The first 72 hours of the SomaliaSpeaks deployment were particularly intense. The purpose of this joint write-up with Al Jazeera and partners is to share some of our early lessons learned in this novel collaboration.  Every deployment teaches us a multitude of lessons, so our partners at Al Jazeera, Souktel and Crowdflower joined us in this effort to share these. We look forward to future collaborations with them as we share this story with you.

This purpose of this pilot project was to let Somalis speak for themselves. For the first time ever, a prominent news organization, Al-jazeera, used crowdsourcing and SMS to let thousands of Somalis express for themselves how the crisis has been effecting their daily lives. More than 4,000 text messages were received within just a few days. Of these, over 1,000 were translated from Somali into English by about 80 translators. The resulting map of Somali voices received over 25,000 page views.

Before reviewing our lessons learned, we first wanted to thank K’naan and Sol for the initial inspiration behind this project. They got in touch with Ushahidi last year because they wanted to use the platform to help amplify Somali voices and show how capable the Somali people are. The initial version of this project was a prototype that was not activated. But thanks to Al- jazeera, Souktel and Crowdflower, we were able to revive the project to help amplify Somali voices in the international media.

Despite being a pilot, the project exemplified valid use cases in the application of pervasive technologies such as the web and mobile phone to news and information gathering. Somalia being a country run down by decades of neglect and war as well being rife with insecurity  provides one of the most challenging operational environments. Within a very short time we were able to curate information traversing through different parts of Somalia. This would have proved futile if not overly expensive or impossible had it been done using traditional news gathering techniques. Furthermore the information collected provides more insight on the realities of life in Somalia.

Projects like this involve a lot of effort and goodwill from the community and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Therefore, building a strong community around the project goes a long way to solving problems and mitigating challenges. The community goes beyond the volunteer translators. We saw lots of support from the Somali blogging community, technology and media enthusiasts as well as innovators or innovation centric minds across the globe who all narrated or reported the Somalia Speaks project in their own ways. Having a strong community and inculcating a community ethos in  project operations and goals goes a long way influencing success. Without the community backing and promoting this project, it would have only been another temporary spotlight on Somalia.

The project worked as follows. Al-jazeera editorial selected the following question for interview:

“Al Jazeera would like to know — how has the Somalia Conflict affected your life? Please also include the name of your hometown in the response. Thanks.”

Our colleagues at Souktel distributed the question via text message to 5,000 of their SMS subscribers across Somalia. The responses were then forwarded from Souktel’s SMS platform to a customized Crowdflower micro-tasking platform. There, Somali-speaking volunteers translated and geo-located the text messages which were then manually uploaded to Al-jazeera’s Ushahidi platform.

There are three points worth highlighting in terms of lessons learned:

1. Messaging

While the question that was posed via SMS in no way asked for individuals to reply with their personal names, a small number of responders still added their names; some even added their full names. So these were deleted as quickly as possible. (Note that the numbers posted in the title of initial reports were not phone numbers but an assigned sequential number generated by the Crowdflower plugin). In hindsight, the SMS sent out with the question should have specifically asked that responders not include personal identifiers in their SMS replies.

2. Volunteer translation

While we had recruited a small number of trusted volunteers to translate the incoming text messages using a Crowdflower plugin, a decision was subsequently made to make the call for volunteers public to cope with the 2,500+ SMS replies received. This means that anonymous volunteers could see the original text messages, some of which initially  included personal identifiers. So we immediately reached out to Crowdflower for guidance to take the plug-in offline. We then began to manually delete several dozen text messages inside the Crowdflower plug-in that contained personal identifiers. Our colleagues at Al-jazeera took over this process and set up their own micro-tasking platform, removing all personal identifiers from the text messages awaiting translation and geo-location.

3. Security

One of Ushahidi’s community members tested the platform and identified a search security issue on Friday, December 9th. We quickly fixed this on the deployment. And, we issued a security patch to all deployers. (http://security.ushahidi.com)

In the future, for this type of “The People Speak” project,  we recommend taking the following steps:

1. On large multi-partner deployments: Global organizations work in multiple timezones, so communications plans need to include 24/7 points of contacts for each organization.
2. Text potential interviewees to ask whether they agree to be interviewed and to have their responses made public before sending out the main question.
3. Text those individuals who have consented to being interviewed with the desired question and ask them to include the name of their town but not their personal names.
4. Recruit trusted translation volunteers well in advance and ensure that the micro-tasking translation platform has no personal identifiers.
5. Stagger the launch of the text messages and the live map. That is, start with the SMS broadcast and spend however many days/weeks doing the bulk of the translation with vetted volunteers. The system that holds the raw text messages should obviously be fully secure. When the majority of text messages are processed, launch the live map and gradually add the already translated text messages to grow the map steadily over a period of days/weeks.

At Ushahidi, we’ve also made some plans to help all deployers in our community:

• We’re building a program for privacy and security education for our users in 2012. (Blog posts, webinars, videos and meet-ups.)
• Best practices for security and privacy will be included as essential documentation on our soon to be re-launched wiki.
• Ushahidi is open source and the community is a large part of what makes it work.  We’ll build a security working group focused on our software, but it’ll take your participation to make it work.
• Alongside our partners within the CrisisMappers community, we will participate in a security and privacy working group. This field is growing and collective lessons can only improve each map action.

Crisis mapping and journalism are both in the nascent stages of collaborating on real-time news connecting diaspora and citizens alike. Al-Jazeera is leading the fray in testing and implementing live maps into their fast-moving news cycle toolkit. We are thankful for all their efforts and look forward to further collaboration.

From HarrassMap in Egypt to mapping violence against children in Benin to software simulations in Zambia, these two tools have been used together to give voice and collect content for various groups. The SMSMap event in Nairobi featured Anahi Ayala Iaccuci (Internews) speaking about her experiences using both tools for the Zambia simulation. Claire Wardle, BBC School of Journalism, shared her London Tube strike experiences using Crowdmap with London participants. And in London, UK Linda Raftree (Plan International) spoke candidly (and virtually) about what worked and needs work to do more joint projects. Each speaker highlighted some of the collective needs and challenges of navigating the new world of merging SMS to Map including the various software bugs encountered with Ushahidi. More on the Violence against Children, Plan International project:

The Nairobi event included a technical demo and the London event included audience discussion groups. Our common goal was to inspire people to talk about their potential projects and meet each other. Both Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS are fully committed to collaborate, provide documentation and other potential events to assist our communities in their endeavours to change their cities and their world. We were delighted to have over 60 people in London and 30 in Nairobi begin that journey with us. Community really starts when you put people with common interests together to build goals and be inspired. The feedback provided by participants is core to each of us improving their experience using our software.

More on the event:
Liveblogs, twitter, videos, skype presenters and software simulations were all part of our interactive event. Here is a running blog capturing the live media from both cities:

Thank you:

Thank you to all of those involved in helping us with the FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi ‘SMS to Map’ event. A special thanks goes to Cast London at Goldsmiths University for sponsoring the London-based event and to the iHub for hosting the Nairobi-based event too. We could not have held these events without this kind support.

Thanks to Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network) and Hamilton Juma (iHub Community Manager) for their excellent hosting of the iHub Nairobi event, Dan Mcquillan (Goldsmiths, University of London) for his amazing support arranging the London event, and of course all of the wonderful speakers including Linda Raftree (Plan International), Claire Wardle (BBC College of Journalism), Linda Kamau (Ushahidi), Sharon Langevin (FrontlineSMS:Credit), Limo Taboi (Ushahidi), Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network), and Laura Walker Hudson (FrontlineSMS Director of Operations). And, a warm thank you to the FrontlineSMS team for co-hosting the London event with Charl and myself. Florence, Amy, Hussein, Laura and Lisa, it was a pleasure to spend the day with you to make this happen. Very special thanks for Florence Scialom for being the rock of organization for all of us. Here’s her post about the event.

Thanks to the participants and volunteers for joining us on this adventure to change and connect the world with open source software.

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.

• 1.0 – iPhone and iPad interface, support for multiple maps, offline reporting
• 1.1 – sharing via Twitter, sharing via email, sharing via SMS
• 1.2 – iOS 4 high-res retina icons, deployment map list
• 1.3 – locating maps near you
• 1.4 – edit pending reports, dragging map pins, Checkins
• 1.5 – bug fixes and minor improvements

We are proud to announce two important new features in the latest version: multi-lingual support and white-label functionality.

Multi-lingual Support

Ushahidi iOS now supports 18 languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Hindi, Swahili, Arabic, Catalan, Japanese, Greek and Lithuanian.

Huge thank you to the Ushahidi community for helping translate the app, it was sort of fitting that the crowd helped us translate our crowdsourcing app.

White-label Functionality

Ushahidi iOS now supports white-labeling, allowing you to re-brand and publish your own customized stand-alone version to the App Store.

This has been a highly requested feature, and we are glad to finally have this functionality available to the community. Instructions how to white-label your own version of the app can be found in the README in the GitHub repository.

Download the new version of Ushahidi iOS at http://bit.ly/ushahidi_ios_app

What can you expect in future versions? Here’s a glimpse what we have in store: admin functionality, map pin clustering, push notifications, report commenting, custom fields, route tracking.

Is there a feature or improvement you’d like to see? Let us know.

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.

The Ushahidi mobile apps play a crucial role for gathering incident reports for a number of reasons. One, gps-enabled devices can gather exact latitude and longitude helping provide an accurate incident location. Two, camera-phones allow the user to take photos on the spot of the incident. Three, 3G enabled devices can upload the incident report as they happen, which is critical during times of crisis. Four, when internet is not available, multiple reports can still be collected and uploaded at a later time when the device is connected.

We currently have mobile apps for the Windows Mobile, Android and J2ME platforms. The iOS app has been in the works for awhile now, so we’re excited to finally add iOS to that collection and have it available for the community.

The iOS app is available for both the iPhone and iPad, with a few optimizations for the iPad’s larger screen size. As expected, it supports both Portrait and Landscape modes. The app allows viewing and submitting of reports to multiple Ushahidi deployments, which is becoming increasingly important since the launch of Crowdmap. Since the list of deployments or reports can grow quite larger, the app offers filtering and sorting allowing the user to quickly access the information they need. The application also remembers the last deployment or report visited, returning upon relaunch. The user can toggle between the report list and report map, to view incidents near their current location. Incident reports can also be shared via email or SMS. User’s will also find the user experience similar to the Apple Mobile Mail app, with a Compose button in bottom right ToolBar and Next/Previous buttons in the NavBar to easily move through reports and photos. Like the other Ushahidi mobile apps, the iOS app can create incident reports in a disconnected state, and upload once the internet becomes available.

A few interesting settings worth mentioning. Enabling the Discrete Mode On Shake will allow the user to quickly flip the current view to a web browser hiding their current activity; this could be useful while entering sensitive information, for example during election monitoring. Enabling the Download Maps For Offline Viewing will take advantage of Google Static Maps so map images can be downloaded and viewed when the device is in a disconnected state.

We’re proud of this first version, but this is just the beginning. We plan to roll out an update soon adding multi-lingual support, improved location selection, push notifications, optimized iPad interface and Twitter sharing.

As usual, your feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Big thanks to Erastus Njuki for all his help during the development process.

Download Ushahidi iOS at http://itunes.apple.com/app/ushahidi-ios/id410609585.

Dale has been an influential member of the Ushahidi community, dedicating many hours of his time to release top quality code for the rest of us to use, and working with the others in the dev community to get things done.

It’s because of that latter trait that we started talking to Dale and asked him to join the Ushahidi team in a part-time role as Mobile Project Manager. In this position he’ll be working not only on the WinMo app, but also coordinating and helping the others around the world who are contributing to the Android, iPhone and Java apps.

If you’re interested in taking part on the mobile apps, start with these links, and then get in touch with Dale.

• Ushahidi Mobile on our Wiki
• Ushahidi’s Github code respository

Welcome aboard Dale!

The 4636 Process

1. People in Haiti text location, name and requests for aid / reports etc. to 4636.
2. The data is streamed from different celtels to a server hosted by Ushahidi.
3. 100s of Kreyol-speaking volunteers translate, categorize and plot the geocoords of the location if possible.
4. The structured data is streamed to different orgs on the ground like Red Cross and InSTEDD, who act on it / pass it to appropriate people there.
5. It is also streamed to the main Ushahidi database (the publicly viewable one) where it is combined with other data, further annotated etc. and made available to other orgs.

I am making sure that #3 happens, coordinating volunteer efforts. I have only worked a little on the software – this was put together primarily by Brian Herbert of Ushahidi who has been an *angel* in getting everything together so fast. A small number of the volunteers I work with coordinate directly with people on the ground to get improved data (this also happens further down the chain).

I am also coordinating the volunteers for migrating Missing Person records to the main PeopleFinder databaase – many 4636 volunteers do this in downtime when volunteers exceed the texts coming in, but I’ve got other groups involved too (Tim Schwartz adapted Brian’s code for this in lightening speed).

The Volunteers

Of all the incredible efforts in crowdsourcing right now, I think that the work of the 4636 volunteers are the most amazing. They are using a simple form to enter data from the text messages, have parallel screens open with different maps and collaborate with each other on a chat-space dedicated to their work, esp for confirming locations.

Some positive results are attached, and here are a few lines from the

4636 chat-space:

(12:52:55) (Dalila): I need Thomassin Apo please
(12:53:02) (Apo): wait
(12:54:53) (Apo): Kenscoff Route: Lat: 18.495746829274168,
Long:-72.31849193572998
(12:57:25) (Apo): This Area after Petion-Ville and Pelerin 5 is not on
Google Map. We have no streets name
(12:58:05) (Dalila): @Apo I thank you for ur help
(12:58:24) (Apo): you are welcome
(12:58:53) (Apo): I know this place like my pocket
(12:59:08) (Dalila):
(12:59:14) (Dalila): thank God u was here

In brief, Dalila asked to know an address written in one of the texts she was translating and 2 minutes later she had the latitude and longitude, even though no map showed it, thanks to the local knowledge of Apo. This has been *typical*. Almost noone is physically together (after a week I met Josh Nesbit, the other main coordinator for 4636, face-to-face briefly last night, and that’s been all)

Here are the screen names people have used in the 4636 chat – most of them will prob never know each other:

Admiral, Apo_Montreal, Barb, Brian, Carline, Caroline, Christina_Xu, Claire, Dalila, Gina, Guerda, J-R, Jenn, Jennifer, M300_Ministrie, Mel, Montreal, Nan, RAM, Rebecca, Regine, Robens, Robert_Montgom, Robert_Munro, Robs, Sebastien, UNIONHAITI, Union_Haiti, Victoria, aline, brianherbert, csik, downeym, duygu, gerhard, gina, guerda, marc, maribux, mik, myrka, nick, pouchon, rebecca, regine, rescuemehaiti, ronny, sandra, stephan

These are from the ~1000 people who have stepped in so far (my guess from IPs). It would be great if this list could be publicized – their efforts need to be recognized however pseudo-anonymous they are!

They are often using their own local resources (texting to Haiti) to better translate / clarify the messages:

(11:56:55) (marc): i will pass it on that is my cousins hospital.

Text volumes vary from one every 5 seconds in the day to every 5 minutes overnight. The average turn-around for us receiving a text and having it translated, categorized and back on the ground with coordinates, message and return # is about 10 minutes.

Here are the most common categories:

4636 SMS messaging category distribution chart

Food distribution 23.27%
Missing Persons 11.06%
Asking to forward a message 10.94%
Response 9.79%
Water shortage 9.33%
Health services 5.65%
Medical Emergency 4.38%
People trapped 4.38%
Shelter 3.46%
Earthquake and aftershocks 3.23%
Emergency 3.00%
Persons News 2.19%
Collapsed structure 1.73%
Non-food items 1.73%
Vital Lines 1.04%

Except for ‘Asking to forward a message’, these all correspond to WHO categories of the same name (I hope the WHO add this as a result of this effort).

About Robert Munro

Rob Munro of the 4636 Haiti project

The past 20 hours have been sad, exhausting and inspiring. Sad for obvious reasons. Exhausting because many of us have been working straight through with no sleep. But inspiring because of the incredible community of Crisis Mappers.

Here’s what been happening in the community:

• Ushahidi launched a Haiti deployment
• Mikel Maron at OpenStreetMap launched this Wiki
• Andrew Turner at GeoCommons is updating CrisisCommons
• Our friends at Sahana have set up a Development Team
• Sahana has also set up a Wiki here
• Our InSTEDD friends set up a GeoChat instance
• Our friends at MapAction have deployed a team
• Einar Bjorgo at UNOSAT is keeping us posted on imagery

InSTEDD is also working on getting +46 numbers for GeoChat, the Emergency Information Service (EIS) and Ushahidi. InSTEDD is also in Santo Domingo deploying EIS. Sahana is exploring the possibility of integrating GeoChat based on some work they did at Camp Roberts a few months ago. InSTEDD is also looking to start testing a Sahana/Mesh4X sync. There are several dozen other ongoing efforts but hard to keep track.

http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/index.html
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/help
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake#Data

I first heard about the major earthquake around 7:30pm (Boston time) last night and immediately called David Kobia to get an Ushahidi deployment out. I have five close friends from The Fletcher School who have been in Haiti over the past two weeks and it wasn’t until midnight that I finally got word that they were alive.

What happened between 7:30pmm and midnight was inspiring. We went live with a basic deployment within half an hour. I called Chris Blow and got in touch with Brian Herbert. They both worked with David to continue the customization.

I then reached out to our colleagues with the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net), and their response has been superb. We’ve had over 50 emails back and forth, sharing data, maps, local contact info with regular updates.

Our colleagues from UN OCHA/Colombia were invaluable in helping us identify the appropriate indicators as were many others on CM*Net. OCHA had just carried out an earthquake simulation exercise using their own customized version of Ushahidi so were fully ready to go. They worked directly on the admin side to help us push forward. So many thanks to Jeffrey Villaveces and Luis Aguilar.

At around 3am, our Nairobi team took over with customization and we had an 8am all team meeting to assess the current deployment and evolving situation in Haiti. We now have an international number up for SMS and are working with our colleagues at InSTEDD and at CM*Net to set up a local number as well.

On a personal note, it’s just been remarkable to see so many of the organizations who participated in the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM) collaborate so pro-actively together. It was also somewhat surreal when someone from Haiti signed up to CM*Net and in their bio wrote:

“I’m in Baudin, Haiti right now ( 18.307606° -72.709935°) so won’t have cell phone service until it comes back but can be reached then at 509-3-823-6859 or michael.ritter2@gmail.com.”

I quickly added Michael to the CrisisMappers Google Group and he has been providing is some valuable information since.

Reports

Note, we’re getting a fair number of Twitter messages, but not all of them are useful reports at this time. Mobile networks are down, so the SMS reports are almost nothing. Web-based reports that are coming in seem to be of good quality, as are the few email reports we’re getting.

Special Thanks

We’re getting slammed by a bunch of traffic on the site. A big thanks goes out to Jonathan and his team at Cartika Hosting who have helped us stay up all along, have migrated servers for us and spent hours on the phone. Thanks guys!

Organizations helping to get the word out about the Haiti site:

Wall Street Journal
Google Relief
Clinton Foundation
UNDP
Cartika forums
Washington Post
Global Voices
ReliefWeb
The Guardian
New York Times Lede blog

Jessica Colaco is here talking to us about having a mobile strategy. She runs the Mobile Bootcamps here at Strathmore University every year, she’s a TED Fellow and a part of the Ushahidi dev community. Jessica’s here to talk about communicating and strategies around that for groups and organizations that haven’t really thought that far ahead yet. One of the most common touch points is the mobile phone, especially here in Kenya.

“Whenever someone receives an SMS, they check it immediately, no matter what they’re doing”.

She’s giving us a crash course in basic ways to reach out, covering SMS, voice or visual interface.

Web

Joshua Wanyama is here to talk about internet strategy. He’s the founder of Pamoja Media, is also a TED Fellow and is working on the WildlifeDirect implementation of Ushahidi called Wildlife Trackers.

“It doesn’t matter how nice your website is if no one comes to it. Your job is to also figure out how to make this happen.”

Joshua is discussing the need for having a strategy beyond just putting up a site. The need to have people be the top search result for certain keywords, and to be in the right place to get mindshare by running ads online. Even when they get there, how are you going to add enough value for them to do something while there, tell others about it or to come back in the future?