Map Kibera

Digital storytelling and new media can be a powerful catalysts for change. In areas where access to internet is limited for most people, introducing new media as an effective means to communicate issues can be a challenge.

Young people in Mathare own mobile phones and have a facebook and email accounts, however the majority of Mathare residents do not use new media or online means to share information. As highlighted in this video Information Sharing by young Mathare residents, word of mouth is still the most powerful medium for information sharing in Mathare.

“Tell me a story, and I will tell you mine. Word of mouth has so much power to make and build a nation”

The team acknowledged these challenges but thought it worth while to experiment with new media in Mathare, as had been done in Kibera. The new media training programme in Mathare was built based on the experience of the Map Kibera team in designing and developing a web-based information sharing site.  The information sharing site for Kibera utilizes the Ushahidi platform for ‘crowdsourcing’ information. In this instance, crowdsourcing refers to providing a channel for information from the general public to be published openly on the internet. The site, Voice of Kibera, aggregates information channeled through short messaging system (SMS) messages and web based submissions and displays report on events, activities, news and other information about Kibera. The site also aggregates content from other sources on the web, including video and news reports. Despite the challenge of internet access, the team behind Voice of Kibera believes the site is an important channel for highlighting issues from Kibera. The team is actively engaged in improving the impact of the site and are excited about its growth.

A similar site initially called “Voice of Mathare” was set up for the Mathare programme. The site was meant to be a means through which Mathare residents participating in the training could highlight issues and information generated by the people of Mathare. While the technical issues were being sorted out for the Voice of Mathare site, the Mathare project coordinator and some of the participants from the other programmes took an interest blogging that was being done by others in the Map Mathare organizing team.

Through a number of discussions, the Mathare participants decided to set up a blog of their own. The Mathare Valley Blog was a thus a spin-off of the Map Mathare work.

The Mathare Valley Blog has become a central site where stories, news and videos generated by the Mathare participants are collected and shared. The blogging team meets of their own initiative and has kept up the momentum for the blog. They actively brainstorm ideas and making changes to the layout and format of the blog. The Map Mathare team provides some technical support to the bloggers and the site continues to run as an effective digital storytelling platform.

Currently the Mathare Valley Blog has 61 blog posts contributed by six different bloggers from Mathare .  Five of the six bloggers are under the age of 25 and have written a blog post for the first time on the Mathare Valley Blog.

Over the past four months (January – April) the blog has been viewed 4,466 times and has six subscribers, plus many other online followers. One Plan USA staff member who runs a blog on ICT and development picked up activity on the Mathare Valley blog and wrote her own post “Mathare Valley is blogging.”

Success stories

The blog has attracted considerable attention within and outside Nairobi and Kenya. There have been numerous success stories that have resulted from the blog. The first is a result of this story, entitled “Attempted rape by a neighbor”. Simon, the author, followed up on the blog post and wrote about the girl’s attempt to contact the authorities in this post. After reading these two posts, a human rights activist from Nairobi contacted Simon and was put in touch with the young girl from the story. The activist then accompanied the girl to the police station to follow up on her case and assure a report was properly filed and acted upon.

The second success story was sparked by this blog post about Mr. Ndeti from Mathare who speaks fluent German and has started teaching German to interested students. The blog post was forwarded to the Goethe Institute in Nairobi. A staff member from the Goethe institute read the story, took an interest in Mr. Ndeti’s work and was put in touch with the teacher. Through this interaction, the Institute donated books and material to support the initiative started by Mr. Ndeti in Mathare.

One of the young bloggers (and videographers) has attracted the attention of an international newspaper published by the Rebel Film Board. The newspaper was impressed by his writing and has offered to publish a version of his post on “The Vice of Violence in Mathare” in their publication, which circulates in print in Toronto and Mathare.

In a short time, the blog has proven an extremely effective platform for young residents from Mathare to highlight their stories. The blog facilitates online – and more importantly – offline dialogue and action on issues of importance to the residence of Mathare. The Mathare Valley Blog is most importantly an initiative of Mathare residents themselves.

To provide the participants with some ideas about other options in terms of new media, some basic training on the use of the Ushahidi Voice of Mathare platform was provided to some of the Map Mathare project participants. The Voice of Kibera team conducted a number of hands-on trainings with 8-10 Mathare participants. The participants were interested in the platform and learning from the experience of the Voice of Kibera members, but did not take-up the software as we saw in Kibera. We therefore agreed to provide technical support for the blogging platform as a central online information focal point for the Map Mathare initiative. We were careful not to impose the original ideas of New Media in Mathare and have adhered to the original methodology agreed upon by the team with support from Plan Kenya and CCS. This was a community driven approach from which the technical and coordination team “leads from behind”. We are and continue to be flexible when it comes to programming in Mathare.

Congrats to Ahmed Mohamed Maawy and Jamila Amin for submitting two awesome apps to Apps 4 Africa.

They both worked with Map Kibera to develop apps, driven by needs from the community.

Kenya Constituency Development Fund: Community Tracking and Mapping enables Kenyans to easily view all official and on-the-ground details on CDF funded projects in Kibera. KCODA (Kibera Community Development Agenda) monitors submit detailed reports on the real status of projects, and contrasts with officially reported government status,the amount allocated, the contractor involved, photographs, and geographic location.

Kibera Open Directory and Repository: An Accessible WhoWhatWhere for Kibera is an organization directory and report repository, seeded from existing offline directories of organizations and available reports, based on Crabgrass. Information is accessible by web; and by mobile phone, which are increasingly and inexpensively connected to the Internet in Kenya. There are literally hundreds of NGOs, CBOs, faith-based, and other even more exotic species of organizations, operating in Kibera, with budgets from pennies to millions, involved in all aspects of life. As with most informal settlements, Kibera is under-served by government and that gap is particularly filled by civil society organizations. These actors are not directly accountable to the community, and it is difficult to get the bigger picture and small details of their work. Newcomers wishing to start working in Kibera, or existing organizations looking to partner, reduce duplication of work, and collaborate, face a daunting task of finding the information they need. Reports and data collected in Kibera is plentiful, but hard to access, particularly from Kibera itself. Individuals from Kibera have repeatedly asked Map Kibera for a solution to this problem, leading to this App.

We’re excited to see all the submissions. Good luck to all!

With the much appreciated help of crowd-sorcerer Henry Addo, we have upgraded Voice of Kibera to Ushahidi 2.0, and the plugin system.

The first plugin we installed immediately was the mobile plugin, which sure, gave us iphone and ipad support but what really excited us was support for any phone, really any phone, with any kind of internet access, via a web browser. In Kenya, mobile internet is booming and it is not uncommon for Kibera people to have internet enabled phones, mostly accessing Facebook. The cheapest internet enabled phone on the market is only 2000 KSH ($25). Phones and data are only going to get cheaper. For many people, the phone will be the first real chance to access the internet, and I reckon WAP is going to really take off. 10 years ago in the EU, WAP was over-hyped and crashed because people were used to a full internet experience, and didn’t really get interested in mobile internet until the iPhone. Here in Kenya, WAP is the right technology, right now. I’m incredibly excited to see what happens now that Voice of Kibera is available on the phone.

An Alert on Alerts

With 2.0 finally out of the way, I had a chance to examine our bugs and features against what’s in 2.0. One long standing issue for VoK, and I’m told other instances, were that Alerts didn’t work correctly. Sometimes they didn’t get sent out at all, or got sent out in huge numbers, almost spamming subscribers (this happened with Uchaguzi, I’m told). I had never investigated or confirmed this, but after a quick test yesterday with VoK, yes, alerts weren’t working!

I examined the code and the database, and discovered the problem. Reports are marked for alerting when approved via “admin/reports/index”, but not via “admin/reports/edit”. This means that if someone marks a report as approved while applying or reviewing location and category, it’s never sent out for alerting. At least with Voice of Kibera, this is the common usage pattern, and I suspect the majority of instances … the same person who creates and geocodes the report, approves it. The approver is often going to check out the map, rather than just read a summary. It’s only in specific circumstances that index would be used on Ushahidi instances, and I can’t say how often that the report listing would be used. This inconsistency made it a troublesome bug to figure out.

Anyhow, I submitted a bug on this, and David Kobia quickly submitted this fix. I was a little concerned that such a core feature had a major bug, but very glad that Ushahidi quickly responded to my report.

If you’ve noticed any problem with Alerts in your Ushahidi instance, I suggest at least applying David’s fix, if not upgrading to the latest codebase completely.

SMS Wishlist

Along with WAP, we see SMS Alerts as a major way Voice of Kibera will be accessible in Kibera. We’ve examined how things work, and have come up with a number of improvements.

• Should be able to sign up for Alerts to specific category, rather than everything. I believe the Haiti instance had this, but that hasn’t been integrating to 2.0
• Should be able to sign up for alerts via SMS. For example, someone interested in sporting events could text in “Kibera subscribe sports” and be signed up. That will text them back information on how to unsubscribe via SMS, etc.
• Admins should be able to toggle whether a specific message is sent out for alerts. Looking at the code around the bug above, I see this would be straightforward.
• Admins should be able to mark a report for sending only via SMS, and not on the site. These could be special communications, or take the form of a daily/weekly digest of information.
• Finally, it would be helpful to assign a name to SMS reporters and subscribers. Reports should be linked to messages that come in via SMS, so that you can see the original message and reporter when approving.

Geo and Other Stuff

Naturally being a mapping guy, I have lots of ideas! One thing that happened in Uchaguzi, and in Haiti and Chile, was a choice of base map layers, so that both OpenStreetMap and Goog were available. These were done by hacking in a little OpenLayers javascript. It would actually be pretty simple to offer a choice of several base map layers in core Ushahidi. Also helpful would be a little design work to make base map choice more obvious.

That could lead to more custom base map layers. During Uchaguzi, there was an unfulfilled need to overlay polling place districts on the map. Since that’s a fairly large KML, a more efficient method on the browser side would be to build up semi-transparent tiles.

Another place to look is geocoding. Currently only Google geocoding is offered, while there are other good, and free, services like Nominatim (based on OSM data) and Geonames. Which geocoder is in use should be somewhat invisible to the reporting interface, and done in an efficient cascade. Also, need to present choices of results to user, rather than just the first.

There may be circumstances where you want to build your own custom geocoder. Again, Uchaguzi could have benefited from geocoding on polling place locations; that database was available, but not with a license shareable with OpenStreetMap (it’s a looong story). What could be done is build up a geocoder using the open source geocommons geocoder, and integrate it with Ushahidi via its RESTful interface.

Anyhow, just a few ideas, which we’ll be processing into specific bug reports and feature requests, and yes, finding time to work on … it’s open source after all!