The world was shocked to learn about Kyrgyzstan’s second revolution within five years. The country’s anger resulted in the ousting of two presidents, and the 2010 revolution was followed by interethnic violence in the south of the country – making 2010 a challenging year. Some doubted whether Kyrgyzstan could remain independent and sovereign.

At the time, UNDP sent experts to the country to assess the situation and provide  technical support. Jens Wandel visited the UNDP office in Kyrgyzstan to learn about our projects including our support to the elections.

He asked me if I had heard about Ushahidi, a free, and open source software for collecting, visualizing and mapping information. Ushahidi is Swahili for “witness” or “testimony” and was used  for the first time in the 2007 Kenyan elections.

Since then, I have become addicted to the idea, especially since it coincides with our plans to use information and communication technology in our work to support democratic governance.

Since Jens arrived just before the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, we didn’t have time to properly explore how the platform had been used, and ways to adapt it to the Kyrgyz reality.

Later, we learned that Ushahidi had already been used in Kyrgyzstan several years ago by a local NGO that recruited local election observers. However, they used the available software without adapting it to local circumstances and didn’t coordinate their activities with other partners.

I consulted local software developers and not only did they know about Ushahidi, but they also knew about the first time it was used in Kyrgyzstan and had a clear idea how to adapt the open source software to moderate activity on election day.

The beauty of the concept is that the final product would become a universal platform focused not only on electoral violations, but on other issues such as natural disasters like the earthquakes inHaiti and Japan.

The next step was also quite challenging: Could I convince my colleagues and our national partners that this is a useful and inexpensive way of exposing electoral violations during elections day?

Some of my colleagues were skeptical, mostly because of the complexity of information and communication technology. There were some doubts that local civil society would buy into the concept and participate.

In the end, proponents of the Ushahidi software prevailed and we hired a local group to develop the supplementary software and to moderate the process on election day.

Another requirement was to ensure strong coordination at all stages between the developers, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), and key NGOs that would be providing information on violations to the system.

About 3,000 text messages with information on electoral violations were verified and posted online. More than half the violations were observed and reported in Osh and Bishkek, the biggest cities in Kyrgyzstan, and there were more than 27,000 hitswith an average duration of about  two minutes.

Kyrgyz NGOs gained experience with the Ushahidi platform and adapted it to the country’s needs. We saw firsthand that the platform can be used to monitor and increase the transparency of elections.

The CEC not only supported the idea and monitored the site, but also used some of the information for their own purposes.

Well, the statistics shown are quite impressive, however, the main question is this:

What is a non-expensive way of making sure that information from the website reaches each potential voter right way? Especially to the first voters, to demonstrate that the electoral processmust be and can be transparent, and any violation will be recorded and shared with the community?

What do you think?

On November 28th, 2011 crowds assembled at 62,000 polling stations to elect DR Congo’s fifth president in the country’s first independently administered presidential elections since independence in 1960.

Polling Station in Bukavu, Ibanda Commune

Technology had improved considerably since 2006 with most people having cell phones and greater access to wireless. On the other hand, the remote areas most sensitive to violence and election fraud are the ones without cell service and electricity. Thus, many of the same challenges remained. Knowing all these challenges, we still decided that deployment would be useful since many organizations are looking to crisis mapping to assist in combating the ongoing insecurity in eastern Congo and massive sexual violence. We could all learn from the experience. The site went live one week before the elections, on November 18th, reporting in French and English.

Organizing Networks and Teams

Through the international partners, a U.S. based diaspora group, RDC2XTE, seeking an alternative vision for DRC through supportive actions to improve accountability and advancement, and our own contacts, we created a network of local independent observers and media sources based in Bukavu and Goma in the eastern Congo and Kinshasa to continuously report back what they were witnessing at various polling stations.

One of our main dedicated partners in the east, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, trained and organized local women journalists to SMS or email direct reports. A second dedicated partner, Collectif D’Actions Pour La Defense Des Droits Humains (CADDHOM), a local NGO focusing on a wide range of programs concerning human rights, was an official partner of the CENI (the National Election Commission) deploying 200 monitors in South Kivu. CADDHOM sent us reports via email and SMS as they received phone calls and SMS from their official field observers. I also accompanied the executive director of CADDOM, Pasteur Joseph on election day to observe the elections.

Outside EDAP Polling Station in Bukavu with CADDHOM Coordinator, Pasteur Joseph (right)

A third dedicated partner was Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), who organized to station a volunteer in Kinshasa to receive reports from the 30,0000 network of Catholic Bishop monitors in the field. Although in contact with the EU monitoring team, there were no actual exchanges of information and the Carter center did not respond to emails.

We provided all partners with training material and produced post card sized printouts with SMS instructions. I only arrived on the ground on November 25th, but used my time there to meet with local partners none of whom, even though they had received all my materials before hand, had actually visited the site. Internet access is simply too complicated to spend time trying to view a site that takes hours to access. On the other hand, once I arrived and installed the local SIM cards, the Android phones with SMSSync worked perfectly. In fact, since I put the SIM cards on roaming, they work even here in Chicago.

Election Day, SMS Blocked and Lessons Learned

Even with the late start, once the elections got underway we began to receive reports via SMS and email. But then a major glitch came when the government shut down the whole SMS network on December 4th due to concerns of impending violence with the announcement of the election results scheduled for December 6th. Our independent deployment hit a major roadblock between the block on SMS and evacuation of internationals from Kinshasa. I was scheduled to fly to Kinshasa on December 5th, but could not get there since flights were cancelled. All work was suspended in Kinshasa and people ordered to stay home. As CENI continued to delay announcing election results and tension mounted, the CAFOD volunteer could not send any reports. CENI finally announced Kabila’s victory on December 9th, but with growing unrest from the opposition, SMS was not restored until December 14. As soon as it was, we immediately began receiving reports from the volunteer, but these were limited to the December 13th press release that the EU confirmed the Archbishop of Kinshasa’s declaration of irregularities in the elections and media reports.

Speaking with many organizations on the ground, it became apparent that Ushahidi was not widely known in the DRC and, although I physically sat with locals and showed them the platform there was interest, no one I met with could view the site on their computers given the slow Internet connection. A local radio station in Goma. Radio Mutaani, had also set up an SMS system and gmail chat feeding into their website, but were weary of sharing data with Ushahidi given security concerns. I visited their radio station and attended a program at the University in Goma and was impressed with the level of engagement surrounding the election. Until SMS was cut off, they had a lot of activity through their gmail chat.

Without SMS the deployment shifted to media monitoring coordinated by undergraduate Liz Casano of the NorthWestern University Student team and Bharathi Ram and Leesa Astredo of the Stand-by Task Force. The SBTF was instrumental in sorting through and reporting on more than 20,000 tweets. So far, a total of 320 online reports have been uploaded from over 70 locations, comprising 55 types of incidents. There are over 150 reports still waiting to be input into the system, most likely with more to come as the team reviews additional media sources.

One of our goals going in to the deployment was to be able to provide a broad platform to link up the work of local and international monitors and amass all the reports in “real time” for use by all. We learned that this was not in the best interest of the official monitors. Given the strategic role of the National Episcopal Conference of the Congo, the country’s Catholic bishops’ council as the largest monitoring group, it was in their best interest to kept their reports secret until ready to make an official announcement which they did on December 12th. In the end, the need of human rights and humanitarian organizations to report on and respond to crisis, did not coincide with the needs of official monitoring efforts to postpone release of information until they could better assess and negotiate the political implications.

Although more time to conduct networking on the ground would have produced more buy in from humanitarian, civil and human rights organizations, it seems that in the end we might have had the same problems given the SMS and need of the largest observers to withhold their reports until the best strategic moment.

The project team is now shifting its focus to analysis. In the next three months our goal is to issue two reports on the elections. The first will examine the question of transparency that was central to the rejection of the election results by the opposition and critiques of the official monitors. The second will layer in additional data to seek to answer questions broader questions such as did NGO civics work result in reduced problems? Were their areas that had violence in 2006 but not this time? And what kinds of responses were most successful and why?

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!

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.

I’m excited to be nearing the completion of my dissertation research. As regular iRevolution readers will know, the second part of my dissertation is a qualitative and comparative analysis of the use of the Ushahidi platform in both Egypt and the Sudan. As part of this research, I am carrying out some content analysis of the reports mapped on U-Shahid and SudanVoteMonitor.

The purpose of this blog post is to share my preliminary analysis of the 2,700 election monitoring reports published on U-Shahid during Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections in November & December 2010.

All of U-Shahid‘s reports are available in this Excel file. The reports were originally submitted in Arabic, so I’ve had them translated into English for my research. While I’ve spent a few hours combing through these reports, I’m sure that I didn’t pick up on all the interesting ones, so if any iRev readers do go through the data, I’d super grateful if you could let me know about any other interesting tid-bits you uncover.

Before I get to the content analysis, I should note that the Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC)—the Egyptian group based in Cairo that launched the U-Shahid project—used both crowdsourcing and “blogger-sourcing.” That is, the group trained some 130 bloggers and activists in five key cities around Egypt to monitor the elections and report their observations in real-time on the live map they set up. For the crowdsourced reports, DISC worked with a seasoned journalist from Thomson-Reuters to set up verification guidelines that allowed them to validate the vast majority of such reports.

My content analysis of the reports focused primarily on those that seemed to shed the most transparency on the elections and electoral campaigns. To this end, the analysis sought to pick up any trends or recurring patterns in the U-Shahid reports. The topics most frequently addressed in the reports included bribes for buying off votes, police closing off roads leading to polling centers, the destruction and falsification of election ballets, evidence of violence in specific locations, the closing of polling centers before the official time and blocking local election observers from entering polling centers.

What is perhaps most striking about the reports, however, are how specific they are and not only in terms of location, e.g., polling center. For example, reports that document the buying of votes often include the amount paid for the vote. This figure varied from 20 Egyptian Pounds (about $3) to 300 Egyptian Pounds (around $50). As to be expected, perhaps, the price increased through the election period, with one report citing that the bribe price at one location had gone from 40 Pounds to 100 over night.

Another report submitted on December 5, 2010 was even more specific: “Buying out votes in Al Manshiaya Province as following: 7:30[am] price of voter was 100 pound […]. At 12[pm] the price of voter was 250 pound, at 3 pm the price was 200 pound, at 5 pm the price was 300 pound for half an hour, and at 6 pm the price was 30 pound.” Another report revealed “bribe-fixing” by noting that votes ranged from 100-150 Pounds as a result of a “coalition between delegates to reduce the price in Ghirbal, Alexandria.” Other reports documented non-financial bribes, including mobile phones, food, gas and even “sex stimulators”, “Viagra” and “Tramadol tablets”.

Additional incidents mapped on the Ushahidi platform included reports of deliberate power cuts to prevent people from voting. As a result, one voter complained in “Al Saaida Zaniab election center: we could not find my name in voters lists, despite I voted in the same committee. Nobody helped to find my name on list because the electricity cut out.” In general, voters also complained about the lack of phosphoric ink for voting and the fact that they were not asked for their IDs to vote.

Reports also documented harassment and violence by thugs, often against Muslim Brotherhood candidates, the use of Quran verses in election speeches and the use of mini buses at polling centers to bus in people from the National Party. For example, one reported noted that “Oil Minister Samir Fahmy who is National nominee for Al Nassr City for Peoples Council uses his power to mobilize employees to vote for him. The employees used the companies buses carrying the nominee’ pictures to go to the election centers.” Several hundred reports included pictures and videos, some clearly documenting obvious election fraud. In contrast, however, there were also several reports that documented calm, “everything is ok” around certain voting centers.

In a future blog post, I’ll share the main findings from my interviews with the key Egyptian activists who were behind the U-Shahid project. In the meantime, if you choose to look through the election monitoring reports, please do let me know if you find anything else of interest, thank you!

Liberia 2011 is an Ushahidi instance dedicated to tracking the country's presidential election

January 6^th marked the beginning of voter registration in Liberia, as well as the nationwide deployment of civic voter education activities, registration monitors, and widespread reports of registrant bribing and illegal registration.  Our team realized that, in order for an Ushahidi instance to be useful in this setting, the instance must catch the attention of many different election-related actors with a variety of roles and interests regarding the election process.  And once we have the attention of these actors, the instance must be accessible and manageable by these multiple users.  Hence, the “Simple Groups” plugin. **Note: in the initial months of the election process, we are not yet targeting ‘the crowd’ but rather organizations that serve an advocacy or monitoring role for the election.

Some of the groups contributing reports to the election instance

With Simple Groups, multiple organizations composed of several unique users can now have private admin access to the same Ushahidi instance. Each group has a private admin page that contains their own messages, reports, and admin map.  This setup keeps data centralized on the instance’s homepage while allowing groups to keep their reports and messages private until they are ok’d for the public map. In short, a plugin for data privacy with a collaborative twist – shared hompeage, private back doors.

An example of a group's private admin page for the election instance. The above page, created on our Demo site for testing purposes, shows the basics of a group page: access to messages, approved and unapproved reports, as well as the Admin Map (found under the Map tab)

Here are some features we’ve created for groups:

• Whitelisted phone numbers – managers of the shared instance (currently limited to our consulting team) have the ability to link trusted sources’ phone numbers to particular groups.  When a message is received from that number, it is automatically forwarded to that group’s private admin page.  Each message from a whitelisted number appears on the group’s messages page with the name, organization and number of the sender listed.  To date, over 135 phone numbers belonging to 30 different reporting organizations have been whitelisted as trusted election reporters.

Whitelisting feature for groups' vetted sources

• Tagged reports – each group’s report is tagged with the organization’s logo so other groups and all viewers can quickly identify the source that has approved and determined the verification status of the report

A report on the election instance tagged by a participating group

• Admin Map plugin– we anticipated that many groups will want to keep certain reports private, if only temporarily, due to their sensitive content. While these unapproved reports are accessible in list form on a group’s admin page, there used to be no way to visualize these unapproved reports on the map. We created the Admin Map on each group’s admin page that shows all unapproved reports as black. This Admin Map provides each group with a view of their reports and their reports only; this way, groups can choose to view their reports exclusively, or to see them with all groups’ reports on the shared homepage

The Admin Map allows each group to privately visualize all its reports, approved and unapproved

• A few more features of the Admin Map:
  • Multiple categories can be compared at once using the Boolean functions OR and AND.  Users can see all the reports that were categorized as A or B, as well as those reports that were categorized as A and B. In addition, when categories A and B are selected using AND, the colors of the two categories blend to uniquely represent those reports. These logical operators give groups a new way to look for trends in their data
  • Many of our partners feel confined by the 4×4” size of the homepage map and spend long minutes with the slow Internet connection zooming in to get a closer look. The Admin Map uses more of the screen and makes the Liberia map easier to navigate
  • The user interface has been modified to make categories easier to explore. Each category with subcategories now has a “+” sign next to it so users do not have to spend valuable Internet time clicking each category to see if it has further divisions. The timeline and category filters may now be positioned on the screen according to the user’s liking
  • All of these features have also been added to the instance’s homepage (all except groups’ unapproved reports).  Click on the “Big Map” button at the top of the election homepage or the “view full map” button just above the map; both will open a map with nearly all the same features as Admin Map

• Location Highlighter – When our partners are turning messages into reports, it can sometimes be difficult to find the message’s location on the map.  To expedite this process, the Location Highlighter tool outlines Liberia’s counties and districts on the map to narrow the scope of the search. This way, when users are looking for a town they can’t find with a quick map scan, but they know the appropriate county and district, they can turn on the Highlighter and zero in on a specific county, district, and even clan. Because most of our groups work with low bandwidth, the Highlighter’s clear parameters allow admin users to spend less time clicking and dragging across the map and more time searching a clearly defined area.  This addition has been especially helpful since Google Maps does not show the districts of Liberia and the counties are not labeled

The highlighting tool identifies the boundaries for a location down to the county, district, and even clan level

Just below the Highlighter tool is the “Find Location” feature.  This has long been a part of the Ushahidi platform, however we’ve found in Liberia that our first search results often landed in India and Ohio rather than Liberia’s interior.  With a few tweaks, the Find Location feature now searches both Google and GeoNames for the town or city listed.  We have also added the ability to set a bounding box so that only results from inside that box (in this case, Liberia) will appear

Group users also found that it took some time, due again to low bandwidth, to get the results of a town search; to expedite this process, results are now set to cache locally so that after the first few searches the data will be stored on the site for faster load time.  We’ve also set the results to show all matches, not just the first, so the user is ultimately the one who chooses the appropriate match.  These changes have also been made to the public reporting form on the homepage’s “Submit a Report”. The Highlighter is a plugin and Find Location is 95% plugin – the only thing that’s different is that Find Location has to operate with the Liberia theme and the Highlighter plugin installed. You can play with these latest location features on our Demo site without worrying about submitting a real report

The "Find Location" section of the plugin provides several options for locating a town or village by its name alone

• End-time plugin – many messages from the field are reports of voter education activities that span several hours and sometimes days.  In order to capture the full length of the reported event, we have added an end-time option for users so the end date and time of day can be listed in the report
• Forwarding messages - if a message comes in from a non-whitelisted number, it is still possible for the instance’s managers to assign it to a particular group.  If the message’s contents indicate the affiliation of the reporter (his/her organization), the message can be forwarded to the appropriate group.  On that group’s private backend, it appears as if it was sent directly to them and not forwarded on from an intermediary

• Reminder cards – while this is not an online feature, it has significantly improved the quality of the messages received.  Each group that requests participation in the election instance receives trainings from our team for office staff (in how to turn messages into reports) and another for field staff and affiliated reporters (in how to report to the election instance).  During the training, a small reminder card is given to each field reporter (the size of a business card) that summarizes the basic steps of reporting as well as what bases to cover in each message. Because texting is still quite new to many of our partners’ staff, especially reporting information via text, we found that training in how to report via text was a must. Presently, more than 60 field reporters have received direct training in using this card, and we anticipate another 60-70 will be trained in the next few months

The front and back of the election reporting card: the size of a business card, this is handed out to field reporters as a reminder of what to include in a message

SMSsync - The election instance has a dedicated shortcode, 2011, that is free with 3 of Liberia’s 5 operators. Our team previously used FrontlineSMS as our SMS gateway; however, because we have a shortcode SIM from each operator and only one extra computer available, we had to run multiple FrontlineSMS instances on that computer – something the program was not designed to support.  We started to consider other options, particularly ones that would not require that a computer be on 24/7 (given the erratic nature of the country’s electricity).  In cooperation with Ushahidi’s talented Henry Addo, we tested downgraded versions of SMSsync to work with android phones available in Liberia.  After just one week, we made the switch: now our SMS gateway operation has downsized and simplified to a mere 3 androids, each with a dedicated 2011 SIM, using GPRS Internet connection to sync messages to the election instance, and only needing a power source for a few hours every other day.

With all of these additions and new technologies, we have kept our user audience small to start.  Voter registration, which officially ended February 12th, was a great testing ground for the new and improving election instance.  We trained a handful of election-focused organizations and so far we have received 325 texts and 150 approved reports on the shared homepage.  The majority of our current reports document voter education activities more than illegal happenings at registration sites or citizens’ feedback about the process; and of those latter reports that do exist, many are privatized by groups because they are still determining what they want to share via this platform.

Our team would love to see a greater variety of messages coming in, reporting on not just organizational activities but also on the many successes and challenges citizens experience around registration.  But we have to think in baby steps.  After several months in-country, I am starting to feel that any info sharing is good info sharing in Liberia.  With each stage of the election process we plan to take another step – spreading the word about the shortcode to the public, bringing on more groups that collect a variety of information, establishing a tech center with reliable power and Internet so groups have a mapping hub at their disposal.  Step by step, it will certainly be a very interesting year.

P.S. to access any of the plugins mentioned here, follow these links:

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/endtime/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/findlocation/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/locationhighlight/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/simplegroups/