Over the year and half working with Ushahidi on the SwiftRiver project, I’ve thought a lot about the subject of crowdsourcing. Not so much the how, but the how. (I suppose the pseudo-science of crowdsourcing would be a fitting subtitle.) Partly because it’s part of my job to help prevent ‘the gaming of the system’ within Ushahidi deployments, but partly because it’s become a subject I’m obsessed with.

So rather than continue to force my wife to listen to all my thoughts and observations, I’ve started an audio podcast and blog called Cult of the Crowd. One of my favorite blogs is Kevin Kelly’s blog The Technium which is sort of like a living book, and so COTC takes that format with lengthy posts and video versions which I also hope will be later combined into a book.

The subject certainly includes collaborative or activist mapping, but it also includes participatory journalism, distributed labor and micro-tasking which the podcast will also discuss in depth. The first episode is up now, you can watch it above or at cultofthecrowd.com. Obviously Ushahidi will be covered quite a bit but so will other companies that heavily rely upon crowds and crowdsourcing in their work.

Join the Cult of the Crowd Community

Follow us on Twitter – @cultofthecrowd
Join the Community – grou.ps/cultofthecrowd

Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica 2011 is Germany’s largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to 10-20 minutes, the organizers gave us an hour to share our stories. So I’m posting the video of my presentation below for anyone interested in learning more about new media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, live maps, crisis response, civil resistance, digital activism and check-in’s. I draw on my experience with Ushahidi and the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and share examples from Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Japan, the US and Egypt to illustrate how live maps can change the world. My slides are available on Slideshare 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.

When was the last time you thought about the 2005 Tsunami in South East Asia? Thousands of people died, the GDP of many coastal economies in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives will not recover for another 10 years, but when did you last think about it?

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t thought about it in a few years, I saw the devastation with my own eyes and I hardly think about it. We are not meant to. Our minds are just not built that way.

We can’t keep everything in the front of our brain, it’s just not possible. As humans we are wired to confront the fires the are right in front of us. It’s impossible to keep conceptual ideas like disasters in countries we’ve never been to–or have not been to in a long time–in the front of our mind.

In my opinion, this is the biggest obstacle to disaster recovery: endurance to see completion. Other people might call it “sustainability”.  As an outsider, I offer very little in the way of sustainability. Sustainability and real resolution most often comes from people that live with these problems in front of them every day.

Passing the work on to the Haitian People from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

When Ushahidi put up the Haiti instance of their system to monitor the events and needs of the country after the earthquake, it was understood from day one that they were not going to be the ones who would sustain the effort into the long term future. Those responsibilities had to go to people for whom the January earthquake was a part of their daily reality on some level, either because they were in Haiti or because they were emotionally tied to the the people that they would be motivated to carry on the responsibility even years from now.

When I started helping Ushahidi tell their story, I was impressed that only weeks after the quake someone who had context and ties in the Haitian diaspora had been brought into the ranks and empowered to lead the charge of handing over ownership of the project to the Haitian community and diaspora.

This video documents part of the transition over to the Haitian community: shifting the majority of the translation and mapping tasks into the hands of Haitians. The microwork initiative is creating jobs, stimulating local infrastructure development and empowering Haitians to contribute to the rebuilding process.

In the long term, Haitians will do more with the information coming through the 4636 service and will have more effective uses for the service than the staff and volunteers of Ushahidi could imagine. This is their fire, not ours. It is, in fact, their right to own the solutions that change their countries trajectory.  It is our honor to walk beside them.

As the days and weeks passed, the Ushahidi-Haiti deployment garnered lots of media attention, and we started to consider the possibility of documenting our impact in Haiti on video. In particular, we saw an opportunity to capture the remarkable story about the launch of the 4636 mobile short code. When I learned that several Mission 4636 team members were traveling to Haiti as part of a US State Department delegation, I reached out to documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends about shooting some video for us. I knew he had been working in Haiti and luckily he was available!

Andrew teamed up with Jaroslav Valůch who is Ushahidi’s field representative in Haiti and in two days of shooting they captured interviews and b-roll in Port-au-Prince and traveled to the town of Mirebalais to visit the micro-work center where local Haitians are paid to complete tasks as part of Mission 4636. With multi-media journalist Jon Shuler working as editor, we have crafted two videos from the footage. Along with our prior video that focused on the work of the Ushahidi developers and the crisis-mapping team at the Fletcher school, these videos form a trilogy about Ushahidi-Haiti.

The story of the Mission 4636 partnership (below) is the second piece in the trilogy, and it highlights the incredible collaboration among many different partners that made Mission 4636 a success. The final video is still in the works and will describe how Ushahidi-Haiti and Mission 4636 are being transitioned to Haitians both locally and in the diaspora.

Haiti 4636 Project from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Annual Strategy Meeting II from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

What is Ushahidi?

Ushahidi is non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping via the mobile phone and web. We builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We are willing to try, and sometimes fail, in the pursuit of changing the traditional way that information flows.

Though the tech space that we’re in seems to be a moving target, our mission and vision has stayed true to form for the past two years. We took the time to boil it down to the quote above.

Annual Strategy Meeting from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Part of this is to see each other and enjoy being together as a group of friends and colleagues face-to-face. Another is to realign and recenter with each other on the Ushahidi vision, mission and goals. Finally, we’ll spend a couple days talking through the big items on the platform itself, the tech-side of what we do.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

We’ll be putting up more videos on Ushahidi at Vimeo.com/ushahidi

“Digital media in conflict-prone societies have the potential to foster dialogue and peace or to fuel hate speech and violence. The rapid spread of digital-based communications and information networks is likely to have an effect on 21st-century wars, which increasingly center on internal conflict, disputed borders of new states, and separatist movements. At the same time, some of the most positive and innovative media projects are coming out of the developing world as people adopt networks and software applications for their own ends.”

It’s a long talk, including the question and answer period, which is probably the most interesting part. It looks like NED got it all up though, and here it is:

Digital Media in Conflict-Prone Societies from CIMA on Vimeo.