It is with great pleasure that we welcome the newest member of the team: Brian Muita. Brian’s been with us since the beginning of this month so this post is evidently late – I blame Yoda for taking so long to prep his (Brian’s) light saber. He’s however been a long time member of the community – since inception in 2008…and counting…

Brian joins the SwiftLIVER development SwiftRiver team and will focus on the core architecture of the platform as we ready it for release within coming days. He joins the rest of the Ushahidi herd working out of the iHub and continues to remain the only person known to catch Salmon using a Praying Mantis as bait.

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!

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

Brandon with his son, Hudson.

We are pleased to announce that Brandon Rosage (@brosage) has joined Team Ushahidi! He comes on board as a web designer and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

Brandon comes to us with loads of experience. From traditional journalism and publishing all the way to co-founding a local internet broadcast network, Brandon has been building on the web for the past seven years. In addition to that, Brandon is a huge Detroit Tigers fan and enjoys living in Olympia, WA with his wife and their 1-year-old son.

Brandon’s focus at Ushahidi will be to improve the overall design and user experience of our products. He brings a passion for “mobile first” design and as such will be a huge help as we optimize our products for mobile.

As is typical for new team members, Brandon jumped into the fray feet-first spending his first week designing and coding in a cabin in North Georgia with David Kobia, Emmanuel Kala and I… the results of which will hopefully be revealed soon!

Please join us in welcoming Brandon to the team!

Finishing up a week of hacking with some southern BBQ!

UP headquarters in Paynesville burned

In the last week, the Ushahidi elections instance has also been updated with new features.  As of last Friday, the instance has been upgraded with latest version of the Ushahidi platform, version 2.1 (Tunis). One of the most exciting features of 2.1 is the Powerful Reports Filter that allows users to quickly sort through reports according to certain dates and categories, verification, media, location and more.

The new Density Map Plugin

Another new feature on the instance is Ushahidi’s first Density Map plugin by John Etherton. Located on the right side of the homepage, just above the categories, the Density Map option makes it easier to separate reports by geographic region – in this case, by county. All reports that have been associated with a particular county will show up using the Density Map. This feature was requested by UN OCHA as well as other local partners, and serves as a small step towards making the Ushahidi platform a data analysis tool.

ECC data operators at iLab

The Elections Coordinating Committee, based at iLab Liberia during the last week, has been compiling detailed reports from monitors at each of the country’s nearly 4,500 polling places; these are being uploaded to the elections instance and can currently be found under the category, “ECC polling place reports”.  The National Elections Commission (NEC) has released preliminary results during the last week that can now be found as layers on the elections instance (go to “other layers” section under the categories listing).

The Ushahidi Liberia team was curious about who was looking at the elections instance, how they got there, and where in the world they were sitting when they looked at it.  After studying our instance’s Google Analytics, we found that in the last week the map has received 3,533 unique visitors that spend an average of 3 ½ minutes perusing its contents. Interestingly, more than half of this traffic is routed via the Liberian Observer, a national newspaper popular on the ground and online. The majority of the traffic came from the United States (not surprising considering low Internet penetration in Liberia), but what peaked our interest was where in the States: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Georgia – states with the large Liberian Diaspora communities.

Elections instance viewers in the US (graphic via Google Analytics)

This was our team’s first indication of the Diaspora’s engagement with the electoral process from abroad (not to say there haven’t been many), and it widened our perspective on the instance’s audience. Perhaps, in a country without much local Internet access, it cannot be simply stated that a tool like Ushahidi is irrelevant. In today’s world, a country’s borders extend far beyond political boundaries, and interactive mapping tools such as the Ushahidi platform start to reveal the interconnected webs that criss-cross our globe.

This evening, the NEC announced that 99.9% of the presidential votes have been collected; with no clear winner, Liberia faces a run-off election on November 8^th.  The first round saw an impressive voter turnout rate of more than 70% (of registered voters), making many hopeful that Liberians will come out in full-force next month. The Ushahidi elections instance will continue to track the electoral process for Liberians at home and abroad, and for all of us who care deeply about the outcome of this country’s first self-run democratic election.

Liberians waiting to vote on election day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Leson is our “Director of Community Engagement”. This means she’s responsible for coming up with the strategy for how we interact better with our non-tech users, and then implementing it. She’s the one who you’ll be in touch with on the Community.Ushahidi.com side, and who will help muster the right mix of case studies, tools and use-cases that make running your own deployment easier.

Heather comes with a boatload of community work. Hailing from Canada, she has over 10 years of experience in technical incident management, software life cycle development, customer care and communications in Internet technologies. In fact, I first met Heather (virtually) as we each led the Random Hacks of Kindness discussions between the Australia and Kenya teams last year. She was an important part of the growth of CrisisCommons, and has helped run multiple unconferences and hackathons.

Heather comes with the right mix of community engagement background, mixed with our ethos of open source, open ideas and open community. We’re SO excited to have her join us, and we hope that you’ll reach out and start engaging with her right away. After all, she is your ambassador within Ushahidi.

It’s with a touch of sadness, and excitement for Jon, that I’m writing this post as he has decided to follow his dreams and embark on a startup of his own. Matt Griffiths, who’s been working with us on SwiftRiver as well, will be joining him in this new project called MetaLayer. This new company plans to use smartphones and augmented reality, mixed with big data, to contextualize the world. It’s a massive idea, with great potential, and we’re looking forward to seeing them excel in their new startup.

What This Means to Ushahidi

Internally at Ushahidi, the SwiftRiver project keeps on humming with a new website refresh launching, SwiftMeme upgrades and redesign, and the Sweeper app in it’s next iteration. Charl and Ahmed, the core engineers, continue to guide the development cycle. David Kobia, Ushahidi’s Director of Technology Development, will set the roadmap, architecure needs and provide the direction for this project in addition to the other products and services offered by Ushahidi.

As always, we rely on the community too, this isn’t just about the core team doing work and making the platform what it is. The continued help from experts in all fields is needed and we’re asking for your help to ensure that we continue on the high velocity trajectory that SwiftRiver is on.