I’m Kuo-Yu slayer Chuang from ITRI, a government funded research institute in Taiwan. We developed an open standard for exchanging location information via SMS among mobile devices called Open GeoSMS, which has currently been adapted officially by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Several use cases of this standard are shown with the following video:

We introduce Open GeoSMS with a quick and real example. Noritsuna-san is a friend of mine from Japan and a guest researcher in our company. One night, I got an SMS from him saying that he can’t get taxi home since it’s too late. I had no idea where he was and he could not read the street names in Chinese. I thus asked him to send me an Open GeoSMS with our free application. I then got an Open GeoSMS with the coordinate embedded in URL that points to Google Map service. At the end I totally new where he was and drove my little car to rescue him.

In the previous case, Open GeoSMS sent as a peer to peer message between mobile phones. It can be also used between mobile and server in disaster management. Users who have smart phone with GPS for incident report can attach coordinate in SMS with Open GeoSMS format (usually, with an App such as Ushahidi app on Android that we hacked).

This feature enables users to do incident reporting without a data connection. We know some volunteers bring their own smart phones and work with expensive data roaming fee. This feature also enables the backend server to auto-process the geo-tagged report, and insert this POI to map automatically. Rescuing activity or the resource transportation tasks can be assigned with Open GeoSMS for more specific location information. Especially with the offline map supported such as Open Street Map, POI-based information exchange can be easily achieved through Open GeoSMS.

As for the notification, the server doesn’t need to care if the receiver is a smart phone user or not. Open GeoSMS notification is just an SMS and that works for almost every phone. On a smart phone, Open GeoSMS can bring out more information via URL. The latest spec and code are available on Google Code. If the SMS with coordinate is compliant to Open GeoSMS, other applications or services can easily parse it and get the x and y coordinates. Last month during a cyclone simulation of Samoa, PinPointAlerts provided Open GeoSMS as a notification option on http://www.SamoAlert.com so the simulation notification could be sent with this open standard. Our team also shipped five smart phones to Samoa with an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi app installed or this Cyclone Simulation activity. As a result, not only could the general SMS-based incident reports be made, but also the Open GeoSMS style geo-tagged SMS could be sent to server for the possible automation afterwards.

Our team has hacked an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi Android App, now we are working with Ushahidi mobile app team on additional projects to merge our technologies. Our next step is to implement a plug-in for Ushahidi to parse Open GeoSMS in order to gain the automated processing ability. Further objectives include working with offline maps such as Open Street Map (OSM) so users can have a better understanding re incoming Open GeoSMS. For more information and our latest activities, please visit our facebook page.

We really hope this tiny handy open standard can help people in various way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberians waiting to vote

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

Ushahidi Liberia's elections instance

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

Liberia's Elections Coordinating Committee at iLab

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

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation at iLab

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

UNMIL's Elections Hub - notice the Ushahidi tag!

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

Ushahidi Liberia volunteers = elections crowdsourcers

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

Ballot counting at local polling station

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

Observers watch ballot counting

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

ECC receiving calls late into the night

A deserted downtown Buchanan

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

County Peace Committee members gathered in Ganta

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

CPC members in Buchanan learning the Ushahidi platform

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

CPC elders seeing Ushahidi for the first time

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

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

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

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

A well-worn phone without numbers or letters

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

CPC members teaching each other how to text

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

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

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

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

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

Liberia 2011 election instance

The Liberia 2011 election instance received 239 crowdseeded messages from trusted reporters during the Referendum and the following week before official results were announced. These reporters have received training in how to report to the Ushahidi platform using the free “2011” shortcode; among them are local election monitors, Liberian police officers, international election observers and local journalists. Most of the messages focused on the following: a low voter turnout (only about one-third of the voting population), a printing error on the ballot that confused voters about Proposition 2, the high number of incorrectly marked ballots (approximately 12% counted as invalid), the frustration of NEC workers over long hours without break and some incidents of violence. Overall, there were few violent incidents during and after the Referendum; those reported include one ritualistic killing with political motives, an attack on a political candidate as well as NEC staff counting ballots at night, and a few fights that broke out at polling stations over how to vote on the Referendum’s four propositions.

Sierra Leone's Election Watch and ECC observers

iLab Liberia, the tech lab at Ushahidi Liberia’s office, served as a data entry hub for the Elections Coordinating Committee and Sierra Leoneon observers during the Referendum, and in the days following each partner organization that received messages on the election instance used iLab’s facilities to verify and approve reports for public viewing. It became clear as we assisted partners with their data that polling station geo-coordinates were a must for the election instance. Our team realized this months ago, but were not able to locate a data set with more than the name and county location of each polling station.

ECC Referendum observers entering incident reports into their database

Once in a blue moon, data heroes come along when you need them most – and that was what happened the week after the Referendum when a UN officer who attended iLab’s mapping party offered to share a KMZ file with each polling station’s confirmed latitude and longitude. A dream come true! But we ran into a familiar problem – we only had the coordinates and the stations’ code numbers in this file. After a serendipitous trip to the NEC where I ran into the IT Director on his way out, he showed me the pdf with all the polling stations’ descriptive details – and, even better, it was online! But, as was the case with our KMZ file, a crucial piece of data was missing – the geo-coordinates. After a bit of tweaking and rearranging, our team merged the two data sets and placed them on the election instance.

Polling stations for Liberia's election

What is now displayed on the election instance constitutes the first complete online data set of all 1,780 polling stations and their exact locations. We may soon incorporate these stations into the “categories” section of the instance, but for now you can find them by clicking on the “polling stations” layer located just below categories. Each time you zoom in, it’s necessary to refresh the polling stations layer; when you do, and click on a station, you’ll see the station’s code, name of the building, town, county and total voters registered at that site. Other layers on this map include electoral district boundaries for quickly viewing how many reports and polling stations are located in each district.

One of the Referendum’s four propositions suggested a date change for the presidential election; official results revealed the date would stay the same – October 11th. That leaves a month between this dress rehearsal and the main event. The Ushahidi Liberia team is going to be busy preparing with up-country trips trainings for 200+ new reporters, turning iLab into the Elections Coordinating Committee’s situation room and making sure all systems are go for what is perhaps Liberia’s most anticipated event since its first democratic election 6 years ago.

Wood Camp and Soul Clinic communities outside of Monrovia

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

Community members discuss security threats they face on a regular basis

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

Sharing the Ushahidi platform at the Youth Crime Watch Liberia office

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Clickatell - an SMS Gateway
• FrontlineSMS – A simple way to turn your mobile and laptop into a communication hub
• SMSSync (An application that will turn your Android phone into an SMS hub.

In addition to the options above, there is the standard email, twitter or reporting form as channels of participation. A mix of these channels can be made in consideration of the context, duration, and scope of the Crowdmap. With this in mind and the fact that we have varying levels of connectivity around the world. One of the ways the organization is working to help deployers and users of the different Crowdmaps to know what is available to contribute to is by:
1. Adding deployment search functionality to the mobile applications. This has been incorporated into the Ushahidi iPhone/iPad and Android applications.
Using your smartphone, you can search for Crowdmaps based on your location by specifying the radius you are interested in. For more on that either click on the graphic below or read more in the recent blogpost from Henry Addo regarding the new Android application.

2. Adding deployment search on Crowdmap.com. You can search by any Keyword, e.g elections, uganda, Amnesty International – Give it a spin and see which Crowdmaps are available for you to contribute to.

3. Our community site has a listing of deployments and is the congregating point for sharing information, plugins/add ons with the rest of the global Ushahidi community. You can add your deployment onto the listing on the site. These two systems are currently separate but we plan on integrating them soon.

The decision to be listed on this public listing remains that of the deployer. For instructions on how to change your settings so that your deployment is more discoverable, please see this brief video made by Brian Herbert.

We welcome your feedback regarding these steps in helping our users and deployers deal with discoverability. There will be more enhancements in future. As always let us know how we can make things better.

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.