This week several members of our team attended the 3rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland and we were blown away by the turn out (Follow #ICCM on Twitter). This community has grown substantially over the last 3 years – when we attended the first conference held in Cleveland, Ohio back in 2009 there were about 100 attendees. Now there are more than 400 gathered here discussing crisis mapping and the challenges they face. There are really 3 main things that we keep hearing as it relates to GIS and mapping:

• How to collect and organize data from the crowd around the globe as it relates to crisis
• How to enable action from this data
• How to build, collect, and maintain reference data for crisis

Collecting and Organizing Data from the Crowd

As for the first topic, collecting and organizing data from the crowd, there is a good tool developed by our partner Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a platform that takes crowd sourced information like SMS messages, categorizes them, and displays them on the map as a point or cluster of points showing relevant location. The result of this effort is a point map that begins to illustrate where individuals are vocalizing need or disseminating information.

Enabling Action

While points are a good start, we have been working with Ushahidi and a focus group comprised of both GIS and Crisis Mappers to define requirements for new tools that will support analysis of this data. We have heard the need for spatial and temporal analysis tools within the Ushahidi platform as well as the need for tools to bring Ushahidi data into ArcGIS where analyses can be run.

We are very excited to announce that we have made the first tool available to support these requirements-the ArcGIS add-in for Ushahidi which can be downloaded and quickly added to ArcMap. This add-in allows you to connect to a Ushahidi instance with the API enabled, convert text between languages, and download the Ushahidi data into a geodatabase. This opens up the feed of data being captured in Ushahidi to the rich spatial and temporal analysis tools within ArcGIS allowing users to empower action and inform decision makers using a sound scientific approach. Curious how this might work? At the bottom of this blog is a good write-up of using this tool to analyze information coming in from the current Thailand flooding.

Reference Data

Having this information and resulting analysis is great, but without good reference/basemap data as a backdrop, it is hard to understand the context of any situation. A common theme discussed here in Geneva is the isolated and rural nature of many locations and the lack of base data. While there may be global vector and raster datasets available, they are often either severely dated or at a scale that does not support local action.

One data set that supports crowdsourcing of basemap data is OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is constructed and edited for all types of use by a global user community, and yes you can join! Crowdsourced basemap data is particularly valuable during a crisis response where current and often high resolution data needs are compounded.

In support of this open source effort, Esri offers a desktop tool for ArcGIS that allows you to join the crowd by editing and publishing to OSM from within ArcMap. This tool also allows you to download OSM data over your area of interest directly into ArcGIS for use in a disconnected and offline environment common in response. You can download the ArcGIS Editor for OSM.

Esri is committed to supporting the crisis response community thru our Esri Disaster Response Program as well as thru the continued evolution of ArcGIS to support the collection, management, analysis, and visualization of data in a collaborative environment. While these tools don’t solve all of the problems we face as crisis mappers, we hope you will find them valuable in your arsenal and as a starting point to a dialogue around enhancements to and construction of additional tools or data. We are already looking forward to ICCM 2012 in Washington, DC!

ArcGIS Add-in for Ushahidi

Getting Started

To get started, first download the Esri Add-in for Ushahidi. Once you’ve installed the Add-in you’re ready to add it to ArcMap. Go to the Customize menu | Toolbars | Customize… located at the very bottom of the list.

In the Customize dialog, click the Commands tab| type Ushahidi in the Show commands containing: text box. You will see the Ushahidi2ArcGIS Add-In listed in the Commands pane.

Drag the Ushahidi2ArcGIS command to any existing toolbar in your ArcMap window. You must drag this command onto an existing toolbar, not just onto the map. You will see a new button with a blue circle icon show up on your toolbar.

Connecting to a Ushahidi Instance

To connect to an Ushahidi instance click on the Download Ushahidi Reports to ArcGIS button and enter the parameters.

The key parameter to enter is the API Endpoint. This is the main URL to the Ushahidi instance, such as Thailand Flood Crisis Information Map or Bushfire Connect. You also have the option to translate the data (using Bing Translator) for either just the categories or all the incident data. Note that the more you have to translate and the more records you have the longer the time it will take to download and create the data.

Once the data is downloaded it is added to a layer. The tool automatically sets the data to render on Unique Values in the Category Title field and uses the default colors from the Ushahidi instance.

Additionally the HTML Popup set and the description of the layer has been populated to reflect the source, date and time the data was downloaded. This is critical temporal information for Crisis Mappers.

Perform Further Analysis

Now that the Ushahidi data is downloaded you’re ready to perform further analysis. You can look at data over time, limit your focus on specific categories, or do more in depth spatial analysis.

For example if we wanted to get a better understanding of the reports of flooding around Bangkok we can focus on those reports (i.e. just one category of the incidents).

We can then visualize the data as a “heat-map” (by using the Kernel Density tool).

To get more detailed information on the data and to further determine significance of the reports we can use spatial statistics to determine if there are non-random spatial patterns and statistically significant hot or cold spots in the data. To do this we can use the Spatial Autocorrelation and Hot-Spot Analysis tools. The basic workflow is shown here in ModelBuilder:

The results of this analysis are highlighted in blue on the map as areas (1 km^2 ) that have statistically significant clusters of flood reports (in this case 8 to 27 per km2 ). These are the high priority areas that should be focused on first. Then we focus on questions like why are there so many reports in this area? Is there a single authoritative source of SMS feeds on the ground or is there a large group of people that need help?

This is just one type of analysis that can be run in ArcGIS Desktop from Ushahidi data. We are interested in learning more from you in the type of analysis that you’ve run using this tool. Please use the comments section of the tool and let us know how the tool works and what needs to be improved.

*****

Thanks to the ESRI team for creating this valuable plug-in.

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/2012/01/09/the-unexpected-impact-of-the-libya-crisis-map-and-the-standby-volunteer-task-force/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2012/01/09/the-unexpected-impact-of-the-libya-crisis-map-and-the-standby-volunteer-task-force/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:00:46 +0000 patrick http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=6566 [Cross-posted from the SBTF Blog. Guest blog post by Andrej Verity. Andrej is an Information Management Officer at UN-OCHA in Geneva with a focus on both leading OCHA's collaboration with the Volunteer & Technical Communities and supporting OCHA's information management staff around the world. In 2010, Andrej deployed to both the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods. In March 2011, Andrej lead OCHA's collaboration with the Standby Task Force in creating the Libya Crisis Map. Later that month, he also worked closely with Crisis Commons in their data collection exercise in response to the Japan tsunami.]

At the beginning of March 2011, OCHA HQ activated the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a self-organized group of structured volunteers, to create the Libya Crisis Map (LCM) early in March of this year to help provide better situational awareness of the unfolding situation on-the-ground. This site and the data were made available to responding organizations with the intention to them improve their operational planning. The site was extended beyond the first month largely based on efforts from OCHA Colombia, volunteers sourced from the UNV online volunteer service, and SBTF members who choose to stay on beyond the official SBTF deployment.

But Why the Collaboration?

The LCM data was being incorporated into the traditional Who-is-doing-What-Where products and info-graphics which were being created remotely by OCHA IMOs [Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, and South Sudan]. These products were then being printed and shared inside the emergency arena. So, what impact did those printed products have? We rarely try to measure their impact on decision makers but recognize they are necessary in every emergency. So, if the LCM data augmented these products, what measurable impact can we say it had?

The challenge in quantifying the impact of information products in situations such as the Libya crisis is they tend to be incomparable to other situations and may yield very skewed outcomes. For OCHA, the impact the volunteers had on the efficiency of the operations and quality of decisions being made is perhaps more interesting. This impact can be more easily quantified by assessing the effectiveness of the decision makers using the maps as input and compared to their workload in other crisis before the SBTF was put into action. This quantifying research is currently being conducted, but on our preliminary qualitative input we can already see that the SBTF has a significant impact on OCHA’s way of working.

The unexpected impact? How we now work differently.

There are three core areas in this collaboration that have influenced OCHA’s work:

1) Speed: as noted in my blog post on UN Dispatch at the end of March, I outlined how much faster we could produce standard IM products in the early phases of an emergency when working with remote volunteers and/or staff. It was quite stark and significant.

2) Connection / Communication: The information management team in OCHA HQ was quite impressed with how well the always-open, tiered Skype chats worked in collaborating with the self-organized task-team based volunteers. The team has taken this approach and opened our own group for OCHA Information Management Officers [which has really made our internal IM Community of Practice flourish and provide support to each other]. We have leveraged the same approach to help incorporate field-based staff into the development of standard tools and software – something we were rather poor at in the past. As well, when we had one IMO responding to floods in Cambodia, we asked for OCHA IM volunteers and placed them in a dedicated Skype group. We ended up with IMOs from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia and Haiti helping out with the efforts.  The OCHA IM team is really learning how we can leverage remote support and are incorporating these concepts into traditional mechanisms.

3) Collaboration Platforms: to collaborate with the external volunteers, we had no choice but to accept the use of non-UN standard software [e.g. Skype and Google Docs]. However, the abilities that these modern tools unlocked helped some of our traditionally skeptical staff members realize there are better ways of working.  It has started a culture change [even if slow].

So, you can easily deduce that OCHA is adopting concepts from the SBTF work style. How much of an impact is that?  Perhaps not quantitatively measurable, but could be qualitatively described a “big”.

But, what challenges arose from the use of new technology and the volunteers?

The challenges can be summarized into three categories:

1. Zoom Level. The volunteers tend to want to work at the highest possible zoom [i.e. close to the affected] and we can understand that desire. However, large responding agencies are dealing with multi-million dollar programme spanning across millions of people in countless locations.  Although they are concerned for the individuals, they need information at a different ‘zoom level’ in order to assess, plan and respond. Thus, we need to ensure that there is a way to aggregate the detailed data appropriately for people or organizations working at different zoom levels.

2. Always On. One major benefit of the volunteers, enabled by modern technology, is that they are dispersed around the world resulting in almost 24 hour support. However, the flip-side of that benefit is that the liaison person from the requesting entity can be faced with questions/issues around the clock if structures, messaging and requirements are not defined early. With the task-team structure used by the volunteers in place, we know that OCHA was sheltered from a large number of questions. Still, in the early days, there were a significant number of topics that arose which needed to be addressed. It meant that we had to be connected all the times – from checking Skype over breakfast, to responding to emails while on the bus, to skipping dinner in the evening to review a risk management strategy.

3. Questions. The volunteers are not necessarily experts – and do not pretend to be when they are not. The challenge for the requesting entity is that someone needs to be available to answer hard questions in a very timely manner. In the Libya context, defining appropriate report categories was one of the first and most challenging questions for OCHA to answer and has reconfirmed that standards are needed.

Did ethical questions arise for the UN?

Of course ethical questions arose during the LCM deployment. They were not specific to the UN. In the Libya context, we dealt with three specific issues:

1. Identify. We did not want any information provided in the LCM that could be used to identify the individual who reported.

2. Location. To avoid anyone from being able to pinpoint anyone reporting, the data was generally anonymized to the centroid of the city it was reported from.

3. Do No Harm. Given the situation in Libya was conflict-based, we needed to ensure that whatever we did minimized the chance of causing anyone harm.

Early in the deployment, OCHA made a decision to run two separate websites. The private site would hold all original data and only be accessible to approved agencies. The public site would show no identifiable information and the data would be delayed by 24 hours. Some have argued that two sites were not necessary [e.g. everything private or only have the anonymized public site], but all we can say is that “It worked”.

What is OCHA doing now?

In June, OCHA held a lessons learned workshop with several of the V&TC entities with whom we collaborated with either for Libya or Japan. That workshop pointed towards 9 thematic Communities of Interest (COIs) to be developed to ensure future collaboration can be maximized [see the final report]. OCHA has been pushing these forward in an attempt to get them started and hosted a one-day meeting with the COI leaders prior to ICCM 2011. [Note: originally a Humanitarian Standby Task Force was suggested, but it has morphed to a 'network-of-networks' concept - which will likely be called the Digital Humanitarians - and be designed to receive requests for virtual support and then find the appropriate entities to support those requests]. In the Libya and Japan crisis, OCHA received support from several V&TCs which resulted in some (positive) unexpected impact and we want to continue to explore and understand the possibilities through the COIs mechanism to help maximize the benefit and effectiveness of V&TC engagements with the traditional humanitarian entities.

This collaboration, amongst others recently, has helped to show OCHA’s IM team that we need to open up our work, our data, and our ideas to external parties very much in accordance with the principles Dan Tapscott outlined in Macrowikinomics: Collaboration, Openness, Sharing, Integrity and Interdependence. We are no longer in an era where good ideas only come from inside our own organization, but rather in a time where we have to be open and ready to receive them from outside.

Participants in November 2011 COI Leadership meeting included: Crisis Commons, Crisis Mappers, Geeks without Bounds, GISCorp, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, HOT (OSM), ICT4Peace, Internews, ISCRAM (Tilburg University), MapAction, Missing Persons Community, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, NetHope, SBTF, UN Foundation, UNHCR, UN-OCHA, UN-SPIDER, University of Munser, UNOSAT, Ushahidi, US State Department (HIU),  Woodrow Wilson Center, World Vision

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2012/01/09/the-unexpected-impact-of-the-libya-crisis-map-and-the-standby-volunteer-task-force/feed/ 1 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/06/28/wrong-assumptions-technology/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/06/28/wrong-assumptions-technology/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:00:44 +0000 patrick http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=4455 [Cross-posted from Patrick Meier's iRevolution blog]

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.

In 2010 it was noted on the Ushahidi blog that when running a full Ushahidi campaign, installing the software was only 10% of the work. The Toolkit we have just launched aims to cover the other 90% including a ‘How To’ and a Case Study, plus guidelines for evaluating the efficiency and impact of your campaign. Also the visual graphics we used in our campaigns are in the Kit.
We hope it will inspire and assist others in their campaign design processes.

Toolkit pdf Cover

The contents are based on our experiences running two peace campaigns using Ushahidi, to name: ‘Unsung Peace Heroes‘  which was run in the aftermath of the post election violence in Kenya, 2008 with early Ushahidi software and later the Building Bridges Peace campaign in 2010. This again was rung with Ushahidi only this time incorporated into a Joomla! Site. In both campaigns we partnered with Media Focus on Africa and NairoBits.

The Toolkit, called Butterfly Toolkit No. 1: Designing social change campaigns also includes the zipped software to run Ushahidi in a Joomla! site and the necessary documentation.


Who’s it for?

Joomla! Developers, Social Change activists, researchers and perhaps you.

Joomla! Developers who want to have the Ushahidi mapping tool incorporated into their Joomal! Sites.
You can see how we combined it here in the Building Bridges site, the advantage to us was that we had more control over the visual styling and could add the functionality, that a project could be updated over time. If you install community builder component swell you can easily expand) you your Ushahidi mapping site with profile functionality for all your users. In the software section can download the software, the documentations and see a demo version.

Toolkit website

Social Change activists who want to know more about how a crossmedia campaign can help their cause. In the How To section of the toolkit there are steps to follow in order to focus, design, run and evaluate your campaign. And for the non-designers out there, we have shared all the graphics, logo, t-shirt designs and poster designs from the Building bridges campaign, for others to use as they please.

Images and designs for download

Researchers, in the Case Study, based on our and Media Focus on Africas’ experiences and the research done by a Kenyan research team we share the lessons learned. We sought answers to questions such as:
- what motivated folk to take part, (was it the competition element or the chance to interact with like minded peacemakers) and
- was it meaningful to their peace work to take part in such a mapping campaign.

We were pleasantly surprised by the engagement expressed by participants and their wish to continue to invest in a sustainable peace movement. On the other hand the prevailing gap between rural and city in patterns of new media usage was confirmed. Despite our best efforts, for example engaging more than 12 rural radio stations and working with Peacenet local counterparts throughout the country, and making it posible to engage with the campaign using only sms or voice, the campaign strategies still favoured an urban public.

Case Study contents



Relevant Links

Butterfly Toolkit No.1: Designing social change campaigns

Building Bridges Peace campaign (website)

Unsung Peace Heroes campaign, (website)

Download the Case study PDF, about Building Bridges campaign

Download the ‘How To’ PDF, Design a Social Change campaign


You, for whatever causes or plans one has, we hope the Toolkit will find many applications. Our partner in Cambodia is using the Toolkit (amongst other strategies) to run a country wide two year fair elections campaign there, in Mexico an underground music group are starting to map and connect the upcoming music scene and in Pakistan a partner is looking into mapping school quality in relation to cases of teacher absenteeism and other indicators.

If you have suggestions we’ll be glad to hear, the software has some known issues which could be improved and if you have plans for social change campaigns we’ll be glad to connect and support if possible. Of course mainly we hope this toolkit will inspire and help other to do social change campaigns for a better world.

[Guest blog post by Heather Leson, an idea hacker and community builder. Haiti changed her life and inspired her to become a serial volunteer for digital response (CrisisCommons, CrisisMappers, Stand-by Task Force) and an Ushahidi user for the past year. She blogs at textontechs.com and tweets on @heatherleson]

Ushahidi Mappers in Canada!

Be still my prairie girl heart. Laura Madison and Dale Zak spent the winter preparing for the spring floods in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Extensive flooding is expected in both the Red River Valley and North/South Saskatchewan River regions. This is the first time that Ushahidi has been used to prepare and to report the floods in Canada. In fact, both maps are the first time that full scale Ushahidi maps have been prepared as part of the citizen reporting and digital volunteer response in Canada. There are Canadian university classes learning Ushahidi and CrisisCamp Toronto conducted an Ushahid beta test in February 2011. Laura is very active in the Ushahidi and Stand-by Task Force communities. Dale is active in the Ushahidi team. Each of us has mapped events around the world. And, we are delighted to see mapping come home.

How to help

Ushahidi is an open source project. There are three types of help required: Mappers, Developers, and Digital Volunteers. Maps are community-driven crowdsourcing. In the coming weeks, the needs will change daily or hourly. This is the beauty and curse of volunteer digital response. Both leaders have been in contact with official responders. However, at this time, their efforts are for citizen response and collaboration.

MBFloods and SKFloods maps allow for reports to be filed by webform, Ushahidi app, iphone, android, or email. Maps allow for various layers of useful open data to be added. People will be able to add news reports, pictures and videos. Maps evolve depending on the community use. So the needs will change over time. The work they have done is fantastic. Bring on the crowd! People are needed to file reports, coordinate mapping teams for about 2 weeks. Laura and Dale will be coordinating this adventure via Skype. I am sure that the great mapping communities may lend a hand. If you are an individual volunteer or are part of a volunteer technical community, please consider contacting:

Contact Dale for Saskatchewan: skfloods AT gmail DOT com
Contact Laura for Manitoba: flood DOT mbfloods DOT ca
Participate in the joint Skype channel: Add Laura (organization9) to get started.

Types of help required:

Preparedness

Laura has added layers for the Manitoba RCMP and Manitoba First Nations. She would like to add more layers. Mappers most welcome to churn out KML/KMZ files. She also needs some PHP help and Ushahidi expertise.

Volunteer Recruitment and Training

Both maps will need digital volunteer teams to support the mapping. The types of content you will be adding is geo-location, media monitoring (mainstream, twitter, facebook), and handling the various streams of online reports (webform, apps and email.)

About Ushahidi

To learn more about Ushahidi, see recently released Ushahidi Manual, created by the lovely crisismapper Anahi Ayala Iacucci. It outlines how to get started with Ushahidi and implement a successful deployment. Maps need a process, this Ushahidi Practical Considerations is also very helpful.

Feel free to contact me as well (heather at textontechs dot com) if you want more information or want to be connected to Dale or Laura.

Heather L.

Cross-posted from blog.swiftly.org

Localizing News by Vladimir Ermakov

The amount of information available in electronic format is rapidly increasing. It is becoming possible to find out real-time about the current events in a particular part of the world based on electronic data such as news articles, blog entries, twitter feeds and SMS messages. Even though the data is available, there is an overwhelming amount of it and it is hard to stay on top of events that are of relevance. Getting informed about recent developments is particularly important in the times of crisis, when lives could depend on timely response. In this project I am exploring ways to pinpoint the location discussed in text documents. I am able to achieve good results by combining location keywords extracted by Yahoo! Placemaker service with state of the art machine learning and natural language processing techniques.

The basic approach that I’ve embarked upon is to extract location keywords from a document using Yahoo Placemaker service, and then apply classification techniques to disambiguate, which of these locations is most relevant to the document at hand. I’ve conducted experiments with Naïve Bayes and Fisher classifiers using bag of words model for feature extraction, but these did not give good results. I explored an alternative approach: use count and position of location keywords extracted by Placemaker and feed them into a SMV. This proved to be a very effective way of determining the country that is the focus of the document. Applying lemmatization to location adjectives such as Russian and converting them to nouns such as Russia helped improve the results even further.

While the Reuters-21578 is was a great dataset to use for training classifiers and experimenting with the data, the articles there were collected 20 years ago. What made this project interesting for me, is the possibility of visualizing the news around the world on a map, and seeing whether sudden rise in the number of articles published can be an indicator of some important events.

To make this possible I had to obtain a recent dataset. Reuters has archived articles from the last several years on their website. I developed a simple crawler that visited news articles from this archive, downloaded them to my server, and extracted the news article text content. I then passed this content off to the Yahoo Placemaker service, and output the data with the location labels into XML files. I then could use my scripts to run the experiments on this new dataset, just like I did with the original data.

I limited my data collection to the most recent articles. The archive contained over 400,000 news articles for 2010, which too many to download. I restricted the crawler to randomly pick 10% of the articles from each day of the year. This was still a significant amount of data, 80,000 articles, and fairly representative of the whole archive.

After all the experiments I was able to narrow down on a working solution for mapping news articles – extract location information from the article using Yahoo Placemaker service, making sure to lemmatize location adjectives, extract normalized count and position of location keywords within the article, and apply SVM classifier to decide which of these locations are more important to the article. The results were encouraging, and I believe this solution is ready to deploy into a real world application. I am hoping to implement an extension to Swiftriver platform in the near future that uses this method to classify news articles by country.

Valdimir’s paper is a much longer, and much more fascinating read than I could share here but if you’d like to read it. He can be reached by emailing vermakov [at] emu [dot] edu.

We’re working on folding this and other contributions into the next release of Sweeper.  Thanks for the awesome work Vladimir!  Other developers interested in contributing to the Swift platform can find out more here.

Uchaguzi TZ is a joint project of Ushahidi and Sodnet from Kenya, as well as TACCEO, which is comprised of a number of local Tanzanian organizations and led by the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) from Tanzania.

How You Can Get Involved

We are relying on volunteers from Tanzania, Kenya, and globally to help us map the incoming reports, and because of the large volume of messages we expect to receive, we are currently in need of volunteers – in Tanzania, Kenya, and remotely – with basic tech knowledge or with previous with Ushahidi to help us map and respond to reports. If you are interested and able to volunteer with us on election day, October 31st, sign up using this Google Spreadsheet!

While we’ve had a wonderful media team working to spread the word about Uchaguzi TZ in Tanzania, we can also use your help in letting your friends and family know to text 15540 with any information about the Tanzanian elections.

During a crisis situation, groups looking to use Ushahidi often need additional support beyond the software itself e.g. paying for hosting, supporting volunteers, SMS costs, etc. To this end, we’re engaging with GlobalGiving to help fund such groups.

What is the Global Giving Open Challenge?

“The Challenge is for participants to generate donations for their projects between September 1, 2010 (0000 hrs, EDT) and September 30, 2010 (2359 hrs, EDT).

Any project that is able to meet the challenge threshold of raising $4,000 from at least 50 separate donors will be invited to stay on at GlobalGiving. These projects will be eligible to continue receiving donations from the general public, private and corporate foundations through GlobalGiving and take advantage of GlobalGiving’s fundraising tools and services. “

Why the Ushahidi Rapid Response Fund is needed

Ushahidi needs a rapid response fund for deployments in response to major crises. The ability of groups (often volunteers) to respond quickly is considerably slowed as a result . While the technology itself is free, funds are needed for the non-tech side for instance, to do media outreach, to disseminate information by SMS, to set up a free short-code, to pay for a hosted server, and provide a space and some food for volunteers to work.

Examples abound for this type of work, including most recently the work by volunteer groups in Pakistan with the floods, the Mozambique riots and in Russia with the fires. Many times these groups don’t need very much money, it’s free software and volunteers who run it. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs that slow their response down though, and our goal is to overcome that challenge.

In a hot-flash crisis, every minute counts. We appreciate your assistance with this fund.

You can also help by spreading the word to people you know who can help (buttons are found here).

FrontlineSMS has long been a part of the Ushahidi ecosystem. When we rebuilt Ushahidi in the summer of 2008 at a free and open source platform, we built hooks into it so that anyone who used FrontlineSMS could easily sync that information to the Ushahidi maps. At that same time, FrontlineSMS open sourced their code, and we tried to learn as much as we could about how to better help users who were running their own SMS gateway through FrontlineSMS so that the system could truly be run by anyone, anywhere.

It’s a simple as this:

Today FrontlineSMS is adding MMS to their repertoire!

That’s a big deal. It means that we can now figure out how to include more than just text messages, but also images, video and audio. Incoming MMS messages can trigger an SMS auto-reply, or an external command, etc. It’s a great blending of SMS/MMS in one system, and shows how holistically their team has thought about the user interaction with simple messaging.

We’re thinking of implementations of this, and we’d love some feedback from you on how it could be done an what would be useful. Leave some comments below with your thoughts.

Taking the maps offline through FrontlineSMS

We’re working on even better integration into this longstanding keystone of the open mobile space. Right now we (“we” being Dale Zak, Emmanuel Kala and Brian Muita) are working closely with Ken Banks and his team of wizards to do a couple of cool things. First is the completing of the very exciting offline mapping tab which is probably about 70% done at the moment. Second, there’s also talk of adding functionality to allow Ushahidi users to post reports directly from FrontlineForms, and this could prove very useful in a wider capacity where people want to get structured data from end-users via SMS which is then posted online.

Many great things lie ahead for the two teams, and we expect more and better integration as we work on different features and functionality together.

[full press release: FrontlineSMS + MMS press release (PDF)]

Download FrontlineSMS v1.6.16 here.