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

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.

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.

Androids running SMSSync at Ushahidi Liberia

These days technology just works. There’s no magic and very little rocket science; put in some 1s and 0s and get out 1s and 0s. The days are gone when bugs, actual insects, would chew their way through the computers wire and cause mayhem.

Now some of you right now are saying, “Yeah, but I still can’t figure out how to make my Facebook profile private.” That’s a user interface issue; the underlying technology is working perfectly. The layer that exposes that technology to you may be poorly designed, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

Yes technology hums along gloriously – until certain assumptions no longer hold true. Such assumptions usually include constant electricity and Internet, two things that are not constant in Liberia. Thus what seems like a perfect combination – SMS technology and Liberia – has a few obstacles to overcome before riding off into the sunset happily ever after.

For us at Ushahidi Liberia, we wanted SMS and Liberia hit it off. SMS is a great way for people on the ground to send in reports of what’s really happening. All you need is a phone and a cell phone signal. Most places in the world have cell phone coverage, and an increasing number of people have cell phones. The Ushahidi platform even has built-in support for SMS because it has worked well in other deployments. So let’s get to know more about the compatibility of this couple in particular – SMS and Liberia.

SMS

Simple Messaging Service is a GSM standard that uses extra bandwidth in the signaling path that controls call flow. The signaling path is used to tell a cell phone that a new call is coming in, that the call has been hung up, the number of the incoming call and so forth. Since the signaling path isn’t used when there is no phone call, phone companies realized they could add a messaging service on top of this unused signaling path – and SMS was born. Because the signaling path is only intended for short messages like, “incoming call +231-6-555-343”, SMS messages can only be 160 characters long.

Liberia

Liberia is a small country in West Africa still recovering from a civil war that devastated the nation’s infrastructure.  Despite the lack of power lines, power stations and any kind of hard-wired telecommunications infrastructure, Liberia now has a relatively robust cell phone network. While less than 1% of Liberians have access to the Internet, at least 20% own cell phones and even more have access to shared phones. SMS seems like a natural choice for Liberians to send messages to our Ushahidi Liberia sites, given that even the cheapest cell phones available in-country support SMS.

Half a powerline: Liberia's damaged infrastructure

The Trials of Matchmaking

At this point, things look good for our two lovebirds. A simple global standard for sending short messages and a country where the telecommunications infrastructure is best equipped to handle short messages. In fact, such a partnership has worked so well in other countries that the wonderful people at kiwanja.net created FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS is a program that turns your average laptop and a cell phone into an SMS gateway for bulk messaging and routing incoming SMS to the Internet. By connecting a cell phone to a computer via a data cable, FrontlineSMS can intercept incoming SMS and automatically send them to a website of your choosing – an ideal matchmaker for SMS and Liberia.

However, it is here we encountered our first obstacle. Computers need power. You can get around this requirement for a few hours by using a laptop, but the problem persists. Ushahidi Liberia’s first office used a diesel generator for electricity, like most Liberian workplaces that do not have access to a power grid. Diesel isn’t cheap in Liberia, so the generator only ran from 9am to 7pm; that leaves 14 hours without power.  In other words, 14 hours without the ability to send and receive SMS via a desktop SMS gateway.  Because many of the reports sent to our Liberia instances about conflict and instability, we could not afford to be operational for only 10 hours a day.

The second obstacle was an unreliable Internet connection. In Liberia, all Internet connections are via satellite – far slower and more expensive than fiber optic connections. Ushahidi Liberia’s first ISP leased a satellite Internet connection comparable to a slow DSL connection in the US – comparable until the ISP splits that connection among all of its customers, who then split their slice of the connection amongst all the users in the office/home.  During peak working hours as many as 500 people were using that one Internet connection, causing it to drop out when bandwidth was exceeded, and causing any user to grind their teeth in frustration when it was working but oh so slow.

When the Internet dropped out in our office and FrontlineSMS received an SMS to forward to Ushahidi servers, the sending would fail and FrontlineSMS would drop the message without resending. At that time, FrontlineSMS did not notify the sender or the receiver that a message failed to send, so it could be days before the person running the FrontlineSMS instance might realize that half the sent messages were missing. FrontlineSMS, like many platforms, is designed with the assumption that the Internet works.  Granted, we were using FrontlineSMS as an SMS gateway to the Internet and not solely as a bulk messaging system, so our needs were specific.

SMSSync to the Rescue

Considering these glitches, our couple might not be as compatible as we thought – that is until SMSSync came along. SMSSync is an Android app written by the Ushahidi team that replaces the computer as the intermediary and runs the SMS gateway program on the phone itself. Since Android phones can connect to the Internet via WiFi and GPRS, they can receive an incoming SMS and then send it out over the Internet all by themselves. This solved our first problem of power. Phones can easily run 14 hours, or a couple of days, without recharge; that’s what they’re made to do. But we still have the issue of unreliable Internet.

SMSSync Android app

To address the Internet, our team worked closely with SMSSync’s creator, Henry Addo, to incorporate a resend function that repeatedly tries sending a message until it is received by the target URL. Now messages can be received by SMSSync even when the Internet is out and they stay in a holding pattern until the connection returns.

At this point it seems like everything is going to work out for SMS and Liberia, but not so fast.

There’s still one more assumption suggested earlier – that humans will interact with technology correctly. Even the most well-intentioned, experienced user will occasionally get it wrong. The civil war held up the arrival of the latest technologies, and as a result many Liberians don’t have extensive experience with technology.  We noticed that every so often we’d receive a blank message from our users in the field; someone probably hit send prematurely. At first we didn’t pay much attention to this, but then we noticed that SMSSync would stop sending messages after receiving blanks.

After a lot of hair-pulling, we realized the glitch was related to the Ushahidi platform itself. It was programmed to reject blank SMSs as erroneous. SMSSync would try to forward the blank SMS to Ushahidi, Ushahidi would reject it, SMSSync would wait 5 minutes and try again, meanwhile all the other messages were waiting in line. We reprogrammed the Ushahidi platoform to accept all messages, blank or otherwise. Messages that appeared to be errors would be marked as such for the users of the Ushahidi platform to decide what to do with them.

We also had a similar problem with promotional SMS from the cell phone companies. They’d send out things like, “Talk free this Saturday” and often these messages wouldn’t be from numbers like, “06-555-123”, but rather from “winBig” or “LonestarCell.” Again, we didn’t think much of this, but SMSSync stopped working shortly after receiving these messages. It turns out that the Ushahidi platform is also set to reject SMS from numbers that aren’t numbers, sending an app like SMSSync into a never-ending loop. We also fixed this in the Ushahidi platform.

At this point we’ve accounted for assumptions about electricity, Internet and human users. The final assumption we had to overcome is that the technology will always, from now to eternity, until you tell it otherwise, do what you want. But here’s a twist: in an effort to save battery power, Android phones are programmed to turn off their WiFi radios after a certain period of inactivity. Thus SMSSync would work brilliantly for awhile, but then stop forwarding messages for no apparent reason. We’d look at the phone, see the unsent SMS, and since we were now using the phone the WiFi would come back on and mysteriously work. Much to our embarrassment, this also took a long time to figure out.

It’s the Simple Things

At this point I’d like to make it clear that 99% of the time it’s the simple things that get in the way. It wasn’t some small manufacturing defect in our phones, it wasn’t a rogue bit of code deep in SMSSync, it was just a simple feature of the phones that, when they aren’t working as SMS gateways, works to the user’s advantage.

KeepScreen Android app

We fixed the WiFi automatic sleep by installing KeepScreen on the phones. KeepScreen is a free Andoid App that just keeps the screen on all the time. By keeping the screen on, and making the Android think the user is still using the phone, the WiFi also never goes off.

Now our phones work perfectly, day and night, through power and blackouts, high bandwidth bliss and connection timeouts, to send SMSs from our users on the ground to our servers high in the Internet’s metaphorical cloud. And after much hardship, Liberia, a beautiful country, and SMS, a messaging protocol of elegant simplicity, are together at last.

The idea behind these events was 1. share tools for data management (storage, curation and web interface) and with Liberia’s leading IT specialists and election monitors ahead of the referendum and presidential election and 2. to introduce Liberians to a variety of freely available online tools that can serve as megaphones – ways to grow Liberia’s online presence at a critical time in its history when so many Liberians want to encourage a democratic election at home but may not know how many tools are out there for sharing their perspectives locally and abroad.

IT officers and election monitors get settled in for a full day of data management tool talk

The participants for the first two-day event at iLab included IT officers and GIS specialists from the National Elections Commission, Liberia’s GIS Institute, election-related iNGOs such as NDI and IFES, and the Elections Coordinating Committee that represents more than 20 NGOs. According to interviews conducted with each participating organization, many of the inefficiencies that currently exist can be traced back to poor data storage, inconsistent formatting and outdated websites with a non-intuitive user interface.

Participants at iLab going through tutorial in how to use Google Sites

Our sessions were full of lively discussion and it was clear what tools and topics resonated most with participants: some include Dropbox for file sharing, Google sites using online Forms to simplify data entry with election data, Skype for remotely viewing other person’s screen during conversation, and internal wikis.  We also went off-topic a bit to offer some solutions to perennial problems like corrupted USB sticks infecting computers; Kpetermeni Siakor offered a tutorial in how to recover files seemingly lost forever when a corrupted USB stick takes over – you should have heard the eruptions of applause when these tricks were revealed!  The topics of these sessions may sound droll – data management doesn’t exactly give most people goosebumps – but it is where so much of the rich data collected during this election process gets stalled and improperly – if ever – shared.  As one of the Elections Coordinating Committee’s IT officers said, “How you enter [data] is the kind of analysis you will get out of it”, and everyone in attendance was ready to get more out of their data.  John Etherton joined the Ushahidi Liberia and Google team for the events, and led most of the data management sessions; as I watched from the back of the room, I could see National Elections Commission and NDI participants pulling up their own data on the screen and standardizing data formats as John spoke, following his suggestions and cleaning up scores of spreadsheets.  Now again that may not elicit goosebumps for most, but I have to say it was thrilling to see changes happening in real-time that may significantly improve data storage and collaboration between these leading institutions for Liberia’s election.

Carter presents on data curation techniques

The third day – our public event – focused on free online tools that can be used to monitor the electoral process and increase citizens’ engagement within and outside of Liberia.  We weren’t sure how many people would attend; we’d sent out fliers, advertised in the paper, but we knew the tech community is small and the event’s focus was fairly specific.  Much to our delight, nearly 100 people showed up and were very engaged in the presentations and the breakout sessions.  Some of the tools presented were FrontlineSMS, Twitter, Blogger, Google Map Maker and Ushahidi; we also had very exciting breakout sessions on Google’s app engine, FOSS and its applications, setting up virtual box as a way to transition from Microsoft to FOSS, mapping for social change (led by Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier!), and file sharing via router without internet.

Ushahidi's own Patrick Meier was present at the week's events and shared some insights about mapping for social change

With this larger audience, we wanted to drive home the role of social media in promoting a democratic election where the concept alone is still new and the process fragile.  It was interesting to see what excited this audience the most; FrontlineSMS was a big hit as a way to send SMS blasts regarding important election info, the Ushahidi instance for Liberia’s election generated a lot of interest, and Map Maker both revealed the paucity of detail on Liberia’s maps and generated excitement about applying local knowledge to grow those maps.  Interestingly, Twitter did not immediately appeal to the audience – in a country where texting is still new and computer access is less than 5%, tweeting seems like a lot of effort without clear advantages. But Twitter’s new SMS feature would make this a much more popular tool in Liberia; we’re following up on this with local operators and Twitter to make the tool more useful and accessible in Liberia.

Another interesting note: Luther Jeke of Ushahidi Liberia presented Facebook Groups as a social organizing tool around the elections and most of the questions generated by this presentation were about the security of the groups- whether or not a group could be overtaken by a rogue member.  Again, a reasonable question in a country recovering from civil war and still not convinced that any tool used to connect and organize people is secure; more often, each new approach to information sharing (even switching from the popular Yahoo email account to Gmail) is usually met with concerns about security.  This is an important element to the adoption of these various tools, and one that our team now realizes we have to consider more seriously in future trainings and assumptions about what stands in the way of IT working in Liberia.

It was a whirlwind of a week, and we were so grateful to work with Google on these events.  As we continue to receive feedback on these sessions and create follow-up trainings at iLab, we’ll provide updates – and we welcome your thoughts on any of what we’ve shared including your experiences introducing these tools in similar contexts.