There have been a couple times this year where volunteers not only stepped up, but they took over and excelled in the management and success of the Ushahidi platform deployment. In particular, a special thank you goes to the students and volunteers at Tufts during the Haiti earthquake aftermath, and to the SIPA students at Columbia for their work after the earthquake in Chile. You stunned us all. Thank you.

It would be difficult to thank everyone who has helped this year. Instead we wanted to highlight the people who have gone out of their way, sacrificing much of their time and resources so that everyone around the world could benefit. They made the Ushahidi community a better place, and we’re grateful to them for it.

We came up with 8 main areas that we wanted to celebrate, and then the team decided on the people who stood out the most.

Core Web Platform: George Chamales
Mobile Apps: Dale Zak
Deployments: Anahi Ayala Iacucci
Design: Chris Blow
Community: Gregory Hill
Translation: Elena Rapisardi
SwiftRiver: Vladimir Ermakov
iHub: Joshua Musau

To the 8 listed here, thank you for your time, your effort and your consistent willingness to help make a better product and community. We’re sending you something special as a thank you, an Ushahidi rubik’s cube with our 4 products on it (Ushahidi, SwiftRiver, Crowdmap and the iHub):

This post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Jessica Heinzelman, who interned with us in Nairobi, and Melissa Tully who spent most of a year working directly with the team and deploying organizations in Kenya. Finally, the iHub interns Angela Oduor, Lillian Nduati, Edwin Nduati and David Ngugi.

To all volunteers, we want to thank you. You give us the inspiration to keep going and provide us the support needed when we get stumped or are overextended. We greatly appreciate your commitment to helping change the world.

Hearing what works, what doesn’t, what is missing and what could be improved is essential to the ongoing development of Ushahidi. Feedback also plays an important role in building and growing a thriving community. Participating in this process is one way that those who have benefited from using Ushahidi can give back and help us build a better platform for future users. Feedback can include bug reports, technical difficulties, and feature requests as well as strategic insights and practical considerations.

A sample of feedback we have received includes requests for: language localization; customized themes; better configuration of email, SMS, and RSS alerts; improved alerts functionality such as the ability to subscribe to alerts for more than one location at a time or for a specific category; enhanced reporting tools to produce reports, graphs, bar charts…and more. You can see how these suggestions were incorporated into the roadmap for the Mogadishu release by visiting our wiki.

We also launched our community resources page in response to feedback from non-technical users.

We glean feedback from a variety of sources: we encourage our users to exchange information on our forums, welcome guest posts to our blog and appreciate when people who have deployed Ushahidi take time to complete our online surveys. In fact, we are currently revising our install survey and our post-implementation survey. Please feel free to let us know what you think of the questions. Do they make sense? Anything else we should ask?

Also, as part of our ongoing efforts to improve our capacity for gathering feedback, we are currently seeking volunteers to join our team. We are particularly looking for bilingual (English + local language) volunteers from Central and South America, Europe and Asia. If you are interested in learning more about how Ushahidi is used in the field, becoming a feedback volunteer will give you the opportunity to engage and interact with deployers who are actively using the platform. It’s also a great way for people without technical skills to contribute to shaping and improving the platform. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, please contact me via email to sarah [at] ushahidi [dot] com.

Participants engaged in discussions, case studies, and practical exercises involving how technology can be used for building peace. The course made use of new technology-focused teaching techniques to ease the learning process. (Read more about the course on the AshokaPeace blog and TechChange blog).

One of the highlights of the course was a two-hour simulation of the Ushahidi crisis mapping software.  The goal of the exercise was to have participants understand the possibilities and limitations of crisis mapping through a practical application.

To make the simulation realistic we built it around the upcoming Wolesi Jirga elections in Afghanistan, set for September 18^th 2010. This election has been postponed several times due to corruption and many experts are concerned that it might lead to new violence by the Taliban to intimidate voters.

The process

1. Software: Ushahidi’s open-source software was installed onto a Web-based server. Because of the location and limited participants with cell phones that worked in Costa Rica, I decided not to install FrontlineSMS. The campus did have wireless Internet, so participants used laptops and smartphones to send messages from the field.

2. Designated Polling Stations: Four polling stations were scattered around campus. Each polling station had a piece of paper with detailed conditions about the level of violence and whether or not the station was open.  Once underway, I circulated around campus to change the papers and post new conditions.

3. Four Groups: The class was organized into four groups of four people each:

Group 1: UN Officials: UN officials were based in the classroom or UN headquarters in Kabul. Their goal was to use Ushahidi on their computers to (1) ensure as many citizens as possible made it to the right polling stations and (2) ensure that international media had an accurate account of what was happening on the ground.

Group 2: Election Monitors: This group played the role of election monitors stationed in Kandahar. They were tasked to work with the UN headquarters staff in Kabul to ensure as many people as possible made it to the right polling stations to cast their vote.

Group 3: Citizens: This group played the role of Afghan citizens eager get out and participate in the democratic process but concerned about their safety. They had to figure out as a group how to use Ushahidi’s alert system to receive updates about polling center violence.  Citizens were asked to vote one by one at 10-minute intervals, regardless if any alerts had been sent out.

Group 4: Taliban: This group was tasked with the goal of disrupting the election process and the Ushahidi platform in any “cyber” way possible.

The Action, Resulting Learnings, and Aspects for Further Reflection

1. Communications Strategy: The UN team and volunteer election monitor group came up with a strategy to ensure only messages coming from election monitors were validated by UN staff. Because the Taliban could read the same reports off of the Ushahidi platform, the election monitoring team assumed that hashtag or number systems might not work so they devised a code based on the placement of word “violence” in the sentence. The Taliban group never cracked the code but the reports from Citizens at polling stations were also not validated.  This points to a very real challenge NGOs and governments face when using Ushahidi—do they accept crowdsourced information from the public or limit their scope to NGO staff? There are tradeoffs with each strategy.

2. Trade-Off Between Time and Accuracy: After ten minutes, the first citizen voted but the UN staff group and election monitors had not figured out the Ushahidi system in time to validate and disseminate reports. After approximately 15 minutes they learned the system. 40 minutes into the simulation, the Taliban group decided instead of trying to subvert the process with accurate-sounding bad data, they would try and overwhelm the system by sending as many reports as they could. Even though the UN knew the reports were erroneous it took them precious time to consider and dismiss them. I am eager to see how SwiftRiver and other filter systems might be able to combat this strategy.

3. Email Alerts Didn’t Seem to Work: The citizen group signed up to receive email notifications but never received alerts during the exercise. I’m not sure if this was a human error on our end or some kind of built-in software delay.  Instead the citizens monitored the map on the website and read the live feed of validated reports coming through the system to make decisions about where to vote.

4.  Password Security: During group orientation I wrote the login, password and URL for everyone to see. The defaults were “admin” and “admin.” Halfway through the simulation I reminded the Taliban group that the passwords might still be the default. Indeed, the UN staff had not changed the password and the Taliban group was able to log in and start validating their own erroneous reports. Once the UN staff realized their system had been compromised, they tried to change the password but it was too late.

Some critics maintain election monitoring may not the best use of Ushahidi, and that it is really best for logistical coordination and mapping, as we saw in Haiti. Perhaps, but election monitoring provides a great context to run a simulation examining Ushahidi’s potential and limitations. After two hours, all 16 participants came away with a great command of how to use this important technology.  I’m eager to work with others to design similar simulations. Please leave feedback, questions and suggestions in the comments, or e-mail nick@techchange.org

In April 2010, 90 students and a team of 9 volunteers participated in a 3-day simulation of the humanitarian emergency in Chad/Darfur. Prior to the simulation students learned about geospatial and mobile technologies in humanitarian response. Ushahidi was presented as an example of crowdsourcing and crisis mapping.

During the simulation staged in a US state park, students acted as humanitarian workers and became end-users feeding crisis information to the Ushahidi-HSI platform. While learning key skills in program planning, security events, and field epidemiology, these students participated in crowdsourcing crisis information during a simulated emergency.

This was the second year incorporating Ushahidi into the Humanitarian Studies Initiative Simulation program. Improvements in 1) didactics and preparation 2) Ushahidi platform technology 3) satellite communications and 4) volunteer capacity resulted in a successful educational experience for future humanitarian responders.

2010 SIM activities

Throughout the simulation students SMS texted crisis events and geospatial coordinates (e.g., refugee camps) to the HSI-Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi became the repository for GIS and crisis information. A volunteer team received, monitored,confirmed, verified, and mapped information.

Real-time information was transmitted via SMS to Frontline SMS and Ushahidi-HSI. Information was also mapped using open-source GIS programs as part of the applied technology learning objectives. The information was fed back to students in real- time and at scheduled mock UN Headquarter meetings.

Implementation – Technical

Harold Parker State Park has cell phone access but no internet access. One major improvement was the incorporation of satellite technology. This enabled the applied technology team to access the internet to confirm, verify, and map Ushahidi data. This on-site, real time feedback to students was not available during the 2009 Simulation.

With the assistance of Ushahidi technical staff the 2010 HSI Ushahidi Platform was improved with new fields for geospatial coordinates and statistics. Similar categories of reportable instances (e.g., camp locations, deaths, land-mines, militia movements, disease, and mass graves) were used again.

Implementation – Human Capacity

Another improvement during the 2010 Simulation was the creation of an applied technology team of volunteers. Under the guidance of a faculty member, the team was responsible for pre-simulation preparation and all GIS and Ushahidi activities. The nine person team included individuals with advanced skills in satellite technology, GPS skills, recent experience with Ushahidi Haiti, and other with new interests in ICT.

The team outfitted each NGO team with GPS units, information cards, and supported students “in the field”. They also managed large volumes of information, processing the data and transforming it to traditional maps while updating the Ushahidi-HSI platform. The team also created “security breaches” gaming the system to teach students about the fragility of ICT in emergency and insecure environments.

Informing End Users

Students or “end-users” were either introduced to Ushahidi in a classroom session or during the first meeting of the simulation. Cards were distributed at the beginning of the simulation to all students with instructions on how to communicate crisis events to Ushahidi.

Crowdsourcing

Within minutes of the simulation, Ushahidi began receiving messages. A total of 287 SMS text messages came into Frontline SMS. All messages were monitored. Information that could be verified was subsequently mapped resulting in 41 mapped reports on the Ushahidi website. Messages were received every few minutes and during a simulated militia raid security related messages were received multiple times a minute.

Frontline SMS/Ushahidi Interface

Not all Frontline SMS messages were forwarded to Ushahidi, and transferred texts were frequently delayed. This hindered the team’s ability to process information. The compressed activities of the simulation may have contributed to this challenge which may not occur in a real humanitarian settings.

Frontline SMS was also used for internal communication between the volunteers. Although it only comprised 12% of all received messages, this created “noise” that needed to be screened and omitted.

Monitoring and Creating Reports

As experienced in the 2009 simulation, there were many duplicate messages of similar events. This provided a means for verification, but also congested the system. The temporary solution was to have the team visually screen all Ushahidi messages and transform the information into reports when appropriate. This required human capacity and resources during the simulation, but the learning curve for new members was fast. Swift River was not used this year, but may have the potential to decrease this demand and increase accuracy in future simulations.

Verification

In order to maintain the educational goals the decision was made to view crowdsourced information and create reports which were a reflection of at least 2-3 similar messages from distinct end-users. Real-time decision-making was necessary to prompt the groups to verify information in order to validate an event and create a report. This process also indirectly educated students about the value of triangulated and verified information for decision-making.

During the simulation, militia raids destroyed the “Toulum” refugee camp. The following messages reflect the series of texts, followed by prompting NGOs to confirm the event. It also is an example of how the the applied tech team must determine how to manage unanticipated events which is more reflective of true humanitarian settings.

Human and technical capacity challenged the timely information feedback loop to end-users. The volunteer team managed large volumes of Ushahidi information while also GIS mapping. This often delayed communicating information back to NGO teams. The Frontline SMS system also stalled when batched messages were sent to all NGO teams.

Security/Mapping

Security was a major theme during the simulation, and the NGO camp was raided. In one hour, Ushahidi received 58 text messages about the crisis event. Ushahidi had “technical difficulties” (intentionally) to educate students about the fragility of technology during emergencies. For learning purposes their information was presented at the following UN meeting reflecting how crowdsourced information could be triangulated.

Mapping events on Ushahidi during the simulation was challenging as the administrative fields were in lat/long units while the student SMS texted coordinates in degrees/min/min-seconds. Volunteers needed to convert the units independently prior to entering it into the report page. This was time consuming and prone to error. The field was not used and sites were mapped by proxy by individual volunteers.

During the simulation, geo-coordinates of key locations (e.g, refugee camps) should be accurately mapped using common units or an embedded conversion system. Creating an internal unit conversion system for geo-coordinates on Ushahidi may improve the use of this new function. Most crisis events were “proxy” tagged by end users. Locations instead of exact coordinates were most commonly used. If the Ushahidi platform could link “location” with it’s previously confirmed geo-coordinate this would increase the efficiency of data processing and minimize “noise” improving interpretation of Ushahidi maps.

Frontline SMS and Ushahidi information was also used to create more detailed maps to aid in NGO team decision making, program planning and service deliverables.

Presenting Ushahidi Findings

The greatest limitation of the Ushahidi web platform was presenting findings back to the end users/students in real time. In order to simulate the challenging humanitarian environment, student access to computers was not ubiquitous and internet access was unavailable. As a work around to this true to life limitation, printed screen shots of the Ushahidi website were presented at the meetings. To improve the students’ understanding of Ushahidi outputs, future simulations could incorporate:

• Use large screen monitor at the group meetings to show the HSI-Ushahidi website to students and allow students to interface with the website at that time.

• Encourage students with internet access on their smart phones to view Ushahidi online during the simulations.

• A Ushahidi skill-station prior to the simulation. Students would have more time to learn the web interface so they may view the real time output more efficiently during the stressful simulation.

There were also Ushahidi bugs identified by the applied tech team.

• When viewing the main webpage the site would stall for prolonged periods of time. Reloading the site or clicking on another tab and returning to the main page would often fix the problem.

• We were also unable to set the background timeline to the current 2010 simulation, excluding the data from 2009. With a few clicks this was possible, but we anticipate students with multiple demands would best learn from more a more controlled interface.

• Unique to the HSI simulation, a broad range of events occurred in a compressed area and time period. A more granular timeline (by the hour) would have been more useful, but may not be reflective of other real events.

Student/End User Feedback

Overall feedback from the HSI students was positive and many students requested more didactic teaching and simulation feedback. 44% of students believe that Ushahidi somewhat influenced their learning during the simulation, and 27% believe that Ushahidi frequently or “always” influenced their learning.

Students found the Ushahidi platform interesting and believed it played a role in communication during the during the simulation. Students also commented on Ushahidi’s limitations and came up with helpful recommendations.

Summary and Next Steps Forward

Overall, incorporating Ushahidi into the applied technologies activities at the 2010 HSI Simulation was a success. Technical improvements with internet access, Ushahidi platform improvement and the establishment of a team of volunteers improved the execution of the Ushahidi platform during the intense 3-day simulation. The technical support from staff at Ushahidi, dedication of a team of 9 volunteers, and most importantly the involvement of 90 students made the success possible.

An 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit southern Chile on Feb. 27, just over a month before we traveled to the capital city, Santiago. Although weeks have passed and the immediate crisis has subsided, the earthquake still shakes the daily lives of many Chileans. The Chileans talk about the earthquake every day, as if it was the weather. They look at videos of the earthquake on YouTube. They share stories about what they were doing at 3:30 a.m. on that Saturday. They follow reconstruction carefully. When they hear dogs barking, they worry that another one will hit.

When the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile happened, I remember how Columbia University students wanted to help. In Chile, it became clear that this desire is even stronger when it affects your own people. On our trip, we had the opportunity to meet some of the most passionate Chileans who use Ushahidi, an online data tool used to visualize information submitted by the general public, for crisis management and reconstruction. After spending a month helping to map incidents such as collapsed buildings and electrical outages from inside Columbia University,  two members of our team went to Chile to connect with local organizations to determine how Ushahidi could continue to be of use there.

We were immediately blown away with our first meeting with a group called ChileAyuda. ChileAyuda is an initiative spearheaded by digital media leaders that aims to centralize information for the earthquake relief efforts. Their work has been exceptionally successful because the members of ChileAyuda are both innovative entrepreneurs and tech-savvy programmers. With these combined skills, they were able to quickly and effectively engineer the Ushahidi platform, connect organizations, and disseminate their vision. It is exciting to know that ChileAyuda is coordinating the efforts of diffusing Ushahidi on the ground.

Part-way through our trip, we ventured down to Talca to meet a group of IT students at the University of Talca who have a small enterprise called DoingIT. Talca was a stark change from Santiago. En route, we saw the damage increase progressively: blocked streets, collapsed bridges, and constant detours. More than 80 percent of the students at Universidad de Talca come from heavily affected areas, so for them taking action has a direct impact. Taking advantage of the open source nature of the platform, students cloned the Ushahidi map to assist municipalities in the area organize and visualize information needed to serve their populations.

Our last meeting was with a group from Universidad de la Frontera that is interested in using Ushahidi for mHealth. Their goal is to use Ushahidi to improve health care for psychiatric patients by having their family members send text messages to monitor treatment. They hope to work on the 9^th region of Chile, the poorest in the country. It is nearly impossible for patients living in remote areas to receive constant monitoring, but without it they could easily relapse. The concept is that health care practitioners can use Ushahidi to visualize how their patients are doing.

Those were only three out of the many organizations we met with on our trip. It is interesting to see the various interpretations and strategies each group had on Ushahidi, but they all shared the same level of passion for their cause. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that so many organizations were already using Ushahidi. This was a first-hand demonstration of the value of open source programming. Now that we have seen how Ushahidi has been used for crisis-mapping immediately after the earthquake, it will be interesting to see how different applications will blossom in the long-term.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/04/19/reflections-from-chile/feed/ 6 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/03/22/ushahidi-haiti-connecting/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/03/22/ushahidi-haiti-connecting/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:43:56 +0000 patrick http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=1721 Sabina Carleson recently joined Ushahidi’s Jaroslav Valuch in Port-au-Prince to support the transition of Ushahidi-Haiti to Haitian hands. Sabina is a senior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health. She has worked in Southern Sudan and three years ago co-founded RESPE, a community-led research and development project in rural northern Haiti under the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL).

I landed on the tarmac in Port au Prince a week ago today. It is not my first time in Haiti: I founded a community health initiative in northern Haiti 3 years ago, where I learned basic creole and learned to respect the resilience of Haitian civil society. I had been called on the ground to lend some support to my colleague Jaroslav Valuch, who has been building an impressive network of contacts in the humanitarian sector.

I landed in Port au Prince to compliment what Jaro is building in the humanitarian community with connections, partnerships, and data from the local Haitian communities, and to diversify the methods we use to collect local information. In just under a week, I have begun connecting with a diverse set of Haitian actors who can see the current value and long-term potential of Ushahidi, from local radio stations to community leaders – and I will expand upon the most promising partnership in my first blog post from Port au Prince.

“The questions need to be asked by the people who have lived the disaster.” Agathe Etienne

In the middle of a long, warm morning in an IDP camp on an old golf course in Petionville, Agathe Etienne and I stood having a long, heated conversation in Creole as people walked by with wheelbarrows of assorted distribution items. If anyone knows the true meaning of this quote I referenced above, it is Agathe: during the first days after the earthquake, frustrated at the lack of attention her community was getting, she mobilized members of her community to conduct a cross between a census and needs assessment, and walked it straight to the humanitarian organizations operating in her area.

Agathe called her initiative Quartier par Quarter, “block by block”, and the project replicated itself across Carrefour Feuilles, Fontamara and Tabarre. In Fontamara, the project was taken up by a local Azek, a bit like a mayor, and no fewer than 26,000 people were surveyed. Hundreds of miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, the Haitian Alliance, a Diaspora development group, discovered the project and were inspired to support it.

When Jean-Claude Bourget of the Haitian Alliance, and Shadrock Roberts of the University of Georgia Athens, discovered Ushahidi, they reached out to our team to ask how we could display this dynamic community-generated data that was coming from the ground.

Instantly, the potential was clear: if Ushahidi is a platform for broadcasting and aggregating the thoughts and priorities of Haitians, here was a true grassroots initiative to begin to collect those thoughts. And if Quartier par Quartier is an initiative to collect the thoughts and priorities of people on the ground and broadcast them to the humanitarian community, here was a platform built that could be instrumental for that purpose.

I arrived in Port au Prince almost two weeks ago, and just a day later found myself on the back of a pick-up truck with the lead volunteers for QpQ. All of them are the same age as the Ushahidi crew back in the Situation Room in Boston: university students, the greatest difference being their universities had all collapsed. Over the noise of traffic, MINUSTAH fuel trucks, and occasional helicopters I explained Ushahidi in Creole. “Oh, ou se pwoje Open Source?” one asked back. “You’re an Open Source project?” I nodded, and he said, “Cool.” No joke.

In a half an hour I had my computer open, and showed them the front and back ends of the Ushahidi site, OpenStreetMap and Hypercube. Immediately, the QpQ team simply got it.

In the eyes of the QpQ team, local use of Ushahidi could become an exercise in local crowdsourcing: they and other small initiatives are collecting information about their own communities, capacities, priorities, and problems, but understood they had no standard way to collect and display the data. Here is an opportunity to sort, streamline, and standardize this flow of information, and give them a common language that is actionable.

In looking at the categories on Ushahidi, the QpQ leaders immediately saw a broader potential in the data they were gathering: being able to map problems in the community like broken bridges or highlighting problems like manipulation of aid. If a new category was put on the table, these intelligent university students spent 10 minutes discussing the implications in their communities. In the final minutes of our 4^th conversation, someone got up and said, “We are the eyes and ears of our communities. If we collect this information and make it public, it is up to the organizations, local and international, to act”.

And, the international community is willing and able to act. I spent the morning in a white tent in the UN Logisitcs Base by the Port au Prince airport, sitting down to present, discuss, and coordinate assessments with OCHA’s assessment working group. Impressive and professional teams are currently deploying large surveys with contractors and electronic handheld PDAs, but as important as they are, as Agathe said, these surveys are not being designed by people who lived the disaster. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized how interested the international community is in the kind of community-generated conversations that initiatives like QpQ and Ushahidi can provide.  It is the human layer underneath the statistics, excel spreadsheets, and GPS coordinates.

This human layer is resilient and dynamic. As I said goodnight and shook hands with 8 of my Haitian peers, including a computer science student and coder named Douglas who is excited about building a PhP platform to streamline data flow, I understood the capacity on the ground in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

The Ushahidi team in Boston have been discussing how to put this tool into the hands of the Haitian community, and now I have seen with my own eyes how those capable, confident, and ready those hands are – and how the hands of the international community are also open to receive it.

Congratulations to everyone involved with Ushahidi-Chile at SIPA for receiving a $10,000 grant from the Mozilla foundation! Our project aligned perfectly with Mozilla Foundation’s mission to promote openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. The work of crisis mapping is more than innovative as it directly affects the most vulnerable people at Chile who are struggling after the earthquake. Thanks to this grant, our volunteers will be able to train local Chileans on how to use and manage the platform themselves.

We hope to use a small part of this grant to recognize and thank our wonderful volunteers at SIPA. Although there was an explosion of interest throughout SIPA to help with this initiative, not everyone was able to take significant time out of midterm exams to help. Our core volunteers are motivated and compassionate; the more they help the more they keep coming back. We could not thank them enough for their work, and we are happy that this grant can go in recognizing the hundreds of hours they have put into Ushahidi-Chile. Thank you volunteers!

The majority of this grant will be instrumental in moving this initiative to the next phase: to Chile. We have been communicating with various Chilean organizations to transition the Ushahidi platform to local Chileans. What’s great about the Ushahidi platform is that it is open source and versatile. The immediate need for the platform was to report incidents on the map, but the need is shifting to another direction. What better people to think of how to best utilize this platform than Chileans themselves.

Continuous aftershocks, office buildings scheduled for destruction, villages without access to water, gasoline shortages, and looting. These are some of the 800+ incidents my fellow students and I mapped during our first week in the situation room at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). The death toll from the February 27 earthquake is much lower than the number of lives lost since January 12 in Haiti, but the 8.8-magnitude quake in southern Chile was one of the largest on record, and coordinating information, needs and responses on the ground is essential.

Near real-time crisis mapping

An initial training session at Columbia University the Monday after the earthquake drew 60 students—during SIPA’s midterm examination period. A core team of six students is working to ensure that the growing list of volunteer names translates into more hours spent monitoring and mapping. Other schools within Columbia University are starting to get involved, and the team has reached out to contacts at New York University. One of our core members took a quick break from the Situation Room to head to United Nations headquarters after individuals from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) asked for training on the Ushahidi-Chile application. Most importantly, as students continue to monitor traditional and social media, more reports are reaching the Ushahidi platform from on the ground in Chile.

The core SIPA Team

Some students were initially skeptical of Ushahidi-Chile. The Chilean government had said international aid was not necessary, and the value of mapping information from news sources and Twitter—in short, information that can be found elsewhere—was questioned. However, by Monday, messages communicating the needs and locations of people who lacked basic supplies and water were coming in. It seemed that our team had uploaded enough information to be truly useful on the ground. Soon, Chilean organizations including Red Salvavidas and Chile Ayuda were contributing reports daily.

As a journalist, the flow of information within Ushahidi has been immensely interesting to me. The process that our teams of monitors, mappers and administrators go through to produce the Ushahidi page is not unlike the path a journalist takes to report and produce a story. In both cases, the reporter seeks information from overlooked sources and tries to verify the data. Small bits of information combine to produce a larger picture, giving an overview of a particular situation. In Ushahidi, the picture that emerges is an interactive map, rather than a narrated story.

Crisis Mapping volunteers at SIPA

The SIPA team has touched base with technology students from Talca, in one of the hardest regions hit in Chile. The Chilean students now have administrative abilities on the Ushahidi-Chile page. The goal of the SIPA students working with Chile-Ushahidi is to transfer the platform to an organization in Chile by the end of March, but to leave behind a trained group of crisis mappers at SIPA who will be ready to assemble and share information whenever and wherever the next disaster strikes.

And of course thanks to The Fletcher Team for holding the fort during the first 48 hours. Last but certainly not least, thanks to the Ushahidi Tech Team for once again rallying to the cause after their massive effort on Haiti. Our colleague Oscar Salazar from “Ushahidi-Mexico” was also pivotal in getting the Ushahidi-Chile platform off the ground and will continue to be. Clearly, this is about building a community, a volunteer response community, more than anything else.

This is why I’m excited that another School of International Affairs has set up a Situation Room and taken the lead on an Ushahidi deployment. The Fletcher, DC, Geneva, London and Portland Teams already demonstrated the incredible multiplier effect that is possible thanks to their lead on the Ushahidi-Haiti project. There are now three core Ushahidi Situation Rooms in the world, Boston, New York and Geneva. They are fully trained and continue to train others. So if you are based at a university and want to set up your own Situation Room, then please feel free to contact me: patrick@ushahidi.com.

The earthquake in Chile and resulting tsunamis have not caused the widespread loss of life that many initially feared just hours after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake. But the advantage of platforms like Ushahidi’s is that they can be deployed regardless, just in case.  Consider this the Precautionary Principle of Disaster Management. And thanks to a growing community of CrisisMappers, these precautionary deployments can happen more often and faster.

Stay tuned for guest blog posts from the Digital Democracy and SIPA Teams.

Customizing Ushahidi-Chile

We all realize that this is a risk coming so soon after the massive efforts around the Haiti quake. But we didn’t have all the answers then either. I will collaborate closely with the Fletcher/Tufts team and look for volunteer groups with universities in Mexico and Colombia, for example. I’ve already reached out to my good friend Oscar Salazar who launched the successful Ushahidi-Mexico platform and he is mobilizing his network of volunteers in Mexico. I’m also reaching out to our South American colleagues at GlobalVoices.

We’ve already set up a long code that individual can use to text in their location and urgent needs: +44 762.480.2524. Note that we are working with our partners to set up a short code for Chile. So the one listed here 4636 is not operational. Please standby for more information on a local short code. In the meantime, you can submit reports directly online here. You can also send an email to chile@ushahidi.com with specific location information and urgent needs.

We will provide further updates on this blog and also on our Twitter feed @ushahidi.

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