Okay, so what does that mean to regular folks? How about: We care about our communities and the world around us. So, we need to protect and improve it. How can we know more and be actively involved in the real changes, even at a incremental level?

Call to Map it, Change it.

The UN has stacks of resources about RIO+20. The Future We Want is an initiative focused on opening up the process to: Share your ideas. The UN’s Sustainable Future site includes a list of organizations and movements who demonstrate the power of: What Can You Do?

We invite you to join the fray: What can you map? There are countless local and global stories related to sustainable development. Take map aim at an issue that you care about to highlight the need for real change.

Mapsters in Action

At the recent United States Rio +20 pre-event, Ushahidi had a chance to feature the work of amazing deployers trying to share, understand and change their world. These examples should get your mind spinning on some of the untold map stories that you could activate. Citizen crowdsourcing can elevate and visualize your subject. And, you may be surprised who you hear from and how you can collaborate.

The Cost of Chicken project works with kids from around the world to collect data on local food conditions. It uses Crowdmap to track and share information ranging from the cost of chicken, water, and, even, candy. Learn more from Olga Werby, mapster advocate:

Can those kids be any more inspiring in their search to understand and connect with each other over food production? Thanks to each one of them for sharing their passion for change.

Take a World Tour:

Deployers around the globe are mapping about sustainability. These are some examples we shared at USRio+20:

• Global Energy Shortages This map includes a layer of Ajay Kumar’s project Powercuts.in.
• Find Fuel in Nairobi, Kenya
• Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock: Nangarhar Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock ( DAIL ) (Afghanistan). More on this project: “A Moment of Discovery and Awe“.
• iWitness Pollution (Louisiana, USA)
• Spotting Fair Trade in North America (supporting sustainable products) (USA)
• Agrotestigo: Mapping Agricultural Social Networks (building collective resources about agricultural technologies) in Argentina
• Qiantang River Water Map 钱塘江水地图: A Collaborative Interactive Water Map for Qiantang River (China)

If you have more examples of great maps, please share them in the comments or add them to our Deployments Map.

And, when you create a new map, be sure to tweet to @UN_Rioplus20 and @ushahidi. Use the hashtags #futurewewant. We’d be happy to feature your map story on our blog. Simply drop us a line.

More Resources:

• Official United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD)
• UN Sustainable Future site
• United States Rio+20 Conference
• The Future We Want

Thank you: USRio20 participants and organizing team

Thank you to Noel Dickover, Richard Boly and Sarah Jessup for inviting Nat Manning and I to participate in USRio20. Special thanks to Carmelle Terborgh, ESRI, for supporting our participation.

We were delighted to meet participants and to brainstorm, learn and Speed Geek [video] about these important topics.

Thanks!

Heather L.

CAUSE Resiliency (West Coast) Experiment 2011

The CAUSE Resiliency (West Coast) Experiment project 2011 was a collaboration between the governments of Canada and United States with operational emergency management communities in British Columbia and bordering states. The goal was to simulate an emergency response with the use and integration of some emerging technologies, including the Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS), ESRI and Ushahidi. Simon Fraser University, under Dr. Peter Anderson’s guidance, trained students to use Ushahidi for citizen reports:

CAUSE Ushahidi Chapter – FINAL from Planetworks Consulting on Vimeo.

Citizens will use the many online communication channels (email, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, and more) and their mobile devices during an emergency. Examples like this demonstrate how official organizations can incorporate citizen reporting platforms like Ushahidi to plan, give voice and build partnerships with their communities. Emergency responders often say that citizens are the first responders and witnesses in their neighbourhoods. With training and planning, it is possible to have an installation of Ushahidi ready for emergencies and use the mobile applications. The mobile apps can be white-labelled and customized for your city or emergency response group. There is a huge opportunity to replicate this simulation model connecting official responders, universities and volunteers. All it takes is leadership, initiative and a plan.

The Canadian National MASAS Information eXchange (MASAS-X) supports operations, exercises and training. (www.MASAS-X.ca).

Thank you
Special thanks to Jack Pagotto (Head, ESEC [Emergency Mgmt Systems & Interoperability, Surveillance/Intel, E-security, Critical Infrastructure Protection] Centre for Security Science) for funding and making this video clip available, Doug Allport, Senior Advisor, MASAS National Implementation Teamand the MASAS team for building software that connects citizens and emergency responders, Dr. Peter Anderson (Director, Telematics Research Lab, SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology) for his support of Ushahidi and for engaging students, Daniel Stevens (Vancouver EOC) for his introduction, and as well many thanks to the actors and other professionals involved.

The SciFi geeks may recognize the actor who volunteered some of the narration as Bruce Greenwood, of the Star Trek movie fame and a native Vancouverite. This video was provided by Paul Childs, Planetworks Consulting with the film by Black Dog Productions.

More clips may be available from the Centre of Security Science on request.

Introducing Luther Jeke, Training Director Ushahidi Liberia:

Introducing Claire Wardle, London Tube Maps and Robbie MacKay, Standby Task Force:

If you would like to share a video about your experiences with Ushahidi or about your deployment, please contact me: hleson at ushahidi dot com.

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.

From HarrassMap in Egypt to mapping violence against children in Benin to software simulations in Zambia, these two tools have been used together to give voice and collect content for various groups. The SMSMap event in Nairobi featured Anahi Ayala Iaccuci (Internews) speaking about her experiences using both tools for the Zambia simulation. Claire Wardle, BBC School of Journalism, shared her London Tube strike experiences using Crowdmap with London participants. And in London, UK Linda Raftree (Plan International) spoke candidly (and virtually) about what worked and needs work to do more joint projects. Each speaker highlighted some of the collective needs and challenges of navigating the new world of merging SMS to Map including the various software bugs encountered with Ushahidi. More on the Violence against Children, Plan International project:

The Nairobi event included a technical demo and the London event included audience discussion groups. Our common goal was to inspire people to talk about their potential projects and meet each other. Both Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS are fully committed to collaborate, provide documentation and other potential events to assist our communities in their endeavours to change their cities and their world. We were delighted to have over 60 people in London and 30 in Nairobi begin that journey with us. Community really starts when you put people with common interests together to build goals and be inspired. The feedback provided by participants is core to each of us improving their experience using our software.

More on the event:
Liveblogs, twitter, videos, skype presenters and software simulations were all part of our interactive event. Here is a running blog capturing the live media from both cities:

Thank you:

Thank you to all of those involved in helping us with the FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi ‘SMS to Map’ event. A special thanks goes to Cast London at Goldsmiths University for sponsoring the London-based event and to the iHub for hosting the Nairobi-based event too. We could not have held these events without this kind support.

Thanks to Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network) and Hamilton Juma (iHub Community Manager) for their excellent hosting of the iHub Nairobi event, Dan Mcquillan (Goldsmiths, University of London) for his amazing support arranging the London event, and of course all of the wonderful speakers including Linda Raftree (Plan International), Claire Wardle (BBC College of Journalism), Linda Kamau (Ushahidi), Sharon Langevin (FrontlineSMS:Credit), Limo Taboi (Ushahidi), Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network), and Laura Walker Hudson (FrontlineSMS Director of Operations). And, a warm thank you to the FrontlineSMS team for co-hosting the London event with Charl and myself. Florence, Amy, Hussein, Laura and Lisa, it was a pleasure to spend the day with you to make this happen. Very special thanks for Florence Scialom for being the rock of organization for all of us. Here’s her post about the event.

Thanks to the participants and volunteers for joining us on this adventure to change and connect the world with open source software.

We’ve told you a bit about iLab on this blog before, but now we have a visual aid to better introduce ourselves.  We started the space as a way to train people in the Ushahidi platform with adequate connectivity and equipment, and now we’re holding FOSS trainings for the Liberian legislature and serving as the data entry hub for national Elections Coordinating Committee. So many good and unexpected things start with a tool that serves to connect, and to ask people – what is your story?  Now we are asking, who is your community?

It’s an exciting time to be in Liberia – with a presidential election next month, broadband Internet landing offshore in 2012 and increasing overlaps between Liberia’s development and tech communities. We hope you’ll take a look and see what iLab is doing to promote IT access and innovation in Liberia.

• 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.

Over the year and half working with Ushahidi on the SwiftRiver project, I’ve thought a lot about the subject of crowdsourcing. Not so much the how, but the how. (I suppose the pseudo-science of crowdsourcing would be a fitting subtitle.) Partly because it’s part of my job to help prevent ‘the gaming of the system’ within Ushahidi deployments, but partly because it’s become a subject I’m obsessed with.

So rather than continue to force my wife to listen to all my thoughts and observations, I’ve started an audio podcast and blog called Cult of the Crowd. One of my favorite blogs is Kevin Kelly’s blog The Technium which is sort of like a living book, and so COTC takes that format with lengthy posts and video versions which I also hope will be later combined into a book.

The subject certainly includes collaborative or activist mapping, but it also includes participatory journalism, distributed labor and micro-tasking which the podcast will also discuss in depth. The first episode is up now, you can watch it above or at cultofthecrowd.com. Obviously Ushahidi will be covered quite a bit but so will other companies that heavily rely upon crowds and crowdsourcing in their work.

Join the Cult of the Crowd Community

Follow us on Twitter – @cultofthecrowd
Join the Community – grou.ps/cultofthecrowd

Ushahidi: Creating a New Narrative from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

The Ushahidi Platform allows everyone to create the narrative.

In this video, the Ushahidi founders and others discuss the origins of, and rational behind, the Ushahidi platform.

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Produced by Jon Shuler & Sarah George
Directed and Shot by Jon Shuler
Motion Graphics by Mancel Lindsey
Photography by Boniface Mwangi
Music by Saregama – saregama-music.blogspot.com