QR Codes, also known as 2Dimensional barcodes, are evolving as part of an emerging trend called ‘the internet of things’ which describes the augmentation of real-world objects and locations with meta-data that is stored in computer networks.

Using some sort of sensing device, usually a camera, a computing device effectively scans a code and decrypts whatever values it might contain. This can be used to store messages, links or small files — to the tune of around a few thousand bytes. If you put a QR code on an apple, you’ve essentially turned that apple into a real-world data storage device.

So those are the basics of what they are, below we’ll explore how they can be used for disaster response.

But First the Checkin

With Crowdmap Checkins, Ushahidi introduced an open source platform for semi-social location sharing. But the value in disasters is simple, the user performs a very quick physical movement to log data as opposed to taking 5 minutes to fill out a report. In other words, it’s quick and relatively frictionless to do. But I don’t want you think so much about location, think about the function. Quick data capture. That’s what checkins offer, and similarly QR codes can be used to do the same.

If you think of the QR code as an abstraction of a function (the act of checking in) then it can play the same role, as well others (because it carries more data). Rather than clicking a button in an application, all a user needs to do is scan the code with a smart device and the hidden data inside is revealed. Not to mention the fact that any physical object can become the storing device for this data.

Assumptions

Now, the consideration of using such technology in disaster scenarios relies upon a couple of assumptions. One, that smart devices are available and in use. Two, that a sufficient data connection is available. Three, that a printing device is available and portable. Four, that security is not a huge concern as a well placed Sharpie marker could completely disrupt your plans.

Potential Uses

QR Codes and the Ushahidi Platform
View more presentations from Ushahidi

Okay so we’ve covered the why and the why not, what about the acute uses?

• Instructions, messages, or media can be coupled with objects as QR or shortcodes
• Triggers a remote process (real-world API call).
• Triggers a process on the device itself.
• Carry information about the device itself.
• Authentication. Code can serve as an identification measure.

Those are a few of the ideas I came up with. The most interesting to me are encoding functions and processes in the code that are unlocked when scanned. More on this in a future post.

I should add that this post is an exercise in thought, and not something we’re actively working on, although It would be pretty cool.

Currently in Sweeper and soon in Ushahidi, users can translate real-time content from one language into another, on the fly, as they receive it. This is done using our Google Translate plugin. Google Translate currently supports 50+ languages.

For the Sweeper deployment we’re using to monitor the situation in Japan internally, we’re using this feature to monitor events, since we can’t manually translate every single message coming through. We’ve found it a significant timesaver. You can also see below that we’re showing the user what language the message was translated from, or if it’s been translated at all…

Before:

After:

It’s important to understand, that this is machine translation, so it’s far from perfect. But if you’re monitoring feeds from multiple countries across Twitter, RSS, Email or SMS it’s sometimes useful enough to get a quick sense of what’s being said, where to potentially look for more info, or perhaps where to direct human translators.

Random Hacks of Kindness Nairobi Kenya RHoK

Welcome to the iHub. This place was created for hackers to come together and make cool stuff. As you can tell, it’s brand new with construction still under way. However, we’ve had a fair number of events happen here.

I can say that I’ve never been so proud as to hold an event here as I am of this one. You represent the spirit of everything that the iHub and Ushahidi stand for.

Jessica Colaco and Linda Kamau lead the Ushahidi and iHub teams for this event. They, along with David, Joshua, Lillian and Angie put this together and will be available to you over the weekend for any questions.

Thank you for coming.

Pothole theory

Think of this when you build: you care about the pothole on your street, not the one 3 streets over. What fits your needs? What makes sense? What would you and your friends use?

That’s what we did right here in Kenya 2 years ago with Ushahidi. Ushahidi, as we all know means “testimony” in Swahili. It’s a simple web-based platform that allows anyone with a phone, email or the web to send in messages about what’s going on around them in a time. We call this crowdsourcing crisis information.

Here’s a video of how it worked in Haiti recently.

Ushahidi Haiti from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

There’s a problem definition for Random Hacks about human sensing. If everything else looks too simple, take a look at it, and then at SwiftRiver, built to solve some of these same issues.

What is RHoK?

Some of you don’t know quite what to expect today, tonight and tomorrow. It kind of sounds cool, but really, what is this whole thing about?

Let me tell you.

It’s not just you. We’re just the Nairobi pod of this global event that brings together almost 1000 programmers, designers and geeks from 6 nations: Australia, England, Indonesia, Brasil, America and of course Kenya.

It’s not just you. You’ll be teaming up with others in this room to come up with simple solutions to complex problems. A lot can be done in 48 hours, imagine what you can do with a few other people just as dedicated as you are.

It’s not just you. The problems you’re solving are for the world. The best apps and hacks are those that effect millions of people. Because, at the end of the day, Random Hacks is about solving big global crisis and disaster problems, using the power of technology.

You might think that you’re just laying down a simple line of code. This isn’t the case.

You are building applications that saves lives, speed recovery and something that just might make the world a better place.

Problem Definitions:

• WeHaveWeNeed Application
• Information Sharing/Situational Awareness Application
• Haiti AMP
• Coordinated Response/Diaspora
• People-Finder
• Credibility of the Human Sensor
• Near Real-Time UAV Imagery Processing
• CERTS
• The money tracker

Major Items

• We’ve been running most communications in Skype chat channels, which works well. It’s hard to come up to speed on what’s happened if you step away though, so we’ve instituted our Situation Room for important items. This means that instead of having to read 3000+ chat messages, you can just read one page and be up to date.
• We’ve been talking with the US State Dept who is giving us a shortcode “200″ that was used by them before. We’re coordinating with InSTEDD and others to utilize this for when the mobile networks come back up.
• Translations are pretty much finished for the Ushahidi deployment, they’re now shifting to help with other sites like the HaitianQuake.com missing persons index.
• haitianquake.com Missing Persons Index is being politely taken over by Google. Google is using the same design pattern as haitianquake. They have collected 2800+ names into the index thus far. Export formats had already been created for RSS and PFIF. Here is the new site: http://haiticrisis.appspot.com
• We’ve put together some buttons and badges for people to put onto their own websites (see below).
• The Fletcher School at Tufts put together a group that crowdsourced and filtered the incoming reports, a HUGELY helpful and tedious process.
• There’s an embeddable iframe that will allow you to put the Ushahidi Haiti map on your own website, here’s the code. You can also adjust the language to French:
  <IFRAME SRC=”http://haitiframe.ushahidi.com/” WIDTH=”955″ HEIGHT=”555″ STYLE=”border:none”></IFRAME>
• All of the Haitian mobile phone networks have been down, which means our reports are mainly coming through the data channels (internet). Web reports, email and Twitter are the primary ways we’ve been getting them.
• We’re continuing to look for valuable and useful geolocated data in order to add it to the map as an overlay. A good example of this would be organizations in Haiti, their location, their contact info and what they are working on. Sahana has the organization registry project to do this since openly.

Thank goodness the Ushahidi team, and volunteers, are distributed around the world. We’ve started taking shifts where the US team and the Africa team switch off and on at rotating schedules. Due to the 7 hour difference, we have a nice overlap of 4-6 hours when the US team wakes up and before the Africa team goes to sleep.

Buttons and Badges

250 x 160px

<a href="http://haiti.ushahidi.com/"><img src="http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/wp-content/uploads/help-haiti.png"></a>


143 x 80px
<a href="http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/submit" title="Submit a Report"><img src="http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/wp-content/uploads/btn-donate.png" /></a>

After watching a video debate (which started off talking about cyber war, then ventured into broader discussions around the use and viability of social media during a political emergency), between Ethan Zuckerman and Evgeny Morozov, it made me think of the current book I’m reading (Wars, Guns & Votes by Paul Collier). In it Collier talks about the inverse relationship between democracy in the bottom billion and democracy in the developed world. Basically, democracy is counterproductive in most countries where people live on less than $7/day.

GDP and Government Media Censorship

This raise a question to me. Has anyone done qualitative research following the same lines of thinking within the blogging and social media space? Where they contrast the social media use, and results of that use, relative to the GDP of the country where the blogging is being done.

In particular, of course, this relates to when blogging and social media is used during an emergency where politics are at play.

The reason I ask is because of the comparisons that are brought up by Ethan and Evgeny, with Honduras, Iran, Xinjiang (China), Russian and South Ossetia parading through the conversation. It’s an interesting contrast listening to the takeaways by each of them, in relation to the outcomes (some of which are still unfolding). I wound up Wolfram Alpha to take a quick look at the GDP of these countries, knowing well and good that more sound research would have to be done to do this properly.

What other factors would seem to play an overly effective part in this space? The first ones that jumps out at me are:

• GDP
• Technology penetration
• Democracy rating
• Openness of society
• Government censorship (media/internet/mobile)

I’m guessing that GDP alone isn’t enough to make an educated prediction on the impact of the use of social media in politically charged societies. It probably has as much to do with the proclivity of government media censorship within a country as well. What is the past history of the government to censor media, and which channels do they block?

If you look at China (16), Iran (16), Russia (12), Georgia (8) and Honduras (6) – as compared in the CIRI Human Rights Database of Government Media Censorship 2000-2007, this is what you find. It seems that there might be some correlation in the numbers, but deeper research would have to be done to truly determine if that is true or not.

Searching for information

I’ve just begun exploring this question, so if someone has done any work in studying this area, please let me know. If not, I’d be interested in seeing some basic research into any of the sub-categories mentioned.

I’m quite interested in finding out what determines an effective (or failed) social media campaign during a period of political unrest.

It was that crisis that started two members of the Ushahidi dev community (Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla) thinking about what needs to be done when you have massive amounts of information flying around. We’re at that point where the barriers for any ordinary person sharing valuable tactical and strategic information openly is at hand. How do you ferret the good data from the bad?

When the noise is overwhelming the signal, what do you do?

Thus began project “Swift River” at Ushahidi, which for 3 months now has been thought through, wireframed, re-thought and prototyped. Chris and Kaushal started asking, what can we do that most significantly effects quality of information in the first 3 hours of a crisis? And then answered, what if we created a swift river of information that gets quickly edited? Events like US Airways Flight 1549 and the inauguration gave us real-time live events that also had massive amounts of data to test things out on.

And, after all that, we’re not done, but we do have some solid ideas on what needs to be done. We think of it as using a crowd to filter, or edit, the already crowdsourced information coming through tools like Ushahidi, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. To us, Swift River is “Crowdsourcing the Filter”.

How does it work? (non-tech version)

Since we don’t believe there will ever be one tool that everyone uses for gathering information on global crisis, we see a future where a tool like Swift River aggregates data from tools such as the aforementioned Twitter, Ushahidi, Flickr, YouTube, local mobile and web social networks. At this point what you have is a whole lot of noise and very little signal as to what the value is of the data you’re seeing.

Anyone who has access to a computer (and possibly just a mobile phone in the future), can then go and rate information as it comes in. This is classic “crowdsourcing”, where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of the finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.

At this point we have successfully filtered a large amount of data. Something difficult to do with a small team of experts, which can be accomplished by a large number of non-experts and experts combined.

What Next?

So far we have some comps and David created a rough prototype of the engine driving it for the US inauguration. If this type of tool interests you, and you’d like to help, then do let us know. Here’s a glimpse at some of the idea flows that spur on our conversation at Ushahidi. This was created by Chris Blow, using the assumption that the user of this tool and protocol was a Twitter user:

The tool is really quite simple, and can be made better by clustering “like” incidents and reports, rating of the users on proximity, history and expertise and by developing a general protocol so that any other developer can expand on it as well.

That’s the problem, and it’s a big one.

So far what everyone has seen with Ushahidi is gathering information and reports during crisis situations. What we’re working towards is something which we believe can be a lot more powerful, that is conflict early warning. It’s especially pertinent when you have regions where genocide and mass atrocities are happening (or could happen).

What we ask is how can we create a system that helps in the creation of acute warnings of news and alerts around mass atrocities and genocide. Preventive actions will always differ, especially as this is a regional problem that tends to cross the immediate borders of the country that it is happening in.

We sit here trying to create a platform, one that is federated and modular, which we hope can become part of a greater ecosystem to help with just this problem. Will we ever be able to prove if it’s successful? Probably not. Proof of “decreasing the impact of a disaster” is hard to quantify, but we think it is of the utmost importance to try.

Many others are talking about the citizen reporting, and it’s value and challenges. Mainstream media is concerned, as are many experts and government officials, about how empowered ordinary people are in gathering, providing and amplifying information in ways that just weren’t possible before.

There is no stopping this change in information dynamics, there is only harnessing it in ways that add more value to the good guys than the bad (when you can figure out which is which). At the very least, we need to figure out how greater information flow and transparency can be leveraged to help in emergencies, especially when there are negative forces at work who have equal accessibility to the same tools.

Aggregation vs early warning

During, or after, a conflict there are a lot of tools available and already being used, especially in technologically advanced countries like India. Technically, it’s fairly easy to aggregate Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube videos. That should be done, and we are creating the superstructure for this to happen easily worldwide. (note: Twitter is useful in India, the US and Canada, but what about all those areas of the world where it was turned off?)

What is more interesting to me, especially about Mumbai and Jos, is the fact that if a tool like Ushahidi was available globally beforehand, then it would have provided a place for people to send in anonymous information and tips before anything happened. After all, even if the local law enforcement isn’t aware of what is happening, someone within the community does. Of course, this begs the question, “how would they know of it?” To which I don’t have any more of a complete answer other than if it was up and live, it would gain traction over time, just as any effective web/mobile service does.

The “right” and “best” tool

The best tool in any given crisis is what ever is available. There isn’t any time to deploy something then, you have to use devices and services that people are already using. Chris Albon noted that there was a lot of information and data flying around during the crisis in Mumbai, and that Ushahidi wasn’t present. Instead, it was a mixture of Wikipedia editing and Google maps that people were using. For a major global city, these two tools makes sense. But what about places like Jos?

This reminds me of a what I wrote about on holistically dealing with disaster scenarios during the hurricanes in the US earlier this year. The value of the current Ushahidi Engine is good for information gathering and visualization, but there is a definite need of a more wiki-like functionality in these tools. Both the hurricanes and these other conflicts have been rapidly collaborated and edited into Wikipedia, so the usefulness of that type of tool is shown. I’m very interested in getting something like this figured out, if we had the resources internally, we’d be doing it already.

What about when the ‘bad’ guys use it?

The other questions were hard, but this ones even harder. As much as mainstream media and experts are up in arms over the way that the terrorists in Mumbai could use information coming in from these new digital channels to monitor their own situation, we have to remember this isn’t new. Groups like this have been able to do this with mainstream TV and radio for years. What’s disturbing is that not even the government can stop it now.

The problem is that it’s no longer one-to-many mass broadcast, it’s now mass-broadcast to mast-broadcast. How do you stop 6 million SMS messages without crippling your own infrastructure and ability to get work done?

I think one answer might be found in figuring out a way to harness information from an even greater number of people. The more data that is collected, the less chance that bad data can have an adverse effect. For instance, if 2 reports come in that widely differ from the reports by 10 other people, then we can assume that they are false. That at least helps us solve for a greater probability of good info being available and can help with the adverse use of it by the “bad guys”.

What it doesn’t do is solve for the problem of the “bad guys” having more information available at their fingertips. Nothing will solve that now. What it does do is mean those opposing them will have equal access to the same information, and possibly even more than is currently available on the “bad guys” movements and operations by tapping into the greater public.

Just more questions…

This all left me with a no final answer, just more questions.

• How does the transparency of a tool help and hinder during hot-flash conflicts?
• Beyond Ushahidi, what are the best tools to use in hot-flashes?
• How does rural, and conflicts with greater geographic distribution than one city, differ in coverage and information?
• What is Ushahidi’s role?

It’s really an interesting device, that is all open source – both hardware and software.

Included in the first prototypes are webcams, radio transmitters and ultra-low-power computers. These components are run with open-source software designed to support the efforts of field workers and partners, and to be locally adapted for ongoing use.

One can imagine devices like this, syncing with InSTEDD’s Mesh4x and even incorporating some of Ushahidi’s visualization tools. It has huge potential for being used when trying to match up and find missing family members – especially children, thus UNICEF’s involvement. The Bee system is intended to help field workers quickly and effectively register children in emergencies.

The Bee means that there is now a mobile hub that can quickly be deployed as nexus points in emergency settings in areas well removed from normal power and connectivity grids. It has multiple ways to use power, including solar, car battery and conventional power.

The Bee is also able to connect to global telecommunications networks using a satellite receiver or a mobile phone, or through its built-in, long-distance WiFi capacity.