Transcript

Maptivism: How to Crowdsource Political Action

February 17, 2011

ANNOUNCER: You are listening to an archived version of the PDF Network call featuring special guest, Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi, on the subject, Maptivism, How to Crowd Source Political Action.

The call was recorded on February 17, 2011, and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on the PDF Network and upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com.

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum, welcome again to our regular PDF Network conference calls. As always we’re thankful to our sponsor AT&T for making these calls possible.

And this week I’m very excited and looking forward to our conversation with Patrick Meier, who is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers.

Just a reminder before we dive into the call, lots of folks are still signing on, we automatically are muting your phones and for the first part of the call, it’ll just be me and Patrick talking but if you have a question, they way to signal that you have a question is to his *6 on your phone and that way we’ll be able to see the list of people waiting to ask a question and then in the second half of this hour, we’ll bring folks in to ask questions and to get into more of a dialogue.

So, Patrick just by word of introduction I just want to say I am a very, very big fan of your work and the work of Ushahidi, I suspect some people who are on this call may know a bit about Ushahidi and what it has done.

But I think what would be great before we get into the whole concept of maptivism as a new kind of crowd souring and political activism, why don’t you start us off by saying a big out the history of Ushahidi and what distinguishes it as a organizing tool and then we’ll get deeper into maptivism itself.

PATRICK MEIER: Sure, I’d be happy to, thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts with everyone and looking forward to getting some questions and discussing brainstorming together, still very much a new field and I’m always learning myself.

So, just a few words on Ushahidi, the word actually means “witness” in Swahili. We started back in January 2008 during the (inaudible) violence in Kenya when the government was downplaying the extent of violence, the media could not be everywhere at the same time to report on what was happening. So, we decided to use the idea of crowd sourcing as it applies to crisis information and set up a dedicated short code to allow anybody who knew about this and who had access to a cell phone to be active witnesses and report what they saw happening around them in terms of human rights abuses and human rights violations.

And then we take this information and simply map it on a dedicated sort of Google map of Kenya. And this has basically allowed us to create what was sort of a live map of the situation that was unfolding. So since 2008, we’ve gone on and improved the platform considerably. Who chose recently the second version of Ushahidi which allows you to build apps and to add apps on top of it just like a smart phone, like an iPhone and it allows you basically map using different channels, whether it’s SMS, Twitter, Facebook, email, voicemail and so on. And allows you to consume that information in different ways.

But at the heart I would say that the Ushahidi platform is distinct because it provides an easy, free and open source way to have people collaborate on (inaudible) live maps of the world around them.

MICAH SIFRY: And folks may not know, but there’s actually a rich and important history of these kinds of activist real time collaborations around crises and natural disasters that pre-dates Ushahidi, that it’s sort of building on top of work.

I think the first example I’m aware of, I’m sure there is some of it goes back to 9/11 but when the big tsunami hit in south Asia, there was an effort by people like Andy Carvin who’s now at MPR to crowd source information for people on a blog called Tsunamiinfo.org and you know, Andy continued to do those kinds of things on Wikipages around like Hurricane Katrina, there was also a big project called The Katrina People Finder which was an effort by a bunch of data hackers to sort of collect all the data bout lost and missing people after Katrina, and sort of mold all that onto one page.

But all of those things were sort of one offs in the sense that people were using blogs or using Wikis but those tools weren’t really you know, streamlined, easy to use for the type of data collection that you know, reporting around a crisis like violence around election in Kenya, or for that matter, you know, people stuck in Washington DC and not able to shovel themselves out, Ushahidi’s been used for that.

So, say a little bit more about what’s in the plumbing if you will of why Ushahidi is so easy to use and why people should trust the information that they see on an Ushahidi instance.

PATRICK MEIER: Sure, happy to. So, you know, when we set out to go beyond just Kenya when after we launched the Kenya platform back in 2008, what we really wanted to do was to provide people with a free and open source tool that would allow them to do what we ended up doing, which took us five days and allow people to do that but in a matter of hours instead of five days, instead of continually repeating and re-inventing the wheel and then all kind of one-offs. We wanted to try and consolidate and find an easier way to integrate these different technologies that people are already using and to connect them so that people could then have a one sort of stop shop for this kind of live mapping.

So, I think that’s part of the appeal. And I’m just reading (inaudible) by Kevin Kelley right now, and I keep on thinking back to Ushahidi in terms of this evolution and he suggests that certain technologies are inevitable, certain innovations are inevitable. And I think you know the technology that Ushahidi uses when we put that together back in 2008, were already three years old. There was nothing new about them. It was the connection and again I think the ease of use.

And then I think also the appeal that this is something that was coming out of Africa as opposed to the usual narrative of something coming out of Silicon Valley.

So, I think that’s where the appeal is and I think that’s why more and more people are using the (inaudible) because it’s already partly there in many ways. Like people talk to different developers who say, this is great, you know, Ushahidi’s not 100 percent complete but it’s 80 percent there and that’s all we want. If it were 100 percent, we’d have to like undo things and so on. So I said, it’s a platform on top of this multiple solution can be built.

In terms of the information that (inaudible) aspect, that depends a lot -- it’s definitely a big issue. I think one of the points to remember is that one does not have to use crowd sourcing as a methodology when using an Ushahidi platform. You could use all kinds of methodologies that exist in terms of information collection. So, there’s surveys, in-person surveys, you could do vendor sampling and so on.

So, all the methodologies that exist in the social sciences for collecting information and narratives and so on can still be used and then visualized on an Ushahidi map. But it’s true that crowd sourcing has been often used interchangeably with the Ushahidi platform and that has been a bigger deal for many people.

In terms of trust, it will depend. You know, it’s just like blogs when blogs were still very human -- well now several years ago. People were having the same kind of reaction saying ‘oh, how are we going to know what blogs to trust and is going to dilute everything and it’s just going to be misinformation.’ But what we’ve seen with blogs is that people have developed reputations, they’ve developed followers and have left a digital trait, so I think what we are going to see with Ushahidi platform is some of the same organizations and networks that have garnered some credibility, repeat that particular exercise and be (inaudible) just like bloggers would.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, but the tools also -- I mean, inside Ushahidi are tools to also enable volunteers to double check things that people post, right? So, the same way that Wikipedia has evolved systems for protecting pages that are subject to vandalism, I mean you could imagine that an open platform like Ushahidi, especially as it gets more and more important in different places when it gets used, would also be subject to people who want to game it or vandalize it.

So, there are some systems built in for cross-checking of reports and ensuring that the site doesn’t get gamed by some malicious users.

PATRICK MEIER: Yeah, so there’s actually multiple partial solutions to that issue. One is simply drawing on what journalists have done for decades, right? Journalists have certain standards of verifying information and in fact in the Ushahidi platform project that was used in Egypt back in November / December for the parliamentary election, a student (inaudible) journalist worked with the Egyptian group there and developed the verification and guidelines to basically publish reports that were coming in as verified.

And she simply drew on her 10, 20 years’ experience as a journalist and said, okay, if we have two or more reports that specifically relay the information on the same event and they’re independent as far as what we can tell, we can assume they’re independent witnesses reporting on this same event and if we have two witnesses that’s better than just having one.

She also had additional information because the great thing about (inaudible) Ushahidi platform is you can do multimedia mapping. You’re not only restricted to just text-based information. And so another guideline that she put it there’s a picture -- one or more pictures or there’s video footage that directly relates to the incident being described in the text and will also mark that as verified.

So, there are tried and tested ways of doing verification and journalists have been doing it for decades. There’s also something we’re developing with Ushahidi team is called Swift River, which allows you to do the verification in a more automated way, right? There’s this user-generated explosion of content that’s happening around us across multiple media, not just the text based world with blogs and Twitter and SMS and so on, but also Shaker and YouTube and what Swift River does is try to cluster all that evidence. So, you have -- when people are talking about what’s happening in Tiananmen Square for example, they’re texting, they’re Tweeting, they’re putting stuff on YouTube, but all that information in way just dispersed across the information ecosystem.

What Swift River does is try and piece that evidence back together in one place and say, oh look, this incident that was just described seems to have been reported on seven different SMS’s from seven different phones, three text messages, two YouTube videos and three pictures. And then you start to triangulate the information, which goes back again to a basic sort of methodology that journalists have used, as human rights practitioners have been using for decades to try and validate information.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, now I wanted to get us to the main topic, which is your idea of maptivism, which it’s also now about gathering and sharing this kind of information in real time where people not just reporting on say I witnessed somebody stuffing ballots in a polling place, but I’m standing in Tiananmen Square and the police have just moved into this and that location and being able to in effect crowd source the awareness that individuals in the crowd may have about where blockages are happening, or where a safe path may exist for people to get themselves to safety.

So, say a bit more about what is new about this or -- I mean, it’s clearly and evolution, right? It’s not a break from what Ushahidi was doing before, but again I think what we’re seeing here is an effort by you and your team to sort of take something that people are already doing, but doing in a very sort of messy, disorganized way. You know, the web is great in that it allows for messy, disorganized behavior, but then developers, smart people come along and say, I think there’s a pattern here and we can help focus using some algorithms using some tools and make that pattern more visible.

So, say more about what you mean about maptivism.

PATRICK MEIER: So, I did not coin the term maptivism, I’m actually curious, I’m not sure who did. Maybe a colleague of mine, Christian (inaudible) in Germany had blogged about this a couple years ago already.

But it’s very simple: maptivism is simply a combination of maps, activism and technology and the technology angle here with respect to what we’ve been speaking about at Ushahidi is becoming more and more interesting because we’re starting to be able to create these live maps and live maps for activist purposes are really, really helpful, it’s been done a lot using SMS, but obviously the geographic angle provides more situational awareness.

0:15:23

So, it’s an interesting solution (inaudible) server the past few months, which I think are really helping out in allowing activists to really leverage geographic information in a very tactical kind of way. And if we remember that 80 percent of data that exists in the world is set to contain some kind of geographic information and providing that kind of data in an up-to-date kind of way to activists when they need it, it becomes really, really interesting.

There was a quote that I came across that I thought was really interesting by a security analyst, a US police security analyst who basically said that having a real time map with satellite photos about where everyone is at any given moment, is almost as good as having your own helicopter overhead. And I think that’s very, very true. It really allows you to get a sense of what’s happening and where it’s happening, even if you can’t see around the corner.

So, we’re getting to this area where we’re looking at maybe a new term, tactical data, right? Data can be used for all kinds of things, but there’s got to be a certain characteristic for data to be used tactically, and that’s where we get to this idea of maptivism and instant mapping. That’s where we’re getting this idea of, I need information now, where are the pro-(inaudible) supporters flooding the streets and where should I go, where’s the danger, how do I maneuver tactically and kinetically in order to get out of harm’s way or to gain the upper hand.

So, one of the things that we’re doing at Ushahidi, trying to help out in this area is we’re launching this idea of check-ins with a purpose. What check-ins or instant mapping, that’s one click of, hello, I’m here, there’s a problem; or, don’t go there, or you know, you use basically individuals as human sensors and you allow that information to be easily communicated in a very meshed and horizontal kind of way.

So, this is something we’re really excited about and we’re learning from others as well as because as I’ve mentioned, this is relatively new. There’s some colleagues of ours in London, a student group called Sukey who have been doing some phenomenal work with smart phones. They’ve even set up this great app -- you can use it as --

MICAH SIFRY: Sukey -- S-U-K-E-Y?

PATRICK MEIER: Yeah, (dot) org, yeah. I did blog about this, so if you go to irevolution.net, or s-u-k-e-y(dot)org --

MICAH SIFRY: I’ll make it easier for folks. We use PDF Network is the Twitter hash tag for the calls, and I’m going to Tweet out the link straight to your blog post that you’re referring to on irevolution.wordpress.com.

PATRICK MEIER: I was just going to share that little bit and you’ll see on the (inaudible), I just took a screen shot, they recently had a compass that was color-coded in terms of directions, green, orange, red and so on. And the red was, uh, oh, the police crackdown has been reported in that particular direction. So, it gives you in just the palm of your hand immediate situation awareness, very tactical, very intuitive, everybody can sort of understand the idea of the compass and red means not good and green means an escape route. I think that’s really, really interesting.

So, another great thing about these open source projects and just being able to communicate these lessons learned and best practices on blogs and social media is that we can partner with (inaudible) and company at Sukey to basically learn from each other and see how we can continue providing more interesting and useful ways to interface with that kind of information in a very tactical, kinetic kind of way.

So, I’m really excited and I think we’ll see some interesting uses of the check-ins with the purpose idea in the coming months.

MICAH SIFRY: So, I want folks to start thinking about questions they may have and again if you have a question, just hit *6 on your phone so we’ll start building up a queue.

I have to say Patrick, I’m struck by something as -- and I don’t know whether you’ve thought about the parallelism here and maybe Kevin Kelley has already anticipated this, but have you hear about something called the Gorgon Stare?

PATRICK MEIER: (Inaudible).

MICAH SIFRY: So, apparently The Washington Post had a story a few weeks ago, Gorgon, G-O-R-G-O-N, Stare, S-T-A-R-E, this is apparently a new tool that they’re using in urban pacification programs in Afghanistan and what it is is a drone that hovers above a city and has high resolution video cameras, or high resolution photographs, maybe not video, that literally take a 360-degree view of a situation. And then all that information is being sent back in real time to the military, whether it’s the combat units on the ground or back in some building in the United States where they manage the drones.

It’s basically the same thing to what you’re describing except -- well it’s being done in a very different way for obviously very different purposes -- but it’s also technology to give you real time awareness, a situation on the ground.

PATRICK MEIER: I was just looking it up -- yeah, and it also cost $150 million.

MICAH SIFRY: How much does the Ushahidi check-in or Sukey cost?

PATRICK MEIER: It doesn’t cost anything. If you’re going to use text messaging -- I think they use -- yeah, they use text messaging with the Twitter and (inaudible), so you know, a couple text messages here and there.

And so yes, there’s no doubt that state-centric organization have the budget to come up with high-powered, high (inaudible) solutions, but the idea of these open source tools that we can use in tactical kind of ways is to try and not necessarily completely level the playing field, but certainly change a bit the balance of power with these kinds of technologies.

And I think that can go a long way especially if we talk about these tools and getting in the hands of more activists. I think numbers do matter.

A couple other points I want to make before we get to a question, this is related is it’s been interesting to see how some of these very expensive military technologies have also been trumped by very simple tactics, right, this is the whole idea of asymmetric warfare, the U. S. Government and Department of Defense keep on churning out these costly technologies from (inaudible) and on and then we see some really interesting Carver tactics and strategies that completely circumvent these very expensive technologies.

So, I think there is always a way to be creative and circumvent some of these technologies. And that definitely goes as well for check-ins being used by activism and this is where I want to make one final point is we should -- we talk about technology a lot and it’s interesting and it’s exciting, but as we’ve seen recently with Egypt and Tunisia, if you don’t have the kind of preparation beforehand and the discipline and understanding of civil resistance and tactics and strategies, the technology’s not going to magically make you an expert in civil resistance. In fact, you’re likely to do more harm than good.

So, that’s something to keep in mind. Again, not the (inaudible) this idea combining map-activism and technology, if you’re missing the activism part you don’t have plans and strategies in place to preempt government actions and so on and then you’re in trouble.

So, I just want to bring it back to that, to the civil resistance and the training.

MICAH SIFRY: I actually was going to ask you -- and again, a reminder for folks who are listening in, we’re nearing the half-way point and if you have a question, hit *6 so you can get in line in the queue or just use hash tag PDF Network if you want to post a question there and we’ll pull comments and questions off the Twitter stream as well.

But the human element, I mean people maybe need to hear more about how much work does Ushahidi and you in particular have had to do in managing volunteers and figuring out -- you know, when you were organizing the effort around the Haiti earthquake and you had people volunteering both physically in dorm rooms and offices up at Tufts where you were to help collect and translate Tweets or SMS messages that were coming out of Haiti, and people all around the world.

I mean, there is a big human piece here, especially in filtering and verifying information in real time. I mean, in the case of Haiti wasn’t about helping people figure out where the army was so that they could get safely wherever they needed to go, it was about helping people figure out where the army needed to go, the relief people needed to go to help people pull out of -- pull people out who were buried alive.

So, there’s this role of lots and lots of volunteers want to pitch in. You know, you were blessed to have a lot of people helping but you then you have a problem, right? What’s the solution to that problem? How did you manage it?

PATRICK MEIER: Well thanks a lot for asking that question. That’s something else I’m really excited to share (inaudible) to get some input from others on the call.

It was an interesting and very unexpected few months back right after the earthquake in Haiti last year. What was interesting and I think one of the reasons we were able to -- or why volunteers were interested in helping out was it started with a pre-existing social network namely graduate student colleague, friends of mine at the Fletcher School and undergraduate students at Tufts University, we had a pre-determined identity of being members of Tufts University and the Fletcher School and many of us were friends already.

So, when we started getting the word out for asking people to come in and help quickly as possible the developments in Haiti, people came together because there was already a network. And then you had one student at Tufts --

MICAH SIFRY: Wait, what does that mean? I’m going to really pin you on this. What does that mean there was already a network? What do you mean by that?

PATRICK MEIER: Okay, so very concretely I’ll -- this is perhaps easier to say. When a few colleagues of mine introduced Ushahidi and other volunteers could no longer keep up with mapping the information that was coming out that was related to Haiti on Facebook, on Twitter, on blogs and mainstream media, this was about 48 hours after the earthquake, I simply sent an email to the Fletcher School list serve, basically involves 200 or 300 students, and simply and quickly explained, okay this is what I’m trying to do, a number of people already knew about Ushahidi because I had done a couple talks there, and I said, you know, if anybody’s got time to help out, please swing by my living room and I’ll pay for food.

And it was really interesting because by the end of that week we had at least 100 people that had shown up to get trained and help map. And I think that identity, that helped a lot and if I had gone out to Twitter, I think I would have gotten some help but it wouldn’t have been people who could have necessarily come initially to my living room and worked together as a think tank or a start up right away.

So, in that sense geography mattered at the beginning and then we got better and better at being able to branch out and to train people on Skype. And I think the solution, since you asked, is this idea that we launched back in October of last year as a stand-by volunteer task force, which now has close to 200 volunteers from about 18 different countries who have all been trained on how to do live mapping. And we’ve got different teams, it’s a very modular, flexible structure and we’ve gone through a couple simulations already in terms of live mapping projects.

So, that network is growing and we hope to double it in number over this year. And I think that’s partly the solution is people who are already trained, who already know each other, who have already worked together, and who already are part of a certain team.

Like we talked about verification early on, there’s a verification team that is part of the stand-by task force just like there is an SMS team and what have you and a translation team. The verification team is trained on how to validate and triangulate and cross-reference information that’s coming in. And our last activation took place during the floods in Queensland in Australia a few weeks ago, we had protocols, we had workflows, everybody knows what to do, it takes one email to activate the teams, there are coordinators for every team. So, we’re starting to streamline these volunteers who already want to help and who have helped in the past year, and we’re recruiting dozens every week.

MICAH SIFRY: Very quick question because I know there are people waiting to ask and is there a place on Ushahidi website like a Wiki or something where you have all this rich, sort of social knowledge because it isn’t just install an instance of Ushahidi and magic happens, right? There’s a lot of additional social knowledge that goes into place, so is there a place where people can access this other than listening to this call when it’s up on the PDF archive?

PATRICK MEIER: Yeah, well there are a number of places. One is if you do go to the Ushahidi website, we have a Resources and Community page, which by the way is going to be -- that division is going to be launched early March and it’ll have a lot more resources and guides on how to use Ushahidi and so on.

So, if you go to the Resources page -- yeah, if you go to Ushahidi.com and you go to Get Involved, you’ll see there’s a Resources page. There are a number of different guides on how to use Ushahidi and we’ll work behind an 80-page guide with lots of screenshots for non-tech people on how to make the best, the best use of the Ushahidi platform once you’ve got it installed. And that’s going to be really also early March as well.

0:31:05

So, those are the different ways that you can learn from others but we also have a dedicated Skype chat group for deployers where we’ve got 30, 40, 50 people on this group that have already been involved in a number of different deployments and who share practices and strategies and so on.

And finally for the stand-by volunteer task force, if you go to blog.standbytaskforce.com, we’re sharing a lot of our best practices and what we’re learning there and the material. And if you want to join, you can simply email [email protected] and then we’ll send you information to access our main platform and we’ve got YouTube videos, we’ve got Power Points, we’re trying to develop the groups that people can also sort of teach themselves. And we’ve actually got a way to how you start. You start with one particular team and then once you get experience you go to another team and so on.

So, there are a lot of different ways and if people want to learn more, simply email me, [email protected].

MICAH SIFRY: That’s fantastic. And really there’s a wonderful larger lesson here which is maybe some of the folks on the call already know this but it doesn’t hurt to repeat. These successes, you know, projects like Wikipedia or Ushahidi or I’m thinking of a big web community like The Daily Coast site, they are held together not just by technology but by people and social practices, and the sharing of that information and the refining of it is really I think one of the things that we here at PDF believe very much in, that it’s very, very important to try and foster that community of smart practice and not let people be fooled into thinking, oh my God, it’s on my iPhone, it must work perfectly just because Steve Jobs made sure it would.

Okay, so we’re going to unmute the first person on the call and it’ll take a second for your phone to unmute but if you would introduce yourself and if you have a comment or a question, just try not to make it too long. Go ahead.

PARTICIPANT 1: This is Mike Nelson, I’m the Professor of Internet Studies at Georgetown, and I have -- good to hear from you, Micah.

MICAH SIFRY: I saw you on the McNeil Lehrer Show yesterday, congratulations.

PARTICIPANT 1: Thank you. My four minutes of fame. Thanks for organizing this and Patrick, thank you so much for a really interesting talk.

I wanted to touch on some cases that are a little more complicated than the Haiti earthquake or election monitoring and specifically wanted to ask about how you can deal with spoofing, how you deal with incorporating additional types of geospatial data and also talk a little bit about how you motivate people to act now rather than later and let me give you two cases where these things come and see if you have any ideas.

Tomorrow morning here in Washington, the AAAS is meeting and I’m hosting a panel on The Cloud and the Crowd, the Future of Online Collaboration. One of our speakers is Norm Whitaker with (DARFA) and he oversaw the Red Balloon Project, which you’re probably familiar with. The end of 2009, DARFA launched 10 large red weather balloons at the end of a cable in 10 different locations around the country and they challenged teams of people to go find them. And what was interesting wasn’t so much how social networks formed and how people shared information, the real “ah ha” the real funny discovery was that people were spoofing. There were teams that formed just to confuse everybody else.

And so I guess I’d like to know a little bit more about how you deal with identity, how do you get to know that you’re really seeing posts from people who are legitimate and not out to confuse people.

And this relates to the other case study, which a number of groups are looking at how to crowd source the re-districting process here in the United States. And again the problem there is if you want to get people involved in drawing the districts for their own state, you have to have a way of knowing that they really are registered to vote in that state otherwise it’s not really legitimate to have somebody from Germany or Bangladesh trying to draw the Congressional districts of Iowa.

But this is a really cool project but there’s this problem of anonymity and identity, there’s another problem that you have to be able to incorporate some pretty rich data sets on election behavior and population. And you also have a problem that you have to get people to work on it now. That’s easy when it’s an earthquake and Haiti and lives are at stake, but any ideas on how to get people to engage quickly and how to make sure the right people are engaged and you know who they are?

MICAH SIFRY: That’s a fantastic question.

PATRICK MEIER: Yes, Mike, great question. I’ve come across your name before so it’s awesome to actually be on the same call as you.

So, yeah, you definitely asked a hard question. Let me try and answer and to hopefully get comments from others as well and advice because we actually do not have all the answers to these questions. I think what we’ve seen is Ushahidi used within previous (inaudible) groups, right, and then hybrids and I’ll tell you what I mean.

In the case of Egypt during the parliamentary elections, this Egyptian group trained a number of bloggers over a period of three months on how to report and how to use the Ushahidi platform, how to submit information, multimedia content and so on. So, these were individuals who were already trusted. They had a trusted network, a known entity that was already recording information.

What Al Jazheera did in a similar way a few years back when they used the platform in Gaza is their own journalists were reporting information so again, a trust network but they also opened it up to the rest of the crowd and they could distinguish it between the information that was from their journalists versus from unknown individuals in the crowd.

And I think that is one way to address the issue of potential spoofing is having a control mechanism and what that allows you to do is if you have members of the crowd that starts recording in line with a trusted network say four out of five times or to that effect then they start winning brownie points, sort of speak, right? This is the idea of being able to rate people who submit information like on eBay or Amazon or so on. You have people who leave a digital history, a digital trace.

So, that’s one idea that I think I’ve seen used that I can address this situation of spoofing and we’re doing something to that affect with Swift River, we’re creating this idea of a river ID is that people who get involved in using Swift River in the Ushahidi platform can get a specific ID that basically can mark them as trustworthy and others can rate their trustworthiness and so on, so that’s a potential partial solution to that problem.

And I’m familiar with the (inaudible) content because my good friend Riley Crane was the one who spearheaded the winning team and we had many long hours of conversation on exactly the issue you mentioned about other teams trying to trip the others and yet they still, within a very quick turnaround time, despite the (inaudible) were able to find the correct locations of the balloons. So, yes, there was spoofing but I think more interestingly it was still possible to get to the end goal.

And then the last question -- two of your questions you ask about incorporating other types of geospatial data, we’ve just released geometry mapping functionality for Ushahidi so you no longer restricted to having to map points and (inaudible) on your map, but you can start mapping polygons and you can start tracing buildings and labeling those as well. So, that’s sort of moving forward in terms of the geospatial.

And then engaging, how do you engage people right now? I think part of that is -- that’s a huge question, how do you leverage the crowd for what you want to do. There’s a great study by (Ulegan Unkhet) out of LSE that I can share with Micah later and he can put on the PDF Twitter feed where he’s looking at the idea of what makes for a successful crowd sourcing project. And there are different angles, but the idea is to also be in line with what the crowd wants and how do you know that?

But from a technology and a pragmatic point of view, what we’ve been looking more and more into is this idea of mechanical (inaudible) and micro-tasking. Can you reduce the task to very small tasks that are easy and easily repeated and don’t require upward training so that you can really leverage and scale up. And that’s what we did when we partnered with (inaudible) last year during the (inaudible) floods, they’ve done some great work on mechanical (inaudible) services and they have a great micro-tasking platform.

We basically got a couple of their engineers who volunteered to set up a micro-tasking plug-in for the (inaudible) platform for Pakistan that allowed anybody to go ahead and start translating text messages or geo-referencing and then in line with this idea of mechanical (inaudible) services, you only -- you could say well only three or more people let’s say geo-reference this particular text message within the same five mile radius will we actually map it?

So again, it leverages the power of the crowd and the scale of the crowd and you have -- you could make that number higher. Only if 10 people translate the text messages in similar ways will we actually publish it.

So, that is possibly one way. But then again what I think -- again, what we’ve learned the hard way is being reactive as we did in Haiti. The easier way is actually to be proactive and prepared and develop something like a volunteer standby task force that you can use and activate and let have the kind of swarming behavior when you need it. So, we also accredit it to some just-in-time crowd sourcing of time critical crowd sourcing.

It’s a challenge, I don’t have all the answers and I’ll be (inaudible) so maybe I’ll pick your brain with that.

PARTICIPANT 1: That was an incredibly useful set of answers to three very hard questions. Thank you very much.

MICAH SIFRY: That was really terrific. I should mention before I go to the question I see on Twitter that I want to ask you that Crowd Flower that project in Pakistan that Patrick mentioned, the CEO of Crowd Flower and Patrick will both be speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in June, so we’re looking forward to digging in further on the subject there.

Question from Jeb Miller on Twitter. Jed I know works with Revenue Watch and is a long-time Tech Politics (inaudible). His question for you is what is the most common step that groups miss or don’t consider when they set up or use Ushahidi?

PATRICK MEIER: Wow, that’s a great question as well. I think it’s assumptions that are made that are not quite accurate. One of the things we try and remind colleagues and partners at Ushahidi is that the technology will be at most 10 percent of the solution. So, downloading and (inaudible) the platform is becoming -- it’s not quite where I want it to be yet, but it’s gotten a lot easier over the past couple of years. And in general now, these open source platforms for mapping (inaudible) and so on are getting significantly easier with every passing month almost. And so that becomes the easy bit.

Now it used to be that you needed to be more tech savvy in (inaudible) program, PHPO, whatever other language and be able to set up whatever servers stuff and so we’ve lowered the barriers for that and we’ve done so even more now with this crowd map because of the hosted version of Ushahidi.

The problem is what we’ve seen over the past couple years -- and this is starting to change now with groups that are using the platform more than once, more than just a one off project -- but there’s still an overwhelming assumption that as long as I download and install my Ushahidi platform, everything will be magical, everything will work like magic.

But unless you have actually a project in mind that’s well thought through with a well-designed program design and either paid staff, volunteers or what have you, but they are trained and they have the time and you have a deliberately well thought-through media and outreach strategy, how are you going to get the word out? How are you going to be able to draw on what you’re doing and get the word out on mainstream media, what have you? How are you going to raise funding in order to keep going? What’s your end goal? Do you have a strategy in mind on how to make your project more sustainable? Are you really addressing the most (inaudible) issue in the particular content that you’re trying to work in?

It goes back to just really the core aspects of project management and best practices and organization and so on, that and technology aspects. So, that I think it the most common misconception than the (inaudible) will give you all the other 90 percent and that’s really for better or worse, simply not the case.

0:45:52

MICAH SIFRY: Well I actually want to go back and sort of ask about a more sensitive type question because it strikes me -- I mean Ushahidi, we love Ushahidi, it’s an amazing open source, non-profit effort that is changing the world in very good ways. I’ve included a whole section in my book on The Age of Transparency.

But it’s best uses have been around disasters, around crises, right? I mean, Haiti is absolutely wonderful story, lives were saved because of the work that you were able to enable. But it’s political impact, has it really -- to go back to the first use case where it was used to map the difficulties in Kenya after the election. It’s been used in some cases -- you know, Egypt you mentioned -- there were two instances there where it was going to be used to help track reports of fraud. It turns out there was a lot of fraud but it didn’t matter. The revolution in Egypt wasn’t sparked by people sharing information more efficiently about election fraud. Unfortunately election fraud in Egypt was -- I don’t know, just such an accepted fact of life, it wasn’t enough to really get the ball rolling.

So, what is that telling us? Is it that you really haven’t hit critical mass around political issues? It may be that the maptivism work that you’re talking about now where you know, I can certainly see demonstrators in all kinds of circumstances wanting and using a reliable tool that helps them figure out where it’s safe to stand or unsafe to go.

But the election monitoring, and we did Twitter Vote Report here, which in some ways is a cousin or very close cousin to the same idea. What would you say is the political impact or lack of in terms of how Ushahidi has been used in the cases where people have used it for election monitoring? What’s your read on that?

PATRICK MEIER: Yeah, that is a good question. Basically the organizations and networks that use Ushahidi platform are very much pioneers. They’ve taken this creative technology type software and they’re trying things out and I think what we’ve seen -- until recently and maybe it’s starting to change because I think these organizations are becoming more sophisticated in their use of Ushahidi, I think what we’ve seen over the past couple of years is sort of one off trials. Let’s try and monitor the (inaudible) and we’ll win the elections here; let’s try this.

And for probably I would say for 98 percent of those cases, until really -- I would say until November of last year, those election monitoring projects have been rather reactive. I remember organizations coming to us and saying, oh, we want to monitor (inaudible) elections in this country and the election’s happening next month. Well that’s just not going to work, right? You don’t see any of the official organizations that do official election monitoring setup shop a month before the elections of the country. They start nine months, they start a year ahead, they do election (inaudible) focus groups, they do media outreach and so on.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, you don’t flash mob this problem.

PATRICK MEIER: No, I don’t think so. And again, it’s really in many ways it’s very validating to see what’s coming out now out of Egypt where we saw how well trained and disciplined the activists were that they were conversant and so resistant, that they were familiar with Jeanne Sharpe’s work and (inaudible) had done and so on. These were not just flash mobs, these were intelligent, planned strategic operations.

0:50:29

And the closest that we come to in terms of uses of Ushahidi platform for election monitoring actually are Egypt, November / December of last year. These groups spent several months on the ground training every day, working in five different cities, having focus groups, asking about what the impact could be and so on. We have yet to see over the past three years at Ushahidi such a dedicated and deliberate approach to using Ushahidi platform for election monitoring.

Now the question is --

MICAH SIFRY: By the way, which group was that?

PATRICK MEIER: D-I-S-C, Development Institution for -- I don’t have it handy. It’s on my blog and I’ll share the blog as well.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, we’ll look it up. Very interesting. There’s one more call waiting and since we only have one more question and we’re down to our last five minutes so I want to make sure -- this is Denise Mengan on the line?

PARTICIPANT 2: Oh, hi, Micah, it’s Rochellya. Hi Patrick, I was really curious when you’re talking about these sort of more long-form projects in planning and using Ushahidi. If it’s not just necessarily just about that critical moment, if you can kind of situate it in terms of sort of the every day-ness of the usefulness of this platform in terms of (inaudible), are you planning for some positive social action or just in terms of a go-to kind of resource for people to check back in, rather than it being something that’s about that critical moment, about that crisis moment or about sort of being able to ask quickly.

PATRICK MEIER: Sure, that’s a really good question and I think it actually ties in as well to a comment that Micah just made earlier so thanks for asking. You know, we say that the best uses of Ushahidi has been in the disaster space. I don’t know how accurate that is because the vast majority of uses of the Ushahidi platform are actually not in the disaster space but they don’t get the kind of publicity and media coverage that a Haiti will get or a Pakistan will get or a (inaudible) will get or what have you.

But there have been dozens of -- and more than dozens of applications in local governance and environmental monitoring and in other sort of day-to-day things as you were just asking now. There’s a map in LA for bicycle accidents and I don’t know why, but it’s gotten a lot of traction. And there are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who have amassed where they’ve had an accident with their bikes on this map.

So, I’m glad you asked that question because we often get the Ushahidi name synonymous with crisis and so on, and that’s not always true. So, for longer term projects I think that’s -- it’s still very much applicable. At the end of the day what you’re doing is your live mapping, you’re putting dynamic data on a map over a long period of time.

There was a successful project in India in Bangalore where even -- it was (inaudible) map rickshaw drivers and people who had complaints, it was a complaint mechanism or a complaints map against rickshaw drivers. You would say, oh, I was refused a ride here; I was overcharged there, and I use this example often because it is not necessarily your sort of acute crisis, it’s an on-going sort of noble governance kind of thing.

But I also use it because that map -- I’d only gotten about 60 or 70 reports published on that platform and some people would say, oh, that’s really not much, who cares, right? But even with that low number relatively, the local commissioner who is charge of transportation issue in Bangalore publicly stated that he was going to take it up on himself to make sure that these complaints were reacted to, that they were followed up on and so on.

So, it’s not always -- you know, you don’t always need 100,000 people from the crowds to make a difference. Often when you take information, you put in the public domain and if it’s relevant, if it’s tangible, if it’s something that’s real and appeals to people, it can already make a difference with just a few dozen dots on a map.

So, that’s something to keep in mind as well. And just to close, I hope I didn’t come across as dodging the question in terms of Egypt. It’s an open question, that’s one of my dissertation case studies is looking that the impact of Ushahidi’s platforms in Egypt and the Sudan. Having talked with some of the colleagues there in Cairo, there is a formal complaint mechanism that can be used, you know you go through the (inaudible) in Egypt and there’s been about 1500 complaints that have been submitted to the courts with respect to election fraud and what have you.

The question I’m trying to find out is any of those have come from this Ushahidi map that has something like 2300 individual reports with 300 pictures and I don’t know what. I don’t know how (inaudible) information but that is the question and that really, Micah, I’m glad you asked that question because that really is now the next step.

It’s great that we get these reports mapped, it’s great that we get them up with media content, it’s great that we get civic engagement and civic participation, but let’s bring it to that next level now. Let’s take that information and really change the balance of power that exists in some of these societies and these regimes.

I think now it’s using this information tactically and strategically either through existing channels like judicial, legal channels or others to really now force the hand of government on some of these issues.

MICAH SIFRY: Well absolutely. Well look, Patrick, it’s been a fascinating hour, thank you so much for giving of your time and knowledge and keep up the really good work. It’s very exciting.

And we will check in again and of course be hearing from you more in June at the conference. I should mention that registration is open and we’re still in our early-bird period, prices will go up as we get closer to June 6th and June 7th.

Also we’ll have a post up on The Tech President blog through people with some of the links that Patrick mentioned and other notes on the call as well as the podcast link if you want to share this and spread the word.

As folks know, these calls are free. For the next three months, PDF Network is completely open so please help share the word. If you have suggestions on topics for calls, send them to us at [email protected].

Two weeks from now we’ll have a very interesting call with Paull Young who’s going to be talking -- he’s the Director of Digital and Social Media for Charity Water, which is a very successful and new organization that works to raise money to help folks in the developing world get clean water. And so we’re going to be talking to him about how they make powerful use of social media.

That’s two weeks from now here on the PDF Network. Until then, thanks to AT&T, our sponsor. Thanks Patrick for your time and folks we’ll see you online and we’ll see you here in two weeks.

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