• We’ll be updating our Situation Room with reports and updates during the deployment.
• More information in our last blog post on the Uchaguzi deployment.

Here’s our press release on Uchaguzi in Kenya.

News Release:

Contact name: Erik Hersman
Phone: 0729 157 257
Contact email: info@ushahidi.com

TEXT #3018 via PERSONAL CELL PHONES to REPORT FRAUD, VIOLENCE, OR PEACE DURING KENYA’s CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM VOTE

NAIROBI, Kenya (August 3, 2010) —The crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi announces a short code to monitor Kenya’s constitutional referendum on August 4, 2010. This will be the second attempt to give Kenya a new constitution. The first was in 2005, and the motion was defeated. It has been noted that the failure to adopt a constitution was one of the causes of the post election violence in 2008 that killed thousands, displaced 300,000 and affected all Kenyans. The first instance of the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi was created in the midst of the 2008 post election violence as a tool to map violence and react to the crisis.

The Ushahidi platform is able to accept SMS text messages from the “crowd” or any person with a cell phone or computer to record events happening at any location instantly. People are also able to call in reports by voice or via email and Twitter. However, the SMS feature remains one of the most powerful communication tools for developing countries. In Haiti, it was reported that the first thing people would do when they regained power or found a battery was to charge their cell phones.

This election is emotional for many Kenyans as the “Yes” and “No” camps have been parading their colors of green and red respectively at rallies, demonstrations for the last few months.

Since the first deployment of Ushahidi in Kenya, the platform has been used as a crisis map after the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, as an election monitoring service in places like India, Burundi, Mexico and Afghanistan, and by major news services such as Al Jazeera and the Washington Post.

Uchaguzi (“decision” in Kiswahili) is a customized version of the Ushahidi platform to monitor incidences of electoral offences, violence and even peace activities during the August 4th Constitutional Referendum vote. The Constitution & Reform Education Consortium (CRECO) is providing 500 monitors located at various polling stations around the country as well as administrative support. The Social Development Network (SODNET) is offering Uchaguzi its total partnership and the shortcode #3018 that is being used for SMS messages countrywide. With the support of Uraia, HIVOS and Twaweza; Uchaguzi is the most collaborative deployment of the Ushahidi platform to date.

The short code for Uchaguzi has been advertised on the cover of the Kenyan Daily Nation Newspaper, on monitors in grocery stores, on TV and radio. In addition to these media outlets, 20,000 text messages were sent to cell phones around the country alerting the users to their ability to SMS voting concerns to Uchaguzi.

The hope is that the Kenyan referendum vote will be peaceful, but if there is any violence the 600+ Uchaguzi volunteers will be ready to map concerns and fears sourced in the most democratic way possible for this 21st century: personal cell phones.

About Ushahidi
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone. This initial deployment of Ushahidi had 45,000 users in Kenya, and was the catalyst for us realizing there was a need for a platform based on it, which could be use by others around the world. For more information: http://ushahidi.com.

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View from a partner's office in downtown Monrovia

Verification: this was the primary concern of each Liberian organization with whom I met in March.  Each of the 18 organizations – ranging from civil society groups to UN departments to government offices – said the need for more decentralized information and different methods for aggregation were critical, but each of them also wondered how incident reports would be verified.  Search for Common Ground (SFCG) an international NGO with a radio network in Liberia, has been dealing with issues of verification for all of its 13 years in-country.  SFCG’s radio hosts regularly receive reports from listeners that they must verify as true or false; over the years, SFCG has developed a methodology for verifying information that gives radio hosts some guidelines for filtering the data they receive.  We will learn a great deal from partners such as SFCG, and this in itself is part of our strategy in Liberia: learn from local organizations who have years of experience working for the public and are also skilled managers of misinformation produced and/or spread by the public.

And yet even with the guidance of veteran organizations, users of this platform will face challenges – if only because it is an entirely new approach in Liberia.  This reality came into focus recently when Youth Crime Watch, a Liberian organization using the Ushahidi platform, described the gaming of existing security systems: robbers call the police while they are robbing someone just to keep the phone line busy.  Robbers also send out false leads, so those police who do respond to the call are chasing phantom crooks.  There is, therefore, already an understanding of how to manipulate information.  Another consideration is the sensitivity of incident report titles.  If, say, one report is mapped with the title, “Church burnt in Voinjama”, people from that village may see the report and form a mob to track down the perceived perpetrators, setting off a chain of retaliatory actions.

It is clear from these examples that the human filters at each partner organization will serve a crucial role in verifying information.  These individuals are the ones who will be sorting through received messages, determining what information should be displayed on the map, what information is too sensitive for public viewing, and where the sensitive information should be directed in order to facilitate an effective response to the incident.   My colleague and Technical Support Manager, John Etherton and myself will provide training for each organization’s filters, and will determine with each group how they would like to sort and map information.  Verification methods will be developed as we and local partners learn together – this will undoubtedly be a process, and one that no amount of planning could predetermine.  In the first weeks and months of deploying the Ushahidi platform in Liberia, strong relationships with local partners will be perhaps the most important factor in producing effective verification methods.  Each node in this early warning network will have unique information to contribute.  It could be the collective knowledge of this ecosystem that will answer questions that, today, are open-ended.

In all international development and humanitarian efforts, Do No Harm is a mantra regularly chanted but infrequently embodied.  Using the Ushahidi platform has the potential, as other early warning approaches have, to cause inadvertent harm in a context where violence is just below the surface and ethnic/political tensions are running high.  The platform is sometimes considered to be more likely to cause harm because it is an open source tool, and therefore accessible to everyone.  While this is a valid concern, the platform – because it is open source – is versatile and can take many forms: partners in Liberia have the option to make internal maps, viewable only by staff; partners may also choose to delay posting sensitive information by several days or a week in order to discourage violent reprisals; partners can create maps that they share exclusively within the early warning community and can explore other avenues such as radio for getting timely information back to the public.

Because the tool is different with each deployment, how the platform is used and aggregated information is shared can be specific to each partner organization – and partners can choose to change their use of the platform at any time.  One of the project’s primary objectives in Liberia is to provide organizations on the ground with useful data collection and visualization tools – and the foundation for a network that is Liberian-owned and operated.  NGOs and government agencies may ultimately decide to use the tool for internal purposes; to plan their work, chart progress, solicit feedback from clients and show the public what they’ve accomplished.  This use of the platform would in itself be an improvement in accountability and transparency.  As the Liberian public becomes more familiar with the platform, citizens may come to expect relevant, timely and free access to information – another significant shift for Liberians who currently experience numerous restrictions on information.  In its 2007 Media Sector Mapping Survey, Search for Common Ground commented on the hyper-control of information and communication in Liberia:

The top-down approach [of information sharing] is inadequate in the new and complex reality of Liberia today as it is ineffective at communicating ideas, and is even less effective at gathering or collating popular feedback. Despite recognition of this in Government, few ideas or plans exist for changing the institutional informational landscape.

As an early warning network grows in Liberia, and nodes in the network use open source tools such as the Ushahidi platform, that missing plan for “informational landscape” reform may finally be in reach.

It is important that we keep asking ourselves these questions of appropriate action and verification, and it is just as vital that others in the early warning community and beyond continue raising concerns.  The Ushahidi platform is a shape-shifting tool, and this may be its evolutionary advantage, but the tool can only adapt to new circumstances if its human operators maintain an awareness of the possibilities and limitations of the context.

I just had a meeting with some Knight fellows at Stanford who have some very interesting ideas about how to use Ushahidi in a journalistic context — very exciting stuff.

As a way of giving some quick advice, I drew this little chart in the meeting to show what I think is one of the biggest problems with most launches: the “if you launch it they will come” idea. (As David Kobia puts it.)

The simplicity of Ushahidi setup sometimes leads to some crestfallen administrators.

Just because you bought a domain name and ran the Ushahidi installer doesn’t mean that anyone is going to use they system — and even if you somehow get a lot of reports, you might not be relevant to the existing systems (that is, all the other people who are working on the same problem). So as Ory said in Cape Town, “Don’t get too jazzed up! Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.”

Systems like Ushahidi have turned enormous communication barriers into a trivial installation and training process. But there is a whole other 90% of real work.

One way to solve this: forget about crowdsourcing. Unless you want to do a huge outreach campaign, design your system to be used by just a few people. Start with the assumption that you are not going to get a single report from anyone who is not on your payroll. You can do a lot with just a few dedicated reporters who are pushing reports into the system, curating and aggregating sources.

A related post from Wherecamp

Over the last week, while the world watched the US elections (as were we), we were also watching the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Since last Wednesday we’ve been quietly scrambling towards the first deployment of the new Ushahidi Engine into a crisis zone. Today, we’re announcing this instance to the world.

The DRC deployment can be found at http://DRC.ushahidi.com, and the mobile number to send SMS reports to is +243992592111.

Note: This is the alpha software for Ushahidi, so there are likely quite a few bugs and kinks that need to be worked out. If you find any, please submit them to bugs.ushahidi.com.

Help get the word out

We need to get the message to the people on the ground in the Eastern Congo that this tool is now available for them to report incidents in on. If you have contacts there, or can help spread the word through some other means, it would be a great help if you did so – even if it’s just point them to the website or telling them about the SMS number.

Setup and lessons learned

We don’t believe in waiting for software to be perfect before a launch, so we’ve tidied it up as best we can, and are doing constant updates along the way. This instance we’re running on our own servers for speed and ease of updates.

SMS Reporting Through Ushahidi, originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

We run what we’re calling our “tech hub”, which features a mobile phone with a DRC SIM card, tethered to a local PC running FrontlineSMS. Whenever this computer connects to the internet, it auto syncs with Ushahidi.

David Kobia worked very hard through the weekend to get the SMS functionality right. We’re using a combination here of FrontlineSMS to receive local SMS from anyone in the DRC at +243992592111, with a completing feedback loop from the admin area to the incident submitter that goes through Clickatell. Ken Bank’s team at FrontlineSMS has been very quick on the ball to provide us updated code samples to get everything working in time (big thanks!).

At the same time, this isn’t Kenya, so none of the Ushahidi team is well positioned to manage any kind of approval or verification of reports that come into the system. We’ve found a couple local groups that are willing to help us with this, including HEAL Africa. Their members are helping to report incidents, as well as verify incoming reports.

The categories being used in the DRC are different. One of the new ones is “verified reports” which only come from users who are known quantities by the groups managing the Ushahidi instance. It’s a form of more “trusted” reports. While we’re optimistic about gathering reports from people all over the Eastern Congo, we know that there is a certain amount of disinformation that goes on. We are actively looking at ways to neutralize false reports and encourage factual ones.

We’re also working on the French translation, and we need to be proactive here in doing other major language translations before they’re needed. If you’re an expert in a major global language, we’d love to hear from you.