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El Salvador: New System to Enhance Collection and Sharing of Vital Crime Information

The Ushahidi team is always excited to hear news of initiatives that build upon the Ushahidi platform, be it implementations on the web, or those that use the different clients developed for mobile phones. The first complete phone client for Ushahid was Windows Mobile, which was spearheaded by Dale Zak, with extensive assistance from Pablo Destefanis and the rest of the Ushahidi developer community. It is with excitement that we share the news from RTI International and its partners on a crime mapping initiative in El Salvador.

seguridad_5.jpg

image courtesy of RTI

SANTA TECLA, El Salvador — May 12, 2010 — The Santa Tecla Municipality, the U.S. Government through its Agency for International Development (USAID), RTI International (RTI), the National Civilian Police (PNC) and Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), through its Wireless Reach™ initiative, today launched a solution that will use 3G wireless technology to create and test a crime reporting and mapping system. The solution aims to facilitate crime reduction by improving the real-time collection and sharing of criminal information.

The Seguridad Inalámbrica (Wireless Security) system will make vital crime data more accessible to law enforcement officials and the municipal government. This capability enables real-time monitoring and analysis of crime patterns for the purpose of improving the implementation of more effective crime prevention measures. Seguridad Inalámbrica demonstrates how the applications enabled by advanced wireless technologies turn the mobile phone into a multifaceted communications tool that can be used for data transmission as well as traditional voice and sms.

“3G technologies provide advanced wireless broadband access to the Internet and have enormous potential for enhancing the capabilities of people who protect and serve our communities,” said Flavio Mansi, senior vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm Latin America. “In the United States, Qualcomm has a long history of working with federal, state and local government organizations to provide technology solutions that help promote public safety. We are pleased to have an opportunity to use our expertise to help the Municipality of Santa Tecla reduce crime.”
Law enforcement agents participating in the project have been issued 3G mobile phones running an easy to use, crime reporting software application. The devices and application are used to report crime from as close as possible to the location where it occurred and information about the nature and location of the crime is transmitted from the handset to a crime mapping database. Crime reports can then be mapped from the crime database using open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. The system then displays incidents on detailed maps, facilitates the identification of high-risk locations and helps track changes in crime patterns over time as law enforcement agencies’ crime and violence prevention programs are introduced.
“This capability will allow us to design and implement timely and effective prevention measures to continue transforming Santa Tecla into a more safe and peaceful community to live in,” said Oscar Ortiz, mayor of Santa Tecla.

“We Salvadorans tend to see mobile phones only as devices for the purpose of voice communication,” said Carlos Antonio Ascencio Giron, general director of Policía Nacional Civil (PNC). “The ability to use mobile phones to report crimes when and where they happen has been eye opening. This system will not only allow us to better track criminal incidents, it will free up time and resources which can be directed to furthering law enforcement and crime prevention.”
Qualcomm Incorporated, through its Wireless Reach initiative, has provided funding to RTI International (RTI) to roll out this system. Funding supports project strategy, system design and development, training, implementation and management oversight. Seguridad Inalámbrica aspires to create a sustainable crime mapping foundation that can be tested and proven in Santa Tecla and eventually implemented in other municipalities and other countries in the region.
“We are delighted to be working with Qualcomm on the Seguridad Inalámbrica project,” said Pablo Destefanis, technical expert for RTI International. “Their support of innovation in this area allows us to develop and implement a system that can serve as an example for El Salvador and beyond.”

More info here.

Posted in Community, Deployment, Mobile, Ushahidi.

By juliana
May 25, 2010

1 comment

Ushahidi Used to Aggregate Reports of Harassment and Intimidation in Arizona

[Guest Post by JD Godchaux, Executive Director and Lela Prashad, Chief Technology Officer of NiJeL | Community Impact Through Mapping. Lela holds an MS in Geological Sciences from Arizona State University (ASU). JD holds a Master in Public Administration from ASU. Lela and JD worked to deploy Unite Arizona along with Project Manager of Unite Arizona, Layal Rabat. Lela can be reached at lprashad 'at' nijel.org, JD at jd 'at' nijel.org, and Layal at lrabat 'at' nijel.org.]

As you may be aware, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) recently passed the Arizona legislature and was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer. The Associated Press described the four “key provisions” of this new law, which – if it survives various legal challenges – will go into effect on July 28, 2010. According to the AP, the new law:

  • Makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally by specifically requiring immigrants to have proof of their immigration status. Violations are a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. Repeat offenses would be a felony.
  • Requires police officers to ‘make a reasonable attempt’ to determine the immigration status of a person if there is a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that he or she is an illegal immigrant. Race, color or national origin may not be the only things considered in implementation. Exceptions can be made if the attempt would hinder an investigation.
  • Allow lawsuits against local or state government agencies that have policies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws. Would impose daily civil fines of $1,000-$5,000. There is pending follow-up legislation to halve the minimum to $500.
  • Targets hiring of illegal immigrants as day laborers by prohibiting people from stopping a vehicle on a road to offer employment and by prohibiting a person from getting into a stopped vehicle on a street to be hired for work if it impedes traffic.

There has been much discussion in the national and local media with respect to this law and it’s implementation, specifically the potential use of racial profiling by law enforcement to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants in Arizona. However, this is nothing new to Arizona. Over the last several years, some law enforcement agencies in Arizona have been particularly aggressive in enforcing Federal immigration laws and other state and local laws to apprehend and remove illegal immigrants from the state. For example, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office conducted a raid at City Hall in Mesa, AZ on October 17, 2008. The raid took place at about 2:00 am targeting the Mesa City Hall cleaning crew and 13 people were apprehended on suspicion of being in the country illegally. This was just one of many “raids” or “sweeps” that have occurred here with regularity in recent times.

Whatever your personal position is on the issue of immigration, there are a few things that we all should be able to agree on. First, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states in Section 1 that States cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (emphasis mine). The architects of the 14th Amendment were careful not to use the word citizen in the second half of Section 1, a word they had used twice in the prior clause. All this to say that persons within the borders of the Unites States do have rights granted by Federal and State laws that cannot be infringed upon.

Second, we think we should all be able to agree that people should not have to live in fear, whether it be fear of criminal activity in their neighborhood, fear of workplace raids, intimidation or harassment, or fear of being potentially deported for reporting a crime. Many people in the U.S. and Mexico live in fear of criminal activity perpetrated by organized gangs often times involved in moving drugs or people across the U.S./Mexico border. One only has to look at the state of fear that the residents of Juarez, Mexico must endure to know that this is unacceptable. With the expansion of law enforcement powers under SB 1070, it is likely that some legal U.S. residents, green card holders, H1B Visa holders, and other legal residents of Arizona will fear their interaction with law enforcement because they speak a language other than English, they speak English with an accent, or they are a member of a racial or ethnic minority group. There are large number of cases, such as this one, where U.S. citizens have been detained or deported, and with aggressive enforcement of SB 1070, many more legal U.S. citizens could find themselves detained for long periods of time or even deported. This is also unacceptable.

Finally, we think we all can agree that people should be able to report criminal activity against them, their family or their friends (or crime they’ve witnessed) without fear of retribution. Whether or not safeguards are in place to protect those in the United States illegally who need to report criminal activity, with SB 1070 as the law of Arizona, it will be very difficult to establish a trust relationship between these people and law enforcement. As a result, some crime will undoubtedly go unreported and criminals will learn quickly that they can prey upon those who are here illegally – those who are afraid to call on law enforcement and cannot fight back. This might be the most unacceptable, perhaps unintended, outcome of SB 1070.

Unite Arizona

At NiJeL, we watched closely as this bill made its way through the Arizona House and Senate, and we urged the Governor not to sign it. When she did, we thought about how best to respond to this issue with the tools we had at hand. It was our former intern, now Project Manager and Volunteer Coordinator of Unite Arizona, Layal Rabat, who developed the idea at ICCM 2009 to use Ushahidi as a tool to track the immigration raids and sweeps. Rather than limit the implementation to the raids or sweeps, we collectively decided to expand the focus to include unreported crime, harassment by law enforcement, harassment by non-law enforcement, organized intimidation, hate group activity, and boycotts. We’re also considering an expansion of the categories to include positive efforts made by law enforcement and others to lessen tensions within and across our Arizona communities.

Screenshotf4UshahidiBlog

As we mentioned before, harassment and intimidation of racial minorities has been happening in Arizona for some time, and there are other organizations providing support and services to people involved in these incidents. Yet this is the first instance in which an open platform has been deployed to track the impacts of immigration policies Arizona’s state, county and city governments and law enforcement agencies have put in place. It’s unclear how often incidents of harassment, intimidation and other organized efforts to instill fear in minority populations will occur – in fact the main function of Unite Arizona is to attempt to understand the scale and scope of the problem.

Since the launch of Unite Arizona, we’ve heard from both supporters and detractors of SB 1070, and we’ve responded to these groups with the same few messages. First, the Ushahidi platform is open for anyone to use, be it viewing the data, submitting an incident, or getting alerts of local reports, and we’re crafting policies on report approval and validation that will be open for all to see. Next, we’re working very hard to disseminate the text message and voicemail number – 602-824-TALK (8255) – the twitter hashtag – #MHRSAZ – the email address – report@immigrantharassment.com - and the url – ImmigrantHarassment.com – and if we’ve done a good job of disseminating this information, then a lack of reports to the system might indicate that SB 1070 did not lead to increased levels of harassment and intimidation. It is possible that this might happen, but it would be impossible to know if harassment and intimidation was occurring without some tool to measure it. Unite Arizona provides an independent tool that people can use to anonymously report incidents, and it provides a simple framework for understanding how big of a problem we have here in Arizona.

Technical Aspects

For those of you who follow this blog with an eye toward interesting Ushahidi implementations, we’ve done a few things differently on the back end than the “traditional” out-of-the-box installation. To keep costs down initially, we’re using a Qwert unlimited SMS plan ($20 per month; $10 activation), which you can use in the U.S. with any unlocked GSM handset. We’re hoping that future funding will enable us to set up and rent an SMS short code from Clickatell, which will preclude the need for this SMS plan, but for now, this appears to be working well.

However, we’re currently only using the Qwert along with FrontlineSMS for our sending out SMS alerts. Qwert provides you with a random U.S. phone number, and in our case the area code is 978. For our local SMS number – 602-824-TALK (8255) – we’re using Google Voice to bring messages directly into Ushahidi. Google Voice allows you to forward incoming voice and SMS messages to an email account, and so we’re simply forwarding the messages we receive on our Google Voice number to the reporting email address – report@immigrantharassment.com. One advantage this offers over a regular SMS system is that Google Voice attempts to do voice mail transcription, so if a reporter attempted to call the number above instead of texting, we would still be able to incorporate their message, which is machine-transcribed by Google Voice. Admittedly, machine transcription is limited and we’re unsure how the system will respond to machine translation in Spanish, but we’re hoping that this might allow more people to use the system who are calling from public pay phones or land lines where SMS is not an option.

Given the wide array of news reports related to immigration and the lack of appropriate, available news feeds, we’ve relied on Google News to help us pre-process news from over 40 local, national and international news organizations. We’ve created feeds with Google News that pull stories from each news organization that have both “Arizona” and “Immigration” in their body. By using this method, we’ve been able to create reports directly from news stories with greater frequency than we otherwise could.

How to Help

As we mentioned above, we’re currently putting together a protocol for volunteer moderation, but if anyone would like to help us moderate incoming reports, please contact us. In addition, if your organization would like to show support for this effort and would like more information about how to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. Finally, you can also help us by following our updates on Twitter and becoming a fan of our project on Facebook. Thank you!

Posted in Community, Deployment. Tagged with , .

By patrick
May 20, 2010

17 comments

Update on Fletcher’s Ushahidi-Haiti Project: Training the Trainer

[Guest blog post by Denise Roz Sewell who is in charge of Crisis Mapping for the Fletcher Team running the Ushahidi-Haiti Project. She just returned from a 2-week mission in Haiti. Roz is also Pickering Fellow and was a Fulbright scholar in Morocco prior to joining the graduate program The Fletcher School.]

I am a crisis mapper. I have been mapping need in Haiti. That means that I take a message (from Twitter, Facebook, SMS), and based on information contained within the message, I place it on a map. Primarily, I have been working with the Ushahidi Haiti Project and the Mission 4636 group of organizations. Through the short-code 4636 we created a picture of the evolving crisis in Haiti that was unprecedented in both its scope and timing. However, I live in Boston. I am from Atlanta. Honestly, it makes no sense for me to be the one mapping locations in Haiti when there are Haitians ready and willing to interact in the discussions of their own reconstruction.

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So, I travel to Haiti. As a part of the Ushahidi Haiti project run by the Fletcher Team, one of our primary goals is to transfer skills and knowledge to the affected populations so that they can use everything we’ve learned through the 4 months we’ve spent working on this project. This means that the purpose of my trip was two-fold: 1 – assess the potential to transfer our knowledge to a single Haitian organization in Haiti and 2 – begin to transfer knowledge to any existing organizations that could use it.

Naturally, I went to Mirebalais. One of the key members of the Mission4636 group is Samasource – an organization bringing computer-based jobs to disadvantaged communities around the world. In a partnership with 1,000 Jobs they set up a computer center in Mirebalais, Haiti to translate messages coming into 4636 from Creole into English. I went to this computer center ready and willing to transfer my knowledge about crisis mapping, technology, and the Ushahidi platform.

What I have loved about my work in Haiti is that oftentimes when I feel like I have something to say or give, Haitians give it back to me ten fold. In my trip to Mirelabais I know I taught the workers how to find coordinates using OpenStreetMap, but I can definitely say that they taught me so much more–they taught me about Haiti.

The first day of my trip, the directors of the 1,000 Jobs site bring me to the center. Before my training, we sat in the office and talked about Haiti. We talked about their lives and ideas for the country, and how hard they’ve worked to get to where they are. I was afraid that my trip would be considered another burden or task they need to supervise. Instead, I received the resounding feedback, “No, this is the idea, we need to bring more skills to Haiti. Thank you.”

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Later, I sat down with six intelligent, young Haitians eager to learn this new skill. I show them the Haiti Crisis Map and walk them through the training documents. Then, I show them the satellite imagery feature and how there is an image of this exact computer center building from the sky on the Internet. I teach them how to find their houses. They picked it up immediately and started laughing to each other, finding their parents’ or aunts’ houses once they mastered the current location. They loved it, and they turned to me and said, “I didn’t know this could exist for Haiti.”

The next day I taught them Ushahidi, which again they understood immediately. I sat back and watched the morning shift train the night shift on creating a report, and then suddenly I felt useless – I had trained an amazing group in the morning and they understood the idea of crisis mapping so well that I could sit back and just listen. Occasionally, they would ask me a question but really I remained a quiet bystander watching Haitian crisis mapping happen the way it was suppose to happen – with Haitians.

Later that day, some of the 1,000 Jobs workers took me around Mirebalais. We had lunch at a small restaurant, where the typical Haitian spaghetti breakfast was served. They showed me the rest of town and talked about their lives at university before the earthquake. They asked me about Facebook and wanted to know my opinions about music. They talked about their families and their friends. They just talked about life.

Now that I am back in the US I realize the unbelievable importance of this trip, and I realize that these workers actually trained me. They showed me Haiti as not just a crisis and not just a map. They reminded me there is a country underneath all the rubble and in fact, there is a country despite the rubble. They showed me Haiti.

Posted in Community, Deployment, Ushahidi Users, disaster. Tagged with , .

By patrick
May 19, 2010

11 comments

Allocation of Time: Deploying Ushahidi

[This post is by Chris Blow, one of the longest serving Ushahidi community members, and one of the brains behind the whole SwiftRiver platform.]

allocation

I just had a meeting with some Knight fellows at Stanford who have some very interesting ideas about how to use Ushahidi in a journalistic context — very exciting stuff.

As a way of giving some quick advice, I drew this little chart in the meeting to show what I think is one of the biggest problems with most launches: the “if you launch it they will come” idea. (As David Kobia puts it.)

The simplicity of Ushahidi setup sometimes leads to some crestfallen administrators.

Just because you bought a domain name and ran the Ushahidi installer doesn’t mean that anyone is going to use they system — and even if you somehow get a lot of reports, you might not be relevant to the existing systems (that is, all the other people who are working on the same problem). So as Ory said in Cape Town, “Don’t get too jazzed up! Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.”

Systems like Ushahidi have turned enormous communication barriers into a trivial installation and training process. But there is a whole other 90% of real work.

One way to solve this: forget about crowdsourcing. Unless you want to do a huge outreach campaign, design your system to be used by just a few people. Start with the assumption that you are not going to get a single report from anyone who is not on your payroll. You can do a lot with just a few dedicated reporters who are pushing reports into the system, curating and aggregating sources.

A related post from Wherecamp

Posted in Community, Deployment, Strategy, Ushahidi. Tagged with , , .

By Erik Hersman
May 19, 2010

12 comments

Welcoming Limo and Linda

One of the great joys of being a part of Ushahidi is the calibre of the people that you work with. We run a small and tight ship, so we have to be very particular about who joins us full time. Thus far we’ve been overly fortunate in the quality of individuals who are here. Today I’m excited to announce the arrival of two individuals who have been a part of the community for a while, and are incredibly good at what they do.

Limo Taboi (aka @Bankelele), is joining the Ushahidi team to help with the increasingly complicated area of finance.

Limo Taboi aka Bankelele

As many of you know, he’s a long-time blogger and his popular Bankelele blog on banking and business in Kenya has been a perennial favorite for many years. Like many other Ushahidi members, Limo was a TED Africa fellow, and he has a strong background in banking and finance. His role will be to help us manage incoming funds, work on processes to make it easier to operate the organization and to help with the Kenya-side payroll management.

Linda Kamau (@LKamau) joined us last month, in time for the Ushahidi Annual Strategy Meeting. She’s a pure coder and has been involved with the extended dev community since the end of last year. Linda caught our eye due to her commitment and energy. She’s already proven to be a road warrior, having hit Burundi, the US and Tanzania in just the first month on the job… :)

Miami Meetup 11

Both Limo and Linda will be joining me in Nairobi, so there are now a few of us working out of the iHub and doing our best to keep this train on the tracks in East Africa. Personally, I’m thrilled to have two people with so much energy and experience to work side-by-side with.

Posted in Nairobi, Ushahidi, team. Tagged with , , , , , .

By Erik Hersman
May 18, 2010

4 comments

First Ushahidi 101 held @iHub Nairobi

The first session on Ushahidi 101 took place on May 12th, attracting 16 people from different organizations in Nairobi.

2010-05-12 10.16.04

The session was meant to introduce Ushahidi to people who may not already know how it works, share the special features that we may not be using or didn’t know how they could help and most important was to network; share experiences on how Ushahidi is applicable in various organizational settings.

The introduction dealt with more basic information about the history of Ushahidi and the latest projects that the platform has been used. The group then divided into three depending on interest.

The first break out session was on the Ushahidi back end, introducing participants on how to customize the platform as well as how to manage the content. This group was led by Melissa.

Linda was leading the advanced tech group- the participants who knew what is HTML- the group mainly addressed more complex questions of customization and was well suited for the techies present or for those managing their implementation and maybe had encountered some challenges.

I led the third group which addressed issues of marketing the platform, through traditional marketing initiatives as well working with the media to raise awareness about the implementation and get the response needed.

The idea of marketing can be challenging, especially if the target audience is not online all the time. Marten from buildingbrides.org shared about the peace initiative and how they have been working with the media to raise awareness about their Ushahidi platform.

For a two-hour session, there was so much information and networking that went on, which was motivating.

Please reserve your seat for the next Ushahidi 101 on Monday June 7th at the iHub Nairobi.

Posted in Community, Kenya, Nairobi, Ushahidi Users. Tagged with , , .

By Rebecca
May 17, 2010

3 comments

SwiftRiver Web Services Launches

The SwiftRiver Web Services platform offers RESTful apps that live in the cloud that we encourage other developers or applications to utilize. These services are diverse and powerful ways to improve data collection and management.

For non-profits and NGOs working in the field who may be worried about connectivity or security, all SWS Apps are also open source which means they can be run on your own servers or completely offline.

The first of these web services available is OpenSiLCC. OpenSiLCC allows users to parse and categorize any text on the fly. We are also developing open source applications which exemplify use. They’re potential building blocks for your ideas with code to help get you started. One of them, Abraxas is live and can be found here. Get the Abraxas code.

To sign up, visit http://sws.ushahidi.com. What are some use potential use-cases for OpenSiLCC?

  • SMS messages coming from Frontline or Clickatell could be tagged and categorized in real-time.
  • Users could aggregate non-tagged data (say from Twitter), parse, and output feeds with tags.
  • Develop your own glossaries and text parsers for content unique to your organization (or language).
  • Identify relationships between seemingly disparate message types (email, sms, twitter).

Sign Up For Web Services

Read the related post “Taxonomy for Text Messages“.

The next version of SwiftRiver (0.2.0 Batuque) will ship with these services (OpenSiLCC and others) fully integrated.

Posted in Deployment, Development, Services, swift river. Tagged with , , , , .

By Jon Gosier
May 12, 2010

3 comments

Visualizing Redundant Data Validation

data visualization

The following visualizations represent the various methods that go into calculating the reputation and veracity scores for users and content within the SwiftRiver platform. They are in part a response to this comment from reader Charles Bernard on this post. His comment:

In many instances, there are entities with a vested interest in preventing valid information regarding things such as voting, battles and even disasters, both natural and man-made.

For nearly any human effort, there exist a group of entities which would profit by either the details or the extent of a problem being kept from the public–and that can include relief agencies.

While tracking particular sources and their validity of reports is a step in the right direction, some entities, in particular governments and large corporations have access to the resources needed to generate thousands or even 100,00s of thousands of false data reports, flooding the system with misinformation.

In other words, what steps are we taking to prevent individuals with malicious intent from gaming SwiftRiver? Here was my response:

With Swift, we aren’t just validating content, we’re also validating users, users validate each other and content validates users. Content can also be used to verify other content. This creates a system that’s difficult to dupe, as one looking to falsify information would need to thousands of false reports from a number of different ‘users’, locations, and media channels.

What would be absolutely possible is for a group to download Swift, set up their own instance with all sorts of fake information and publicize it as fact. However, our distributed, decentralized reputation system River ID would show that outside of that instances ‘ecosystem’ no one trusts those users, or the instance. If the administrators opt out of tracking…they also forfeit any sort of benefits that come from River ID (trust from users who don’t know you or your site). In this case falsifying information is indeed easy, but promoting it becomes self-defeating, as the more people who aren’t under your influence see it, the less authority your Swift instance (with all it’s fake reports) actually holds.

I thought these concepts might be hard to grasp so I made the following Arc Diagrams to give a visual representation of what I actually mean. Click the images for high-versions. In the images below, the light grey color is simply used to indicate that content isn’t important for what that particular chart is showing you.

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Fig. 1 Individual Voting Against the Community

Figure 1 represents the most classic scenario of ‘gaming’, spam, bots or human individuals who are trying to vote bogus content ‘up’ so it will be weighted higher than other content. Section “A” represents User 1. Section “B” represents the activity of User 2 (our spammer). Section “E” represents the community within this particular Swift instance. Section “F” represents the users of our distributed trust system River ID or the global SwiftRiver economy. Section “C” represents individual content items. Section “D” represents the source that content is coming from.

The thickness of the lines connecting the users to the content and the source, represents how they’ve voted on those particular things. The thickness of the line for User 2 tells us that he’s rating these things very highly. Perhaps they come from his blog, and he wants them at the top! The thickness of the lines from the local community of the SwiftRiver instance as well as the global users tells us that these content sources are suspect. We can see that User 1 (who represents our average, active user) is voting closer to the how the community is voting, in fact even harsher than the community votes both the content and the source (represented by thinner lines).

This dynamic relationship between users and their interactions with content (in contrast to the local and global community) is considered when scoring users, content, and the sources. In this case the person voting against the tide is actually damaging his or her own reputation both locally and globally. However, this isn’t the only thing we consider, otherwise it would encourage conformity which also isn’t good (sometimes the outlier knows something the rest don’t.)

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Fig. 2 Factors Considered in Rating Content

In Figure 2 we can see that things like Time, Location, Activeness as well as Global and Local interaction, are all considered. Time (green) and Location (dark grey) are optional, for scenarios like a conflict or war. The content producer’s location, or proximity to ‘ground zero’ tells the system to factor this in to its score. Also the length of time that content is produced after the initial event may also tell us a lot. Things like ‘time’ and ‘location’ are optional because if your Swift instance is tracking something like a political scandal, time and proximity may not actually add any value to authority calculations.

Purple represents how active Users 1 and 2 are. In and of itself how much someone uses a Swift instance is irrelevants. It could mean that they are an eager member providing valuable assistance, or it could mean they are attempting a brute force attack on the system similar to the Figure 1 scenario. However, when coupled with other factors, frequency of interaction is considered and can positively or negatively weight the score for a user.

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Fig. 3 Ratings Visible to Users

In Figure 3 I’m illustrating what information is visibly shared in the scenarios above. The trust the local community has for Users 1 and 2 is displayed. The trust the global RiverID system has for Users 1 and 2 is also displayed. Thus, the trust Users 1 and 2 should have for each other is inferred.

Swift’s strength is in multiple points of redundancy. All scores are calculated against a multitude of other factors which may or may not be independent to the local community. This allows users to build scores more organically than x=bad y=good. There are some probabilistic calculations as well as algorithmic intricacies that make all this a lot more complex (a lot of math beyond my paygrade). We also calculate things like tags and content influence which compound the complexity.

Unless the local Swift instance administrators opt-in to participating in the global Swift ecosystem, their instance only holds authority with the people using it. In theory, their ‘gaming’ would then be contained to their local Swift instance. The fact that global authority isn’t considered would be an indicator that the public shouldn’t trust it. If they do opt-in to the global ecosystem, it becomes increasingly harder to continue gaming the system, as your scores are constantly weighted against the global community’s.

Because Swift is open source, it’s easy to reverse engineer or hack parts of the local system. But this is why we announced Swift Web Services last month, core components to the global system are centralized and well protected. This protects the global ecosystem, but still allows for independent uses of SwiftRiver, and all of it’s components as open, locally deployable apps. Some users, for example election monitors, may not want their SwiftRiver instance online at all. In that case, global authority doesn’t matter, the instance can and should only be influential amongst the people using it. This is why we opted for cloud solutions in addition to local deployment options, yet another redundancy to ensure the platform’s usefulness in multiple scenarios.

Post any follow up questions to the newsgroup or in the comments below.

Posted in crowdsourcing, swift river. Tagged with , , , , , .

By Jon Gosier
May 9, 2010

7 comments

Ushahidi Used to Create Oil Spill Crisis Map

Guest Blog Post by Shannon Dosemagen, Member Action Associate for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She has a MS in Cultural Anthropology and is currently managing the technical efforts behind the Oil Spill Crisis Map. She can be reached at Shannon@labucketbrigade.org

In February, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB) began working with students from the Tulane University GIS class of Professor Nathan Morrow to develop a map using the Ushahidi platform. The purpose of the map was to address the large number of oil refinery accidents that happen in the state of Louisiana. The same day as their final class presentation, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. The following day it sank into the Gulf of Mexico, spewing what is now estimated at 210,000 gallons of oil a day.

Burning the oil was one of the techniques that officials were testing to figure out ways to stop the spread. On April 29th, while standing in front of our office in Mid-City New Orleans, we smelled that burning oil as it blanketed the city that afternoon. Our office is located approximately 80 miles from Venice, the town closest in Louisiana to where the oil rig once stood.

Picture 1

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade works with communities located near oil refineries and has seen firsthand, over the last decade, the health impacts on communities from the un-regulated release of VOCs and benzene (among other pollutants) through refinery accidents. Thus, our staff team of four grabbed buckets to go take air samples in Plaquemines Parish. While sitting in a traffic jam caused by the tourist rush of the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, we made a group decision to launch the Ushahidi platform as the “Oil Spill Crisis Map” since the Gulf Coast was faced with the onslaught of a man-made disaster.

One of the interesting things about an oil spill is that, contrary to the common idea that everyone can help scrub a bird free of oil, people are only able to volunteer to help with such efforts if they are properly trained and certified.  Even though the oil spill happened in what could be considered our neighborhood, the environmental groups in Louisiana have only been allowed a small degree of access to the spill area and efforts to assist in the clean up. As an environmental and social justice organization, we felt that by launching the Oil Spill Crisis Map we would be contributing a creative solution that could make a real impact, especially as clean-up efforts continue and the livelihoods of our fishermen, shrimpers and oystermen, as well as the already fragile wetland ecosystems they rely on (and Louisiana relies on for Hurricane protection), are threatened.

Docked trawlers in Venice as commercial fishing and shrimping is closed

Docked trawlers in Venice as commercial fishing and shrimping is closed

When I went to Hopedale, a fishing community in St. Bernard Parish, as I spoke with fishermen and shrimpers, I repeatedly heard comments such as “What am I going to do? I have no education, I have no way to support my family,” or “I’ve been fishing for 70 years, this is all I know, and all I can do now is sit and wait.” It is critical that there is a platform that engages people and provides a place where they can share their experiences and stories and that is exactly what the Oil Spill Crisis Map does.

In partnership with the Tulane University Disaster Resilience Academy we are using the visual reports generated on the Oil Spill Crisis Map to document and create public transparency to the way that the Gulf Coast is being affected by the oil spill. With this map we will also be facilitating accountability of the response as this must be watched and documented in any man-made disaster. As the oil continues to spill and we find that there is limited access to the official clean-up efforts, we also use this map as a way for the public to give visible testimony to how they are being affected and what they are seeing firsthand.

The Gulf oil spill has the attention of the world, but besides the environmental impacts, we have yet to see the humanitarian crisis that is emerging. Only five years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Gulf Coast fishing communities are still recovering from losses that they suffered and thus this blow to their livelihoods could be completely devastating. The seafood and hospitality industries rely on coastal environments and communities and thus an entire economic chain is being destabilized. The potential impact to livelihoods is immeasurable and will be mapped to show the economic extent of this spill.

Posted in Community, Deployment, crowdsourcing, disaster.

By patrick
May 8, 2010

13 comments

Mission 4636 video

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, shockwaves spread around the globe. We could sense the impending weight of the devastation as the first fragments of information emerged from the darkness and chaos. Within hours, Ushahidi was deployed and volunteers began scouring twitter feeds and other sources and posting these reports on the map of Port-au-Prince. I decided to do my part by helping to spread the word about Ushahidi-Haiti.

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

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

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

Haiti 4636 Project from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Posted in Ushahidi, Video. Tagged with , , , .

By sarah
May 6, 2010

2 comments