World Bank Managing Director Caroline Anstey recently announced a new partnership with Google that will apparently empower citizen cartographers in 150 countries worldwide. This has provoked some concern among open source enthusiasts. Under this new agreement, the Bank, UN agencies and developing country governments will be able to “access Google Map Maker’s global mapping platform, allowing the collection, viewing, search and free access to data of geoinformation in over 150 countries and 60 languages.”

So what’s the catch? Google’s licensing agreement for Google Map Maker stipulates the following: Users are not allowed to access Google Map Maker data via any platform other than those designated by Google. Users are not allowed to make any copies of the data, nor can they translate the data, modify it or create a derivative of the data. In addition, users cannot publicly display any Map Maker data for commercial purposes. Finally, users cannot use Map Maker data to create a service that is similar to any already provided by Google.

There’s a saying in the tech world that goes like this: “If the product is free, then you are the product.” I fear this may be the case with the Google-Bank partnership. I worry that Google will organize more crowdsourced mapping projects (like the one they did for Sudan last year), and use people with local knowledge to improve Map Maker data, which will carry all the licensing restrictions described above. Does this really empower citizen cartographers?

Or is this about using citizen cartographers (as free labor?) for commercial purposes? Will Google push Map Maker data to Google Maps & Google Earth products, i.e., expanding market share & commercial interests? Contrast this with the World Bank’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI), which uses open source software and open data to empower local communities and disaster risk managers. Also, the Google-Bank partnership is specifically with UN agencies and governments, not exactly citizens or NGOs.

Caroline Anstey concludes her announcement with the following:

“In the 17th century, imperial cartographers had an advantage over local communities. They could see the big picture. In the 21st century, the tables have turned: local communities can make the biggest on the ground difference. Crowdsourced citizen cartographers can help make it happen.”

Here’s another version:

“In the 21st century, for-profit companies like Google Inc have an advantage over local communities. They can use big license restrictions. With the Google-Bank partnership, Google can use local communities to collect information for free and make the biggest profit. Crowdsourced citizen cartographers can help make it happen.”

The Google-Bank partnership points to another important issue being ignored in this debate. Let’s not pretend that technology alone determines whether participatory mapping truly empowers local communities. I recently learned of an absolutely disastrous open source “community” mapping project in Africa which should one day should be written up in a blog post entitled “Open Source Community Mapping #FAIL”.

So software developers (whether from the open source or proprietary side) who want to get involved in community mapping and have zero experience in participatory GIS, local development and capacity building should think twice: the “do no harm” principle also applies to them. This is equally true of Google Inc. The entire open source mapping community will be watching every move they make on this new World Bank partnership.

I do hope Google eventually realizes just how much of an opportunity they have to do good with this partnership. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will draft a separate licensing agreement for the World Bank partnership. In fact, I hope they openly invite the participatory GIS and open source mapping communities to co-draft an elevated licensing agreement that will truly empower citizen cartographers. Google would still get publicity—and more importantly positive publicity—as a result. They’d still get the data and have their brand affiliated with said data. But instead of locking up the Map Maker data behind bars and financially profiting from local communities, they’d allow citizens themselves to use the data in whatever platform they so choose to improve citizen feedback in project planning, implementation and monitoring & evaluation. Now wouldn’t that be empowering?

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2012/01/25/google-inc-world-bank-empowering-citizen-cartographers/feed/ 4 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/07/01/ushahidi-and-google-team-up-in-liberia-for-elections/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/07/01/ushahidi-and-google-team-up-in-liberia-for-elections/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:58:36 +0000 kate http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=4481 iLab Liberia was bustling last week with Ushahidi Liberia and Google’s event, “New Tech at Work: Planning for Liberia’s Elections and Beyond.”  The event was broken into two sections – a two-day session at iLab and a public one-day session at the delicious and spacious PA’s Ribhouse (good bbq and a big hall – what else is there?).  Here’s a bit about what we covered and how it went.

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

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

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

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

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

Carter presents on data curation techniques

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve spent the past week at the iLab in Liberia and got what I came for: an updated reality check on the limitations of technology adoption in developing countries. Below are some of the assumptions that I took for granted. They’re perfectly obvious in hindsight and I’m annoyed at myself for not having realized their obviousness sooner. I’d be very interested in hearing from others about these and reading their lists. This need not be limited to one particular sector like ICT for Development (ICT4D) or Mobile Health (mHealth). Many of these assumptions have repercussions across multiple disciplines.

The following examples come from conversations with my colleague Kate Cummings who directs Ushahidi Liberia and the iLab here in Monrovia. She and her truly outstanding team—Kpetermeni Siakor, Carter Draper, Luther Jeke and Anthony Kamah—spearheaded a number of excellent training workshops over the past few days. At one point we began discussing the reasons for the limited use of SMS in Liberia. There are the usual and obvious reasons. But the one hurdle I had not expected to hear was Nokia’s predictive text functionality. This feature is incredibly helpful since the mobile phone basically guesses which words you’re trying to write so you don’t have to type every single letter.

But as soon as she pointed out how confusing this can be, I immediately understood what she meant. If I had never seen or been warned about this feature before, I’d honestly think the phone was broken. It would really be impossible to type with. I’d get frustrated and give up (the tiny screen further adds to the frustration). And if I was new to mobile phones, it wouldn’t be obvious how to switch that feature off either. (There are several tutorials online on how to use the predictive text feature and how to turn it off, which clearly proves they’re not intuitive).

In one of the training workshops we just had, I was explaining what Walking Papers was about and how it might be useful in Liberia. So I showed the example below and continued talking. But Kate jumped in and asked participants: “What do you see in this picture? Do you see the trees, the little roads?” She pointed at the features as she described the individual shapes. This is when it finally dawned on me that there is absolutely nothing inherently intuitive about satellite images. Most people on this planet have not been on an airplane or a tall building. So why would a bird’s eye view of their village be anything remotely recognizable? I really kicked myself on that one. So I’ll write it again: there is nothing intuitive about satellite imagery. Nor is there anything intuitive about GPS and the existence of a latitude and longitude coordinate system.

Kate went on to explain that this kind of picture is what you would see if you were flying high like a bird. That was the way I should have introduced the image but I had taken it completely for granted that satellite imagery was self-explanatory when it simply isn’t. I really kicked myself on that one. In further conversations with Kate, she explained that they too had made that assumption early on when trying to introduce the in’s and out’s of the Ushahidi platform. They quickly realized that they had to rethink their approach and decided to provide introductory courses on Google Maps instead.

More wrong assumptions revealed themselves during these courses. For example, the “+” and “-” markers on the map are not intuitive either nor is the concept of zooming in and out. How are you supposed to understand that pressing these buttons still shows the same map but at a different scale and not an entirely different picture instead? Again, when I took a moment to think about this, I realized again how completely confusing that could be. And again I kicked myself. But contrast this to an entirely different setting, San Francisco, where some friends recently told me how their five year old went up to a framed picture in their living room and started pinching at it with his fingers, the exact same gestures one would use on an iPhone to zoom in and out of a picture. “Broken, broken” is all the five year old said after that disappointing experience.

The final example actually comes from Haiti where my colleague Chrissy Martin is one of the main drivers behind the Digicel Group’s mobile banking efforts in the country. There were of course a number of expected challenges on the road to launching Haiti’s first successful mobile banking service, TchoTcho Mobile. The hurdle that I had not expected, however, had to do with the pin code. To use the service, you would enter your own personal pin number on your mobile phone in order to access your account. Seems perfectly straight forward. But it really isn’t.

The concept of a pin number is one that many of us take completely for granted. But the idea is often foreign to many would-be users of mobile banking services and not just in Haiti. Just think about it: all one has to do to access my money is to simply enter four numbers on my phone. That does genuinely sound crazy to me at a certain level. Granted, if you guess the pin wrong three times, the phone gets blocked and you have to call TchoTcho’s customer service. But still, I can understand the initial hesitation that many users had. When I asked Chrissy how they overcame the hurdle, her answer was simply this: training. It takes time for users to begin trusting a completely new technology.

So those are some of the assumptions I’ve gotten wrong. I’d be grateful if readers could share theirs as there must be plenty of other assumptions I’m making which don’t fit reality. Incidentally, I realize that emerging economies vary widely in technology diffusion and adoption—not to mention sub-nationally as well. This is why having the iLab in Liberia is so important. Identifying which assumptions are wrong in more challenging environments is really important if our goal is to use technology to help contribute meaningfully to a community’s empowerment, development and independence.

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.

Since then it has been a crazy ride…from producing an incredible open source platform and working towards scale, to building and working with an incredibly talented team, to seeing multiple uses of Ushahidi around the world, to numerous awards and press mentions.

For me, what has always been the most important aspect of the work we do has remained simple, building a tool that makes it easy for individuals and groups to tell their stories, and making it easy for these stories to be mapped/visualized.

Ushahidi has grown to be that and much more, thanks especially to the wider community – which saw potential uses beyond crisis reporting and who largely shaped our growth and direction to date be it through translation efforts (Ushahidi now available in 10 languages!), or custom themes, or pushing for a hosted version (Crowdmap), or challenging us to address the shortcomings of the platform (through tools like SwiftRiver and our community resources page).

Beyond the growth of Ushahidi as a platform and an organization, I always tell people that I am most proud of the fact that the Ushahidi story has provided an inspiration to other techies in Kenya and Africa – an example of the kind of talent the continent holds, but also a reminder that we have just scratched the surface. And so after 3 years, I feel it is time for me to take on the next challenge. Those of you who know me well know I’ve got a 1001 ideas floating in my head that I need to get out☺

Where I am headed? I will be joining Google in the new year as the Policy Manager for Africa. The role will involve developing policy /strategies on a number of areas of relevance to Google and the Internet in Africa and will involve working with different parties including government leaders, policy makers, regulators, industry groups and so on. It is a huge opportunity to bring Google’s resources to bear as far as the growth and development of the internet in Africa (and hopefully a reminder of why I went to law school in the first place!). I’m very excited about the move and I hope I can continue to lean on your support and insight in my new role.

To my co-founders – the ride continues! To the most amazing team, I am watching this space! To our Board of Directors, thank you for your insight and guidance! To our partners, especially those who took a risk on us in the early days, most grateful! To the wonderful readers of Kenyan Pundit, whose stories and willingness to share in those dark days of 2007-8 – you were my inspiration, thank you! To the wonderful wider community of Ushahidi – volunteers, translators, crowdmappers, critics (yes I love you too!), journalists, people who supported us in the early days when people asked Usha-what?, THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Need to reach me….you all know I live on the internets right…find me @kenyanpundit or kenyanpundit-at-gmail

- O

LISGIS is the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services, and it is notorious for keeping its data on a short leash.  John (our team’s tech support manager extraordinaire) tried getting in touch with the Institute: a personal visit, an official letter – all to no avail.  Meanwhile the UN Mission in Liberia, the Norwegian Refugee Council and others were waiting to use Ushahidi – but without county and district boundaries displayed on Ushahidi’s maps, there was little our team could offer.

What was in fact the most challenging aspect of this data-chase was that we already had the LISGIS data; through one of his contacts at an NGO, John was able to view purchased LISGIS shapefiles in all their glory – one map after another of detailed boundary lines and villages with populations as few as five.  But these shapefiles were licensed to one particular organization for internal use, and therefore just out of reach (picture John and I at our desks, grinding teeth and biting nails).

During a meeting with the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Peacebuilding Office, we mentioned this data deadlock; the Director of the Peacebuilding Office (PBO), one of the most connected men in Monrovia, casually offered to accompany us on our next trip to LISGIS.  The head of the Institute, he said, was a personal friend.  And here the tides began to turn.  In one visit, the PBO’s Director arranged a verbal agreement with LISGIS to release county and district boundaries, cities and villages, plus main and arterial roads for Google’s use; all that remained was for John and myself to get it down on paper.  And Google?  Our contacts at HQ were more than happy to post the census data on their maps as soon as we sent them signed permission.   I will abbreviate the course of events that followed, however I would be doing you an injustice if I did not at least summarize the run-around that ensued – it is, after all, an integral part of data collection in Liberia:

• Personally delivered document on PBO letterhead to LISGIS for the Director’s signature
• Hastily walked out of the office with signed permission in-hand.  Wait – he put the wrong date
• Back to the office.  Director crossed out the date, initialed, corrected it. Quickly again out the door to scan the document off to Google.  Done!
• Not quite.  Google writes: the document is not on LISGIS letterhead, and the Director’s listed email is a Yahoo address rather than an official LISGIS address (Liberians do have a fondness for elaborate Yahoo addresses)
• John inquires about the official email address: LISGIS does not have one.  Fine, Google understands, how about just a signature on letterhead, minus the Yahoo?
• Got it.  Back to LISGIS.  Up the stairs, into the office – the entire staff is on retreat.  For the week.  In a faraway town
• The next week: up the stairs, into LISGIS, yes hello again I know I’m truly trying my luck but my bossman says I have to get this on your letterhead.  Okay, said the secretary – but not on that thing (I’ve brought a USB stick with the original document).  I don’t ask why – sure, would you like to retrieve the document from my email?  They would rather rewrite the entire document based on a hard copy.  I offered to type it – no, no problem we can do it
• I waited in the lobby.  The secretary brought me a copy – there are some typos.  She tries again.  Another copy – a few remaining mistakes.  Once more.  An hour later, a pristine rewrite.  She went for the signature – can we get two copies, I asked?  I’m bit my lip, I had pushed too far, there was no way we could get away with this now.  I waited some more
• Secretary emerged, signed documents in hand.  On letterhead.  I bolted out of the door, scanned, copied, FedExed to Google, nearly framed the copies and built a mantle on which to admire them within the same hour.  Really. Done.

And it was worth it.  Below are samples from our friends at Google demonstrating how these added shapefiles will improve public maps of Liberia.  Within the next few weeks, this data will be available in the public domain.  As they say in Liberia for progress, one step at a time – “we’re trying small.”

Before and After: County and District Boundaries

Before and After: Main and Arterial Roads

Before and After: Cities and Villages

If you would like to see the shapefiles for yourself, check out this link on John’s site: http://johnetherton.com/file-share/Liberia/Census-Data/2008/

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Ushahidi GSoC Projects

For projects we’re working on or ideas on what to contribute as part of the GSoC program, please visit http://swift.ushahidi.com/extend/ideas/.

For Potential Applicants

For people interested in participating in Ushahidi’s Summer of Code projects, please review our organization’s projects here and then fill out the application form here.

Other Relevant Links

mailing list – http://groups.google.com/group/swiftriver
IRC channel - irc://irc.freenode.net/#ushahidi
skype public – click here
facebook – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Swiftriver/362720609137

I happen to be enthusiastic about astronomy and I couldn’t imagine a more perfect scenario than using Ushahidi to help professionals and hobbyists alike, to monitor the stars. Enter the concept art below for an app I dubbed…SPACE MONITOR.

Before I continue, I should note that Space Monitor does not exist (yet). It’s entirely possible technically, but the screenshot above was created using an Ushahidi installation, Google Sky and Photoshop. Google actually offers Google Sky tiled maps online, so I conceived this as a project that would bring the two together. The idea is that it would aggregate scientific reports and amateur discoveries to allow the astronomy community to monitor discoveries, abnormalities and interesting facts about space.

Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Figure A.

In the image above you see a tiled map of the stars. In a crisis monitoring Ushahidi instance, the tiled maps are of a place on earth where the size of the circles represents the frequency of reported incidents of violence in any given area. In the case of monitoring space, you have the same basic concept. However, instead of reporting incidents of violence, Space Monitor tracks irregularities of measurements recorded in different regions of the sky.

This is how professional scientists make new discoveries in space. When things are different, they scrutinize their measurements to determine if they can determine causation for irregularities. If the cause is something previously unrecorded, then it’s documented as a new discovery or find. Recently scientists at the European Southern Observatory reported the discovery of 32 new planets outside of our solar system. The typical method for discovering planets is to measure the magnitude of and brightness of the stars that are ‘behind them’. As the planet crosses between our vantage point of a star, scientists can measure the change in magnitude and determine what might be the cause. Sometimes the cause is discovered to be a planet’s orbit, sometimes it’s a nearby asteroid or other celestial objects.

With a tool like Space Monitor, anyone enthusiastic about astronomy could learn about all sorts of recent discoveries from one central location. This might serve as inspiration for more research, or it might provide the tip that allows an amateur enthusiast with a telescope to make a discovery.

Figure B.

Figure C.

Figure D.

This would be done by following a feed of reports like the ones above. In Figure B the feed is of a module that tracks ‘irregularities’ reported by different scientific instruments. This information is often hard to get, but if organizations like ESO and NASA offer such reports via their websites or Twitter accounts. Wit the proper meta information, these reports can be mapped. In Figure A these fake reports are represented by the white ellipses superimposed over stars. The more activity (irregularities) from a particular region of the sky, the larger the circle. This would also included ‘submitted reports’ by scientists and amateurs all over the world. Of course these would all need to be curated and verified by an in-house team that would verify their authenticity.

In Figure C, the module would track official reports (press replaces, news stories, articles, etc.) related to astronomy. If you look closely, in my mock up app, a series of reports from Figure B have lead to the announcement of a discovery in Figure C. The timeline in Figure D shows the frequency of reports on any given day.

Right now Space Monitor is purely conceptual, but hopefully with the right involvement from professional or amateur astronomers, we’ll see Ushahidi applied to such scenarios in the very near future!

• First, we see an inordinate amount of traffic on the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc).
• Second, the aggregators step in to gather the data into one place.
• Third, we see visualizations (maps and graphs).

Social Network Chatter

When there is a “hot flash” emergency, the social media networks start to buzz – Twitter is the biggest and most open example of this. It’s also the place where a lot of misinformation starts to get amplified. It’s not just a place to air your own thoughts, but a place to get a bead on information as it is happening. You can get the information here faster than anywhere else, period.

Ever since the Mumbai terror attacks last year, the community behind Ushahidi has been interested in this. We think this should be done, understanding the probability of information being true by gathering streams of data and using both machine-based and human filtering to make sense of it. The Swift River project was born from this. It is currently being prototyped and iterated on within VoteReport.in project. Another interesting project in the same line is InSTEDD’s Evolve, which has a great amount of potential in just this scenario.

There is another issue at hand here though; the fact that many individuals who have information are not on Twitter, Facebook, or any other big social network. So, while there is a great deal that can be done with the open channels available in the developed world, most of the world is not on those channels when it matters most.

This is where tools like Ushahidi come in. It’s why it was developed, a way to get information from people who aren’t connected online and who might never be. A way for them to share information and receive alerts around emergency incidents.

Aggregating the News

As soon as a new emergency hits, the first thing we see is aggregation of news and data around it. This is good. In the Swine Flu case, I think the example set by Delicious creator Joshua Schachter is one of the best.

“my weekend evening project: RSS + Twitterfeed + Bit.ly + Delicious + Google News = @threatwatch“

People try to find the best places to get new news. People like Jimmy Wales will use his platform to create real-time wiki collaboration. Once in a while you’re fortunate to have institutions like the CDC give out good up-to-date information.

I’m intrigued by the aggregation of information, and it makes sense if you can actually get a handle on the different channels, not just mainstream news, wire services, images and video. It really has to be done on a large scale and it’s not an easy thing to manage in terms of both volume and veracity of information.

Visualizations and Maps

The last, and usually the most helpful to general news seekers, is the maps that have started to crop up. Google Maps Mania has an extensive list. Below is Google’s own aggregation and mapping of Swine Flu:

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Timothy O’Brien has some interesting graphs on the data as well, especially the information coming through from Twitter. As time goes on, if this follows the patterns we’ve seen before, we’ll see even better and more professionally designed informatics done by the NT Times and others.

In Summary

What we have is the beginnings of an ecosystem for emergency and disaster information. The projects are disjointed and unconnected, and there’s little hope of making them one cohesive unit (nor should the necessarily be).

What I do hope to see in the future is that the protocols, tools and processes for gathering, making sense of, and then disseminating crisis information becomes more open and standardized. There’s no reason that Ushahidi shouldn’t plug and play well with Evolve, which then feeds into Threatwatch on Twitter and is all part of a mapping and visualization scheme by larger publishers.

It would be very interesting to get some of the minds behind Twitter, Ushahidi, InSTEDD, Facebook, Wikia, Google and others together to better figure out how we can each continue to build independently, yet at the same time work towards a better ecosystem for emergency information.

What Google has done, instead of just building another social network, is use their existing “My Location” and other tools to enable people on Maps for Mobile to share their location with a selective group of contacts — those who opt-in to participate.

This is more innovative and will have a larger impact than most people understand just yet. It’s big, primarily because it’s not a “specialized for humanitarian efforts” application – it’s made for everyone, all the time, which means it is more likely to be used when an emergency strikes.

As Sanjana Hattotuwa says:

“Potential uses for this for real time election violence monitoring, IDPs and refugee movement tracking, Human Rights and Ceasefire monitoring, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and disaster management are impressive and beg to be explored.”

Just today, Google announced that they already have 1 million users in 27 countries. That’s fairly impressive, and it will grow as they have specific communities that adopt the service. It will also grow when an emergency strikes and people “turn it on” for their Google account. Basically, a million people have turned it on out of curiosity, what happens when you give the rest a real reason?

Make no mistake, this is Google’s quiet “Ace” and it’s a killer app. Nokia, Facebook, Twitter and the rest would do well not to ignore it.

My question: can outside services play with this? Is there going to be an API or web service?