Guest Post: What Open Data Means to Marginalized Communities – Joshua Goldstein

Filed under Digital Activism, Guest Posts by admin on 9 June 2010 at 12:38 {no comments}

This is a guest post by Joshua Goldstein, an incoming technology policy PhD candidate at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, where he will be working with the Center for Information Technology Policy.  He’s also a former Fletcher classmate of mine and working on some really neat stuff (you can find his full bio here). Make sure to follow him on Twitter.  The original post can be found on his blog, In an African Minute.

Two symbols of this era of open data are President Obama’s Open Governance Initiative, a directive that has led agencies to post their results online and open up data sets, and Ushahidi, a tool for crowdsourcing crisis information. While these tools are bringing openness to governance and crisis response respectively, I believe we have yet to find a good answer to the question: what does open data means for the long-term social and economic development of poor and marginalized communities?

I came to Nairobi on a hunch. The hunch was that a small digital mapping experiment taking place in the Kibera slum would matter deeply, both for Kiberans who want to improve their community, and for practitioners keen to use technology to bring the voiceless into a conversation about how resources are allocated on their behalf.

So far I haven’t been disappointed. Map Kibera, an effort to create the first publicly available map of Kibera, is the brainchild of Mikel Maron, a technologist and Open Street Map founder, and Erica Hagen, a new media and development expert, and is driven by a group of 13 intrepid mappers from the Kibera community. In partnership with SODNET (an incredible local technology for social change group), Phase I was the creation of the initial map layer on Open Street Map (see Mikel’s recent presentation at Where 2.0). Phase II, with the generous support of UNICEF, will focus on making the map useful for even the most marginalized groups, particularly young girls and young women, within the Kibera community.

What we have in mind is quite simple: add massive amounts of data to the map around 3 categories (health services, public safety/vulnerability and informal education) then experiment with ways to increase awareness and the ability to advocate for better service provision. The resulting toolbox, which will involve no tech (drawing on printed maps), and tech (SMS reporting, Ushahidi and new media creation) will help us collectively answer questions about how open data itself, and the narration of such data through citizen media and face-to-face conversations, can help even the most marginalized transform their communities.

We hope the methodology we develop, which will be captured on our wiki, can be incorporated into other communities around Kenya, and to places like Haiti, where it is critical to enable Haitians to own their own vision of a renewed nation.
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New search capabilities for Twitter: Hope it’s not all business as usual!

Filed under Digital Activism by Kate Brodock on 24 August 2009 at 16:40 {no comments}

At long last, Twitter is allowing for (at least a little) location-aware

capabilities.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

“Developers will be able to access this new geolocation feature early which means it will most likely be available on your app of choice before it is available on Twitter’s Web site. Later, we will add it to our mobile Web site and Twitter.com as well,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

As eBrand reports, it comes in the form of

“An API that will allow users for accurate, tweet-level location data and make the information accessible both on the main Twitter site and through external applications. Tweets will include location based metadata attached to them including latitude and longitude details.”

While many are talking about what this will mean for marketing, I’m more interested in what it may mean for digital activism and such efforts as CrisisWire, Ushahidi and crisis mapping.

To start, the feature is optional, and a user can opt-in to use it.

More on this later, but I can’t wait to hear what Patrick will have to say about the technological capabilities of this and how it be used with mapping platforms.

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Documenting Kenya’s Election Using Crisis Mapping Techniques

Filed under DigiActive, Digital Activism by Kate Brodock on 1 May 2009 at 20:10 {one comment}

I’m going to repost this research write up that has been over at the Other Side blog for several months.  It was originally posted on 28 October 2008.  Eventually I’ll be posting some of my better posts from OSG over here as well.

What are citizen journalists’ roles in documenting conflict and are those roles becoming more important?

Led by Patrick Meier, a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, I’m happy to report that we’ve just completed the first of (hopefully) several case studies this case study will attempt to answer this question more concretely.

Supported by Humanity United, the project seeks to explore the changing role and impact of information communication technology in crisis early warning and humanitarian response. The eventual goal is to identify ways in which citizen journalists and new communications tools can work more effectively in crisis situations.

Patrick did a really good job of writing up the methodology at his blog, so I’m going to leave wheel inventing up to him.

The exciting thing for me was to see the way in which new media tools were being used by citizen journalists, specifically how much more effective they seemed to be in disseminating on-the-ground, real-time information than the mainstream media was. The effects of efforts like Ushahidi also contain incredibly valuable information for future research.

Our preliminary findings:

  • Mainstream media reported actual death count before citizen journalists; however, on many accounts, mainstream media did not report on incidents leading to actual deaths, i.e., early warning signs;
  • Citizen journalist reports and Ushahidi reports did not overlap geographically with mainstream media reports;
  • Citizen journalists tended to report as soon as violence started, well before mainstream media;
  • The number of comments on citizen journalist blogs increased during the 30-day period, or during particular periods of violence;
  • The comment section was also used as a medium for real-time updating;
  • Many citizen journalist bloggers used real-time updates sent to them via SMS, primarily from rural areas;
  • Citizen journalism reports declined after the launch of Ushahidi;
  • Ushahidi reports document an important number of violent events not reported by the mainstream media and citizen journalists;
  • Contrary to news media and citizen journalist reports, Ushahidi data always had specific location information;
  • Ushahidi reports also covered a wider geographical area than both mainstream news and citizen journalist bloggers.

For further information on our project’s methodology and sources, please see this short powerpoint presentation (pdf) which we have also uploaded on Slideshare. For more on crisis mapping, please see this page.

Some follow up questions that we identified as being interesting off-shoots of this project are:

  1. What was the role of SMS messaging in the overall information chain? How does it differ across the country (rural vs urban) and what are some of the most effective ways that this medium was (or could be) used?
  2. What was the role of blogs in mainstream media information gathering? Were they a resource? What about Human Rights organizations? If so, is there anything we can learn about how to make that information more effective in terms of crisis response?
  3. Can efforts such as Ushahidi be replicated in other areas, or have there been similar efforts?

We hope to refine the process as we move forward, and with that being said, we’d love feedback as possible on both methodology and analysis, as well as the visualization. We’re looking to clean the whole package up moving forward, so this would be very helpful.

Our next case study will be Georgia. Please contact me if you’re interested in joining the team.

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