Voice of Kibera

From Map Kibera

Contents 1 Voice of Kibera Focus Groups 2 Technical Issues 3 Older Technical Issues 4 Design

Voice of Kibera Focus Groups

First Voice of Kibera Focus group held on 23rd April 2010 with participants from: Vision Africa, Kibera Community Youth Programme, Kibera Mpira Mtaani, Global Giving, Hot Sun Foundation/Kibera Film School, KCODA/Kibera Journal, Map Kibera, SIT Study Abroad Program, and Mchanganyiko Women's Group.

Workshop Agenda:

• Introductions
• Overview of Map Kibera
• Overview of Voice of Kibera
• Demonstration of Voice of Kibera
• Small group site testing and discussion
• Reconvene for feedback in large group
• Closing

Presentation availabe on slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/mapkibera/voice-of-kibera-focus-group-presentation

Feedback from Demonstration of Voice of Kibera:

How is SMS currently being used?

• KCODA governance project, reporting on corruption using SMS
• Think about how you would use SMS in Kibera?
• Website demonstration
• Twitter demonstration – description of Twitter and discussion about what twitter is
• Question from participant: How do you set up a Twitter account?
• Showing recent reports
• Showing website Tabs: “Contact us”, “About us”
• Showing admin side – demo of Brian's text message to 3002 – demonstration of how to create and approve reports, editing spelling, capitalization, adding categories, geolocating Mchanginyiko women's hall as the location, verifying
• Can reply to SMS or call to gather more information
• Question: how would you call back? Using personal phone?
• Yes, site admin could call back b/c would likely be given credit. When short code 3002
• What about Pamoja FM? Would have information by accessing the website or email alerts
• What if SMS taken long to approve and add to site? - what about a way to send them directly to pamoja directly right after the SMS is approved on email shouldn't usually sit for more than a few hours because should have a dedicated site administrator; someone at Pamoja could be a site administrator, a way for Pamoja to deal with the site directly or could get email alerts
  

• Pamoja FM could have verification over radio, ask listeners
• anonymity of reporting ppl, would have to have a strict agreement and policy about identiy of ppl sending in sensitive information
• Participant: as a person who works with the media, we know that reporters are responsible to verify a story before reporting, journalism ethics, could be implicated as a Media House if you report on something that is not verified
• Better way of doing it would be if you get a message about an incident, call somebody who is a correpsondant to confirm what is happening, from the confirmation you can go ahead and be confident to publish – have ppl on the ground
• Ppl doing admin would have to do their best to verify the stories before approving if it's sensitive information
• Crowdsourcing technology
• People will likely send information that is impt to them b/c they are paying for it
• Could be hate messages? hate messages – how to deal with this type of information?
• would never post hate messages, have to develop the policy about dealing with hate messages or other sensitive information
• Saving messages and forwarding them to responding agencies (ie. Police, Child protection workers, CBOs, etc.)
• Technology is neutral but uses are not
• Participant: Idea, sit down and start small with members, groups sit with us and have key correspondants from organizations who are partners, worried about anybody sending information
• Can pre-approve trusted sources, and build up trusted sources over time if ppl are always sending in good reports (crowdsourcing)
• Roots of Ushahidi – post-election violence, verified and unverified information, verify using network, different view than what was being reported by media, near real-time reporting, allows you to collect information from all different sources
• To what extent are ppl's opinions valuable in and of themselves? Over time the opinions will give you a better picture about what's happening, but need fair ethical administrators and community members to decide when to follow up with a report
• People looking at the information should take into account there are other sources of information coming in (news, video, photos) – SMS allows for interaction- disagreeing, discussing, to get a more balanced view of what is happening
• Participant: what you are saying is right. When information is not, you might be in a position to get back to the person and get it right. Need admins of sound mind, intelligent, who are understanding what is happening in Kibera. Must have a healthy network.
• Question: sms at the normal rate? Sometime back sent an SMS at 10 bob? What happens?
• System is new. Changed something but Safaricom was charging for a reply back, Safaricom are meeting with our partnersto make sure it's the price of a normal SMS. What's the ideal price? If it's free we might get a lot spam
  

Feedback from small group discussions:

Josh’s group

• Groups that use video already: How will they give it out to the community?
• Posting to the site will take a long time to upload because of bandwidth
• Radio is very important
• Time between reporting and broadcasting has to be short
• Time and cost factors
• Setting up video houses to distribute information
• Information and video that come to VoK can be shown and distributed through community screenings
• SMS- very cheap and convenient, and can reach everyone
• Question of cost; if it’s too high then nobody will come, but if it’s cheap it will be better because people will engage with the platform
• Go to cybers and ask them to put Voice of Kibera as homepage so that people will see it right away
• Introducing site to organisations and youth groups in Kibera so it will spread quickly through word of mouth
• Social media tools: using facebook to post the link and to create profile of Voice of Kibera to “friend” people and build network

Jamie’s group

• People don’t understand Twitter very well, but understand Facebook more
• Incorporating Facebook into the site because it is used and known
• Kibera is not an island but when you look at the site you just see Kibera not the rest of Nairobi (context for Kibera. People from Kibera hold events outside Kibera, so need the wider Nairobi as well.
• Content: forming an editorial board with members that are well versed in different fields and knowledgeable so that they can look at the information—can improve credibility
• Get material on the web about Kibera so that lots is known about the community
• Embracing technology because pen and paper may become obsolete
• Incorporating strong networks; need to continue to connect with people from other fields to improve content
• SMS: normal rate or lower, but not free
• Job unemployment: a way to introduce employment opportunities; posting job listings and notices and advertisements
• At first glance, they didn't understand the idea of submitting a report until it was explained. Now it's easy to understand but worried for the people who didn't get the training
• People in Kibera have been doing things, but they go unnoticed, so this site provides a platform to make it known.
• If an administrator approves an SMS, they should provide a feedback or acknowledgement through reply SMS.

Erica’s group

• Homepage is very good
• It has concepts that we can easily grasp
• Still questions about Twitter
• Kibera is heavily populated with many activities
• Improving the map icons and information on the map to more accurately represent Kibera
• Getting key groups on board with the project
• SMS- good communication channel which can be used for sending out reports and keeping site interactive as possible
• A lot of people use SMS so it will be very useful for updates
• Important to get the cost situation settled
• Promoting the site and making it effective
• Using group leaders from various organisations
• Harnessing the central journalism groups (Pamoja and Kibera Journal), but realizing that e-world allows anyone to be a journalist
• SMS, Facebook- let’s use them!
• Media houses to spread info about the site and how to access it
• Posters for publicity
• Spread the site around
• Working with local groups, especially through forums in the community
  

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Technical Issues

• Map is too zoomed out
• They requested today to have focus on Kibera but have whole Nariobi map show if you scroll around. Possible?
• Related reports are not actually related

• Can we include mainstream news on kibera (anything from KTN Nation etc) as a feed somewhere too? Already posting some of their videos.

Older Technical Issues

These may be solved

http://kibera.ushahidi.com/

• the dots are again not appearing on my map kibera.ush with the www (in case you tried to fix already?) - also even w/o www i had to reload a few times
• source of each report (ie, news media org)
• type of report (video, audio, written)
• timeline doesn't look like anything?

Design

I think we could use some help determining the best design for the site. We have a couple of photos of Kibera (see Flickr: mapkibera tag, ie http://www.flickr.com/photos/junipermarie/4169730390/; I also have a lot of video and could pull out stills). We also are open to color suggestions.

One of our mappers also came up with some Map Kibera logo ideas based on incorporating the railway into the design. I think this would also be a nice graphic element for our site.

Is this enough to start with or?