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Launching the Universities 4 Ushahidi Program

[Guest blog post by Rob Baker, U4U Coordinator]

This morning, at the start of the 2010 International Conference on Crisis Mapping, I’m happy to announce the launch of the Universities for Ushahidi program, a joint effort between Ushahidi and United States Institute for Peace (USIP).

In the case of Haiti, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator, Craig Fugate, publicly noted that this student-driven crisis map was the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community.

The U4U program was inspired by the remarkable role that student volunteers played in the disaster response to Haiti and Chile, where they created a live crisis map of the needs in both countries. U4U will bring students from developing countries to learn how they can use the Ushahidi platform and related tools in their own countries.

“U4U training will be run for students by students, who will work together with peacebuilding experts from USIP to identify applications of Ushahidi for their home countries,” said Patrick Meier, director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi.

“We need to begin catalyzing a global network of proactive, next-generation peacebuilders who are trained in these new technologies,” said Sheldon Himelfarb, head of USIP’s Center of Innovation for Science, Technology and Peacebuilding. “U4U is an effective way to do this, and we’re delighted to be working with the Ushahidi team to launch it.”

The first group of U4U students will be selected and trained in the spring of 2011. Our website, http://u4u.ushahidi.com, will launch on November 1st with more public information about the program.

To learn more about USIP’s Center of Innovation for Science, Technology and Peacebuilding, please visit: http://www.usip.org/programs/centers/science- technology-and-peacebuilding.

Official press release: http://scr.bi/dsO4C7

Thank you,
Rob Baker

Contact:

Lauren Sucher
202/429.3822
lsucher@usip.org

Rob Baker
U4U Coordinator
robbaker@ushahidi.com
781/218.9460

Posted in news.

By caleb
October 1, 2010

1 comment

United States Institute of Peace Report on Ushahidi-Haiti

As many fans and supporters of Ushahidi recall, the Ushahidi−Haiti Project raised the profile of crisis mapping to a new level.  It demonstrated the potential of crowdsourced maps for targeted disaster response to a broad and empowered  audience and provided a useful foundational model for the international community to leverage and improve upon in advance of future emergencies.

To many outside the core team of volunteers working day and night for weeks out of a basement at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in Boston, the logistics of the Ushahidi-Haiti were a mystery.  How did they get such detailed maps?  Who is translating and mapping each SMS?  How are people using the information on the ground?

My co-author, Carol Waters, and I are excited to share the recent report published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster-Affected Haiti.” It provides an overview of the project from platform launch to hand-off.  The mystery is revealed!

USIP Report

Full version of the report available on the USIP website

Many thanks to all the people involved with the project who graciously agreed to interviews and replied to our emails and to USIP for not only publishing the report, but giving $20,000 to the Ushahidi-Haiti effort during the crisis.

Summary of the Report:

  • On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. More than 230,000 people died, and some of Haiti’s most populous areas suffered mass destruction. The international community responded immediately to launch extensive search and rescue missions and provide emergency assistance.
  • The traditional disaster-response system employed by relief actors in Haiti concentrated on enabling information-sharing among teams of responders from the international community. This system lacked the ability to aggregate and prioritize data that came from outside sources, making it difficult to benefit from valuable information coming from the Haitian community.
  • Ushahidi, an open-source crisis-mapping software first developed and used in Kenya, provided a way to capture, organize, and share critical information coming directly from Haitians. Information was gathered through social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter, and Facebook) and text messages sent via mobile phones.
  • Reports about trapped persons, medical emergencies, and specific needs, such as food, water, and shelter, were received and plotted on maps that were updated in real time by an international group of volunteers.
  • These reports, and associated geographic information, were available to anyone with an Internet connection. Responders on the ground soon began to use them in determining how, when, and where to direct resources.
  • The most significant challenges arose in verifying and triaging the large volume of reports received. Ad hoc but sufficient solutions were found that involved the manual monitoring and sorting of information.

Posted in Crisis, Reports, Uncategorized, Ushahidi, crowdsourcing, disaster. Tagged with , , , , .

By jheinzelman
September 29, 2010

No comments

Mapping Honduras Hospitals

[Guest blog post by Heather Leson, cross-posted from Text on Techs]

Paul Jones believes that a map can change the world – starting with Honduras. A third year McMaster University medical student, Paul has taken two tours with the medical brigades in Honduras. In the past month, he has developed a unique Crowdmap providing visual story of Honduras hospitals and the rise of Dengue outbreak. I’m posting his story because he needs your help. Paul is a symbol of future mapper. Someday students around the world will follow his path by taking their discipline to crowdsource open source tools like Crowdmap.

Honduras Health Map

What is your Crowdmap project?

I originally started this project due to the lack of available information about the health system in Honduras and lack of collaboration between health-based Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). My only motivation is to accurately catalog the existing health infrastructure and resources in Honduras to better facilitate communication and collaboration. As one collaborator put it: “Here’s to a healthier, better educated Honduras”. Often, NGOs utilize teams or “brigades” of foreign medical personnel that have little knowledge of the Honduran health care system or existing projects so there is often duplication and redundancy. I wanted to try to break down these silos and provide easily accessible information for other projects, clinics, hospitals and medical teams.

The entire project is open source and information gathered through crowdsourcing and modeled after CrisisMappers. Crisismappers brings together practitioners, scholars and developers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping. They have developed deployments during the Haiti earthquake, Chilean earthquake and the recent floods in Pakistan by leveraging volunteers to map large quantities of data onto a single dynamic platform. Content is freely accessible to improve the overall effectiveness of the response.

What have you learned? Any obstacles?

My first priority has been to establish the exact location of hospitals (Public, Private and NGO). After this is complete, I’ll focus on mapping clinics and NGO projects. This is a labour intensive project, so it is heavily dependent on my free time or volunteer capacity.

I am in contact with a number of individuals working/living in Honduras and the USA/Canada who have an interest in this project. It is really in its infancy. I am open to suggestions as to how it can be improved and most effectively utilized to improve health for Hondurans as well as how it can be used to compliment and not duplicate existing efforts.

I’ve been following the ongoing Dengue outbreak in Honduras and thought that this might be worth incorporating into the existing map. My original slogan for the project is why wait for the next crisis. It appears that Honduras is now in the midst of a crisis. Thus, I’m attempting to gather information about both Honduran health structures as well as the recent Dengue outbreak. I would love to update this map to be more relevant and detailed about the current situation in Honduras.

How can we help?

I am the only one actively collecting the information, emailing NGOs, reading news reports and mapping for this project. I am also attempting to plug into the various crisis mapping communities, all while staying on top of my medical studies. I would love some more experienced and knowledgeable crisismappers involved in this project. I have recently made contact with the Medicine sans Frontieres (MSF) mission in Honduras and they have been providing me with copies of the epidemiological reports of the Dengue outbreak. I haven’t time to map this yet. I am hoping in the coming days to establish some contacts within the FrontlineSMS/SMSMedic community with individuals running SMS based health projects in Honduras to see if collaboration might be feasible. I’m on twitter hoping that this may attract the attention of some potential volunteers.

You can access and edit the working spreadsheet of Honduran Hospitals, Clinics, NGOs and Medical Brigades by using the Google spreadsheet.

More information about this project can be found by following these links.

Honduras Health Crowdmap
Paul on Twitter

More about Paul

My name is Paul Jones, I am 22 years old and in my 3rd year of Medicine at McMaster University (in Canada). I’ve been to Honduras twice with medical brigades and am active with a couple of NGOs which work in the health field in Honduras. I’m in my final year of Medicine at McMaster University. I plan to pursue a residency program in Family Medicine with potentially some additional training in Emergency Medicine as well as Travel/Tropical Medicine. Briefly, I flirted with the idea of pursuing specialization in Infectious Diseases, but have decided that Family Medicine would be a better fit for me. I am still really interested in Virology and Global Health. During medical school I have been writing articles for our student newsletter Placebo about neglected, infectious diseases and other Global Health topics. I’m also writing an article about the unprecedented outbreak of Dengue Fever and Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever in Honduras.

Update: (Tuesday, September 21, 2010)
Paul is now collaborating with a few volunteers from the CrisisMappers mailing list.

Posted in Deployment, crowdmap. Tagged with , .

By patrick
September 27, 2010

No comments

Daring to Hope in the Land of Pharaoh: Monitoring the Egyptian Elections Using Ushahidi

[Guest blog post by Anonymous]

Two months ago I started working on a project hosted by the Development and Institutionalization Support Center “DISC” in Cairo on the use of the Ushahidi platform to monitor the upcoming parliamentary election 2010. Despite the pessimism and the despair about the political situation in the country, the undercurrent of digital activism is tangible

The use of social media and Facebook in particular is increasingly enabling the youth to engage in a political scene that normally opts for the physical elimination of the opposition. Blogs and Facebook groups are clearly taking the place made empty by the lack of a real political debate in Egypt, and are more increasingly emerging as an alternative political scene where a discussion on democracy and human rights is still possible.

egypt1

Until recently, Egyptians have only been able to approve or reject a presidential candidate appointed by the parliament, which of course is dominated by Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The turnout in the last referendum in 1999 was around 10% with only 40% of the total population in Egypt registered to vote. Mubarak has been re-elected four times during his 24-year rule thanks to this system. The media landscape is completely controlled by the establishment, bordering on the ridiculous like the recent Photoshop modification of the picture of the meeting in the White House of last week.

In May 2005 a constitutional amendment approved in a referendum opened the way for multi-candidate presidential elections. Under the new election law, parties that garner 5% of the votes in the parliamentary election can propose candidates for the election, which are reviewed by the Presidential Election Commission. In this context the parliamentary elections schedule for November 2010 become extremely important for the upcoming Presidential elections that are scheduled for 2011.

Nobody knows whether Mubarak will be a candidate in the next year’s elections or if he will push for the candidacy of his son Gamal. But amidst these machinations and speculations, something else is starting to shift in the background: the youth in Egypt are more and more interested in having a voice and want an active part in the political discourse going on in their country.

The U-Shahid project is actually very simple: the use of the Ushahidi platform to monitor the elections by allowing people to send SMS, Twitter messages, Facebook comments, voice mail, e-mail and web-submission to the U-Shahid (Anta Shahid – “You witness” in Arabic) and by creating a combined system of bounded and unbounded crowdsourcing.

The U-Shahid platform is based a Ushahidi version 2.0 Beta, which allows the system to use new features: we can use the Cloudvox plugin and receive voice mail (still working on it cause Cloudvox doesn’t have Egyptian numbers available); we will use the full screen map; people will be able to upload reports and see the platform on their mobile phones thanks to the mobile version. The platform has also been translated entirely into Arabic, including the back end and the admin page: this is an Egyptian project for Egyptians.

In addition, we have the Flicker integration that will allow anybody to upload pictures on Flicker and tag them with the hashtag #U-Shahid so the picture can be displayed on the homepage of the platform. We also have the YouTube Channel integration that will allow us to receive videos from anybody, which can be displayed on the U-Shahid homepage on and our YouTube channel.

egypt2

Since Facebook is an important platform for Egyptian youths, we added a feature that makes it easier for people to report using the tool. We created a Facebook plugin in the home page that is automatically updated every time someone post something on the U-Shahid Facebook page. In addition, we subscribe to the Facebook page by using the official e-mail address of the platform, so that every time someone post something on our wall we receive in the back end of the platform an e-mail that we can easily transform into a report on the Ushahidi map.

We are working on a host of other features such as independent RSS feeds and alerts triggered from verified reports, Skype integration with Ushahidi, automatic block function so that reports that are being edited cannot be opened by more than one person in the back end, drop-down menus for verification visible to users so that you can actually specify different range of verifications publicly.

We are aware that technology cannot by itself change the political situation in Egypt. We also know that the National Security in Egypt can shut down the project and block access to the website if it wants. Furthermore, everyone involved in the project know full well that their involvement in the project could get them arrested. Egyptians are well aware of the risks they’re taking. But this is not the issue. The issue is that sometimes having an alternative is enough to be the difference: at the end of my first training in Cairo, one of the participants came to speak with me after the training and simply said: “You know? We may all end up in jail, but before this I thought there was no hope to change anything. Now I can even dare to think it is worth a try.”

Posted in Deployment, elections. Tagged with .

By patrick
September 27, 2010

3 comments

Venezuela: Mapping Irregularities Ahead of the Upcoming Elections

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This is a guest blogpost by Andrés Azpúrua of Voto Joven

Caracas, Venezuela:
The Reports Map has the intention of collecting all the irregularities that arise in the campaign, with the goal of showing the conditions that will be taken throughout the next elections, irregularities will be received during the elections via the website, twitter, phone calls, and more.

The youth organization Voto Joven, that has been working to motivate the participation and transparency of the Elections, put at disposition of all the Venezuelan Community a map on its website to record all the oddities that might be observed before and during the elections. The system uses the Internet, E-mail, and twitter as a way to comunicate the complaints. In it’s last campaign, Voto joven accomplished to increase significantly the numbers of new voters registered during the last registration period; the new voters registered in the few months period was equivalent to those registered in the 3 previous years. The map is powered by Ushahidi, an open-source crowd sourcing crisis information platform.

Once the users visit http://mapa.votojoven.com, they will find a map in which you can find the location of the reported irregularities. On the right hand of the map, are the complaints sectioned according to the category of: intimidation or threat, law and electoral statements violation, judicial processes and physical violation, among others.

To denounce irregularities through the Website, the user must click NUEVA DENUNCIA up on the right corner of the page, fill all the blanks that appear and classify your complaint, must also specify the location, and if possible, the user can also upload a Picture, Video, or any News that support the complaint. Denounces will also be taken through email, Twitter by hashtags #VJdenuncia and #denuncialo; on the day of the election a free phone number and SMS will be enabled for reports.

Voto Joven will dedicate itself, among other activities, to promote the Vote, and to receive complaints from any citizen. All of this in order to monitor the electoral climate before, during and after the process.

Posted in Community, Deployment.

By juliana
September 15, 2010

2 comments

Welcome to the InfoWars

Being part of Ushahidi has given us a front row seat to what I like to term the “InfoWars“. A time when it seems like the fourth and fifth estates are pitted against the other three.

  • The US is clueless in response to the Wikileaks release of war documents
  • The music and film industries continue to lose to the open web
  • South Africa seeks to muzzle the press
  • The UAE takes on RIM over the ability to read everyone’s email
  • In Australia you can’t link to certain sites from your personal website
  • More and more countries require SIM card registration on phones to track users

…it goes on.

This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a reaction by those in the status quo (be they government, big business or large established organizations) to the inefficiencies that they represent in the system being overcome by changes in technology and culture. As the open web expands it becomes a real threat to controlling governments, even to the relevance of the nation state itself.

The Case of the Russian Fires

Blogging and social media have been utilized for transparency and accountability for a number of years. While that’s interesting in its own right, I find the translation of those online tools into offline activities far more compelling.

The Russian forest fires is a particularly interesting one, as it represents what appears to be a major shift in ownership and attitudes in Russia around governance and responsibility. At the same time, one of the main tools used to organize it was the Ushahidi platform (giving me that little bit of liberty to write some thoughts on the bigger picture).

“On the one hand, cooperation was empowered by a shared understanding that the government has failed to get the situation under control and, moreover, didn’t want to be held accountable for it. On the other hand, it was information technologies that provided both information exchange and tools for coordination and effective collaboration.”

Please, read the full Global Voices article on the Russian fires.

Final Thoughts

Personally, I don’t see too many governments being displaced or replaced by online cooperation alone. Trust, reputation and resources are just a few of the hurdles to overcome before that happens. Instead, I think we’re seeing the continuation of the refinement of mass movements, brought about by the inefficiencies in the system, which catch on faster and are enabled better online and then move offline for impact.

Posted in Deployment, Random Thoughts, Strategy, Ushahidi. Tagged with , , , , , , , , .

By Erik Hersman
September 10, 2010

6 comments

Got feedback?

For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Ushahidi to gather feedback from people all over the world who have put the platform to work. I’ve found it incredibly inspiring to learn about their implementations and see how Ushahidi has evolved in response to their needs.

Hearing what works, what doesn’t, what is missing and what could be improved is essential to the ongoing development of Ushahidi. Feedback also plays an important role in building and growing a thriving community. Participating in this process is one way that those who have benefited from using Ushahidi can give back and help us build a better platform for future users. Feedback can include bug reports, technical difficulties, and feature requests as well as strategic insights and practical considerations.

A sample of feedback we have received includes requests for: language localization; customized themes; better configuration of email, SMS, and RSS alerts; improved alerts functionality such as the ability to subscribe to alerts for more than one location at a time or for a specific category; enhanced reporting tools to produce reports, graphs, bar charts…and more. You can see how these suggestions were incorporated into the roadmap for the Mogadishu release by visiting our wiki.

We also launched our community resources page in response to feedback from non-technical users.

Ushahidi Community Resources
Ushahidi Community Resources

We glean feedback from a variety of sources: we encourage our users to exchange information on our forums, welcome guest posts to our blog and appreciate when people who have deployed Ushahidi take time to complete our online surveys. In fact, we are currently revising our install survey and our post-implementation survey. Please feel free to let us know what you think of the questions. Do they make sense? Anything else we should ask?

Also, as part of our ongoing efforts to improve our capacity for gathering feedback, we are currently seeking volunteers to join our team. We are particularly looking for bilingual (English + local language) volunteers from Central and South America, Europe and Asia. If you are interested in learning more about how Ushahidi is used in the field, becoming a feedback volunteer will give you the opportunity to engage and interact with deployers who are actively using the platform. It’s also a great way for people without technical skills to contribute to shaping and improving the platform. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, please contact me via email to sarah [at] ushahidi [dot] com.

Posted in Community, How to Help, Ushahidi Users. Tagged with , .

By Sarah George
September 8, 2010

No comments

Rapid Response Fund for Ushahidi

The Ushahidi community has been the main driver for the platform’s success. Here is an opportunity for fans, friends and Ushahidians everywhere to take part in a project that gives an added chance to Ushahidi deployments in the hardest hit areas of the world.

Ushahidi Rapid Response FundDuring a crisis situation, groups looking to use Ushahidi often need additional support beyond the software itself e.g. paying for hosting, supporting volunteers, SMS costs, etc. To this end, we’re engaging with GlobalGiving to help fund such groups.

What is the Global Giving Open Challenge?

“The Challenge is for participants to generate donations for their projects between September 1, 2010 (0000 hrs, EDT) and September 30, 2010 (2359 hrs, EDT).

Any project that is able to meet the challenge threshold of raising $4,000 from at least 50 separate donors will be invited to stay on at GlobalGiving. These projects will be eligible to continue receiving donations from the general public, private and corporate foundations through GlobalGiving and take advantage of GlobalGiving’s fundraising tools and services. “

Why the Ushahidi Rapid Response Fund is needed

Ushahidi needs a rapid response fund for deployments in response to major crises. The ability of groups (often volunteers) to respond quickly is considerably slowed as a result . While the technology itself is free, funds are needed for the non-tech side for instance, to do media outreach, to disseminate information by SMS, to set up a free short-code, to pay for a hosted server, and provide a space and some food for volunteers to work.

Examples abound for this type of work, including most recently the work by volunteer groups in Pakistan with the floods, the Mozambique riots and in Russia with the fires. Many times these groups don’t need very much money, it’s free software and volunteers who run it. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs that slow their response down though, and our goal is to overcome that challenge.

In a hot-flash crisis, every minute counts. We appreciate your assistance with this fund.

You can also help by spreading the word to people you know who can help (buttons are found here).

Posted in Community, Crisis, Ushahidi, disaster. Tagged with , , , , , , , .

By Erik Hersman
September 5, 2010

3 comments

Choose your own adventure: data collection in Liberia

Creating an ecosystem of early warning and response actors in Liberia necessitates involvement from various levels of that system – local civil society organizations, international NGOs, the UN, government ministries, the national police and armed forces.  Our team on the ground has spent much of the first couple months meeting with international NGOs (of which there are more than 70 based in Monrovia alone) and the UN – key players in this multi-layered approach to conflict prevention and intervention.  Many of these potential partners were eager to begin mapping – but with several of them, we hit the same wall: our maps, they said, didn’t have enough information.  Well, not “our” maps, but rather the base layer maps used here in Liberia for Ushahidi instances – Google Maps.  And Google is certainly not at fault for having sparse Liberia maps; when geospatial information is in the public domain, it’s only a matter of time until it’s on Google’s many map layers.  It was in the public domain where we hit our wall – Liberia’s census data (containing detailed information about roads, towns and villages, county and district boundaries) was not, despite its public nature, freely available without license or restriction.  There was no way around it; we were going to have to go to LISGIS.

LISGIS is the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services, and it is notorious for keeping its data on a short leash.  John (our team’s tech support manager extraordinaire) tried getting in touch with the Institute: a personal visit, an official letter – all to no avail.  Meanwhile the UN Mission in Liberia, the Norwegian Refugee Council and others were waiting to use Ushahidi – but without county and district boundaries displayed on Ushahidi’s maps, there was little our team could offer.

What was in fact the most challenging aspect of this data-chase was that we already had the LISGIS data; through one of his contacts at an NGO, John was able to view purchased LISGIS shapefiles in all their glory – one map after another of detailed boundary lines and villages with populations as few as five.  But these shapefiles were licensed to one particular organization for internal use, and therefore just out of reach (picture John and I at our desks, grinding teeth and biting nails).

During a meeting with the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Peacebuilding Office, we mentioned this data deadlock; the Director of the Peacebuilding Office (PBO), one of the most connected men in Monrovia, casually offered to accompany us on our next trip to LISGIS.  The head of the Institute, he said, was a personal friend.  And here the tides began to turn.  In one visit, the PBO’s Director arranged a verbal agreement with LISGIS to release county and district boundaries, cities and villages, plus main and arterial roads for Google’s use; all that remained was for John and myself to get it down on paper.  And Google?  Our contacts at HQ were more than happy to post the census data on their maps as soon as we sent them signed permission.   I will abbreviate the course of events that followed, however I would be doing you an injustice if I did not at least summarize the run-around that ensued – it is, after all, an integral part of data collection in Liberia:

  • Personally delivered document on PBO letterhead to LISGIS for the Director’s signature
  • Hastily walked out of the office with signed permission in-hand.  Wait – he put the wrong date
  • Back to the office.  Director crossed out the date, initialed, corrected it. Quickly again out the door to scan the document off to Google.  Done!
  • Not quite.  Google writes: the document is not on LISGIS letterhead, and the Director’s listed email is a Yahoo address rather than an official LISGIS address (Liberians do have a fondness for elaborate Yahoo addresses)
  • John inquires about the official email address: LISGIS does not have one.  Fine, Google understands, how about just a signature on letterhead, minus the Yahoo?
  • Got it.  Back to LISGIS.  Up the stairs, into the office – the entire staff is on retreat.  For the week.  In a faraway town
  • The next week: up the stairs, into LISGIS, yes hello again I know I’m truly trying my luck but my bossman says I have to get this on your letterhead.  Okay, said the secretary – but not on that thing (I’ve brought a USB stick with the original document).  I don’t ask why – sure, would you like to retrieve the document from my email?  They would rather rewrite the entire document based on a hard copy.  I offered to type it – no, no problem we can do it
  • I waited in the lobby.  The secretary brought me a copy – there are some typos.  She tries again.  Another copy – a few remaining mistakes.  Once more.  An hour later, a pristine rewrite.  She went for the signature – can we get two copies, I asked?  I’m bit my lip, I had pushed too far, there was no way we could get away with this now.  I waited some more
  • Secretary emerged, signed documents in hand.  On letterhead.  I bolted out of the door, scanned, copied, FedExed to Google, nearly framed the copies and built a mantle on which to admire them within the same hour.  Really. Done.

And it was worth it.  Below are samples from our friends at Google demonstrating how these added shapefiles will improve public maps of Liberia.  Within the next few weeks, this data will be available in the public domain.  As they say in Liberia for progress, one step at a time – “we’re trying small.”

Before and After: County and District Boundaries

Before and After: County and District Boundaries

Before and After: Main and Arterial Roads

Before and After: Main and Arterial Roads

Before and After: Cities and Villages

Before and After: Cities and Villages

If you would like to see the shapefiles for yourself, check out this link on John’s site: http://johnetherton.com/file-share/Liberia/Census-Data/2008/

Posted in Deployment, Development, Mapping Resources, Ushahidi, team. Tagged with , , , , , .

By kate
September 3, 2010

9 comments

Brazil: DIY Clean Elections

[This guest blog post is by Janet Gunter, a Global Voices Online Author, and adviser to the Eleitor 2010 team]

School children being told to chant candidates’ names by their teachers. Civil servants getting sacked for not campaigning for their political bosses. Zinc roofing being traded for votes. The public wholesaling of voters’ personal data to campaigners. Death threats to those who denounce electoral crimes.

Welcome to the unpleasant side of Brazilian electioneering.

These are just some of the reports coming from Eleitor 2010, a “crowdsourcing” project aiming to facilitate citizen reports of abuses of the electoral process in Brazil.

In the largest democracy in Latin America – with over 120 million voters – this year, voters go to the polls they will be choosing the successor of one of the country’s most popular Presidents in history (Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva) but also voting on governors, a large portion of Congress.

Every country has its own unique political culture and oddities. Even the most minimal democracy has its own rules around electioneering, the mechanics of the vote, and ensuring that the state regulates the electoral process.

Brazil was one of the first democracies of its size to use electronic voting machines. It also has compulsory voting. But other aspects of its electoral process are unique, including attempts to strictly regulate of online campaigning, vote buying and what are called “showmícios” (concert-rallies).

Brazil has very clear and comprehensive laws regulating elections but the problem is enforcing these laws.

There is a real culture of politicians subverting the law, maintaining a privileged position as patrons of voters in Brazil. This stems from a distant colonial past and continued persistent inequality, where entrenched elite interests have maintained themselves.

The idea behind Eleitor 2010, which is a purely volunteer, non-partisan project run by a virtual team with zero funding, is to engage the voter beyond the day of the election. According to Paula Góes and Diego Casaes, its creators – who met via Twitter and now collaborate on Global Voices Online, the project is to promote critical and active citizenship, that challenges some of the arcane and undemocratic practices mentioned above.

Eleitor 2010 runs on the open source software Ushahidi, a web-based platform which received much attention for its utility in mapping incidents after the Haiti earthquake, driven by SMS reports from the ground.

Ushahidi has yet to reach its full potential as an election monitoring platform, say Góes and Casaes. With an estimated 25% of the country online every day, and one of the highest mobile subscriber rates in Latin America, they hope Brazil could be the place where it comes of age this year. Four weeks away from the election, Eleitor 2010 already has 230+ reports, from every state in the country, and from the most remote areas.

However, it is an uphill battle to get the message out about the platform, in a country where broadcast and print media are still strong, held in the hands of a privileged elite bent on defending its interests.

Despite this, the communications team at Eleitor 2010 has generated some media attention, and networking with other online transparency initiatives has been crucial. Google recently featured Eleitor 2010 on its page dedicated to the Brazilian elections.

Góes and Casaes hope that with their awareness campaign – on social networks including Orkut with over 40 million users, partnerships with networks of internet cafés, NGOs, and social movements – Eleitor 2010 will break through and change the way thousands of voters engage in the electoral process.

Through the plaftorm, some entertaining anecdotes have already come to light, well in advance of the October 3 vote.

Voters caught one man in a small town in the interior selling off Twitter accounts with 40,000+ followers for the sickeningly low price of US$125. This is illegal under Brazilian electoral law. When confronted, the man in question gave more incriminating evidence and then threatened to sue Eleitor 2010. The evidence, including screenshots and transcript of a chat with him, were delivered to the Electoral Courts.

Another comic report from São Paulo, where teachers at a school illegally encouraged children to chant for two candidates, one for mayor and one for President, and it backfired with children instinctively chanting “Lula!” “Lula!” The video circulated widely, and has had over 70,000 views.

Another video that raised eyebrows was one by blogger Ricardo Gama of a VW bus owned by the City Hall being used for a campaign in Rio de Janeiro. The blogger shouts “Are you carrying electoral propaganda in the car of the City Hall? This is an electoral crime! I filmed it. I am going to denounce you.”

From the north of Brazil, in the state of Maranhão, word reached Eleitor 2010 that a network of evangelical churches was offering to “trade” 3,000 votes for “support” after the election. In the state of São Paulo, one Bishop implored the faithful not to support President Lula’s chosen successor, Dilma Roussef.

These examples indicate how this platform and online, participatory tools will be of use in years to come. No matter whether it goes “viral” and becomes a household name, Eleitor 2010 and other transparency initiatives have already become game-changers this election year.

Posted in Community, Deployment, elections. Tagged with , , .

By juliana
September 3, 2010

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