were approved by mid-day on January 26, over a day before the Internet was shut down in Egypt. No new reports have been posted to this instance even though the Internet is now available in Cairo.

There are a number of possibilities as to why this CrowdMap instance is not currently being administered, but obviously the lack of Internet service made it impossible for the ANHRI staff in Egypt to log in and administer the site. It’s also likely that most – if not all – of the ANHRI staff are taking part in the protests. It should also be noted that ANHRI’s offices are near Tahrir Square and might not currently be accessible.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that concentrating the administrative functions for an Ushahidi/CrowdMap instance in the hands of a small number of people, all in the same geographic, social and political space, creates an obvious vulnerability in the system. CrowdMap is fantastic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the distributed, cloud-based architecture. In this case, the Egyptian government could have blocked CrowdMap altogether, but they could not have taken this site down for others outside of Egypt. But, CrowdMap and Ushahidi can not on their own overcome what we call the “administrative vulnerability” that the 25Jan CrowdMap instance faced.

We think that there is still need for a dedicated site for the ongoing events in Egypt and the work of the Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC) to re-purpose their U-Shahid installation is a great starting point for that effort. We would very much like to see the efforts of the ANHRI and DISC merged together in some way. Having redundancy here only serves to confuse. There is also a need over the coming days and weeks to include other data on a dedicated Egypt installation to help Egyptians find and share basic necessities like working ATM machines, food locations, and other information. We’re working to forge partnerships to do exactly that and any help that the CrisisMapping community can provide would be much appreciated.

We know from our experience in this area that to be most effective, there must be dedicated volunteers on the ground backed by strong organizations who can coordinate the volunteers,  publicize the system, and set standards for incoming reports. Organized Crisis Camps and allies outside of Egypt can play an important supportive role, but we think that the Ushahidi instance will serve the affected people best if organizations on the ground take the lead on what the purpose of the instance should be. Additionally, there will likely be government interference with the system and the administrator of any sensitive system should be prepared. To these points, we continue to offer our assistance to ANHRI, DISC and any others interested in improving a dedicated Egyptian CrowdMap or Ushahidi instance.

Finally, with continuing unrest across the Middle East, there appears to be a need for both a region-wide collection of reports to show the scale of the pro-democracy protests, as well as a proactive attempt amongst organizations in countries with nascent political uprisings to use tools like Ushahidi and CrowdMap to document these efforts. To overcome the administrative vulnerabilities we’ve outlined, it is useful for these organizations to forge partnerships with trusted, like-minded groups outside of their geographic, social and political framework to help them administer their instance if something goes awry.

Update: When considering the use of Ushahidi/Crowdmap, be sure to review the practical considerations guide, and other guides available in our resources page.

“After the economic and political mistakes committed by the Egyptian system in the management of things, there was a flame of anger suppressed in the issuance of Egypt’s youth Increasing them by killing a young man named Khalid Saeed by the hands of Egyptian police, and in January 2011 the situation exploded after the terrorist incident occurred in a church inside Alexandria by the hands of terrorists and not without justification of police presence to protect churches, Burst of anger in the Egyptian police day which was in January 25 declaring their rejection of the system and calling it down.

Abuse, violence, the number of gatherings and All thing are going so well were these categories that we have been using for  this  map, We have use twitter Hachtag #jan25 to receive reports, As well as email@u-shahid.org. Visitors can also send reports to the site directly or through our page on Facebook. We received thousands of reports and we see the extent of its credibility to publish it, in order to preserve the credibility that is our approach since the election monitoring.

This project is non-profit and is sponsored by the Cyber act Organization, (DISC) Company and Egyptian Democratic Academy.”

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The Cairo-based Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC) has just launched their #U-Shahid map below. DISC previously used the Ushahidi platform to monitor the country’s Parliamentary Elections last November and December  (see this post for more info). This means they already know the technology and have a trained network of active crisis mappers that can verify reports before they are mapped.

The events in Egypt over the past two weeks have been nothing short of unprecedented. The Mubarak regime clamped down on many forms of communication including the Internet, cell phones and SMS. There were also reports of landline phones being blocked. The word still go out, however. And with Internet access now restored, the map will get out as well just as it did in the Sudan over the past few days.

DISC has mapped some 50 reports based on events that took place over the past week. Take this report below, for example, which includes a YouTube video of protests. The map includes dozens of categories, including Riots, Breaking and looting, Arrests, Violence against protesters, Spraying water and Firing tear gas, for example.

Notice how DISC has made it very easy to share information on individual events by allow direct Tweeting, Facebook posting, etc.

The group has also enabled the subscribe to alerts feature, which allows individuals to automatically get reports sent to their email and cell phone.

Since Egypt just got back online, we expect the map to receive more reports in the coming days. Perhaps the group may also end up using the dedicated Ushahidi smart phone apps to distribute the mapping further.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) launched this Jan 25th CrowdMap in Cairo days before the regime shut down Internet access. It hasn’t been updated since but there are now discussions about reactivating the map to provide information on the location of ATMs, for example.

An an ongoing and pressing concern about these maps (and others) is of course security. Crisis maps can depict important information that can be used for good and ill. We hope local groups that use these tools in non-permissive environments take every precaution possible when doing so as repressive regimes are becoming more sophisticated in electronic surveillance.  To learn more about communicating safely in such situations, we recommend some of the following links:

• Tactical Tech Security in a Box
• Digital Security for Human Rights
• SMS Privacy Tips for Election Monitoring
• Communicating Securely
• Mobile Security

Crisis mapping is redefining the way we think about maps. Today’s maps are alive and dynamic. They are not hard copy static objects like this historical map of Ancient Egypt dating from 1,450 BC. Maps, like books, were written by the winners, the elite. They reflected and projected power. They depicted a fixed reality through one lens.

Today’s crisis maps can give voice to the distributed voiceless. They integrate tools like email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. What does this all add up to? “Will the triangulated crisis map be regarded as the new first draft of history?” asks New York Times journalist Anand Giridharadas. He considers some of the implications in this piece,

“They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a fresh chance to scream out, with a text message that will not vanish. What we would know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews — and indeed would it have happened at all — if each of them had had a chance to declare and be heard saying: ‘I was here, and this is what happened to me?’”

Thanks to PopTech, I was able to meet with the CeaseFire team in Chicago on two occasions this year. This is truly one of the most stunning projects I’ve come across in a long time. Members of the CeaseFire team are true professionals. They prove that preparedness is fundamental to successful tactical early warning and response. Having worked in the field of conflict early warning and rapid response for years, I’ve always known that a people-centered approach to violence prevention would be far more effective than a state-centric approach. CeaseFire demonstrates this beyond the shadow of a doubt. The model itself is based one how diseases are controlled, which is fascinating.

I’m incredibly excited to be part of PeaceTXT, a joint PopTech, CeaseFire, FrontlineSMS:Medic and Ushahidi initiative to explore how technology might help the team leverage and scale their incredible work. From the PopTech website:

The PeaceTXT project brings together some of the world’s best technologists and social innovators to explore how mobile tools and mobile messaging might further accelerate CeaseFire’s ability to engage communities, change social norms, improve its efficacy and find new paths to scale. Our investigation is broad but intensive, exploring and rigorously evaluating several possible applications.

While the initial work will focus on CeaseFire’s efforts in its model sites in Chicago, there is clear potential to apply key insights and methods to the global context. Experience and learning gained from this project is expected to prove invaluable to conflict resolution and violence prevention efforts, nationally and globally.

The project was publicly launched and announced last week at PopTech 2010 thanks to seed funding from the Rita Allen Foundation. My colleague Josh Nesbit and I have already learned a lot from the conversations we had in Chicago, but we know that we’re just scratching the surface. So I’m eager to get back to Chicago and pilot some projects with the CeaseFire team.

Thank you PopTech for bringing us together!