Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.

The video is from 2010, but it’s still worth seeing:

He suggests that instead of expecting first responders to use the information collected on a crisis map, the data could be fed back to the crowd so that neighbours can help neighbours. He uses the example of snowstorms in Washington D.C. where people used an Ushahidi map to help others out with snow shovels etc.

I think he has point. If enough people were plugged into the system, it could turn into a marketplace for help needed and resources offered which could make a difference.

However, I have three caveats:

• The risk remains that multiple responders would rush to a single incident that catches the imagination (think: babies) while other, more serious cases,  might be neglected. I suppose the likelihood of this happening could be reduced by enabling logged in users to say “I’m taking on this task.”
• The usefulness depends very much on the size of the disaster and that there is a significant portion of the population who are not affected at all or who are affected but still have resources they can spare. So while it would probably work during the floods in Bangkok, it would not help during a mega-disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
• This model works only in societies which have a very advanced technology infrastructure that is accessible to a large part of the population. So, while I’m not surprised that it can work in Washington DC, it will not work in the poorer parts of the world which are also more likely to experience disasters.

With these concerns in mind, I nevertheless think that “crowdfeeding” (though that is a horrible term imho) can be a useful tool to organize people who are willing to help each other at least in the highly developed world – and that is nothing to scoff at, either.

What is your opinion?

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

In total, only 23 reports were submitted to the web platform on election day for all of Liberia. Many of these reports were of dubious news value such as “Not many voters left at Nancy Doe Market” or “Voters have already started arriving @E J Good Ridge High School waiting to cast their vote”. I would say that only seven of the 23 reports had any news value at all – but that might be a matter of personal opinion.

Misleading or fake reports?

The bigger issue is that a large number of reports were automatically posted on 11 October at 00:00 by the Elections Coordinating Committee (see an example here). All of them were marked as “verified” and included lines like: “Did the polling place open on time (08. 00 am): Yes” and “Did the counting start after polling closed: Yes”.

Obviously these reports are wrong: either, they really were published before the polls opened, in which case they are completely fabrications, or the posts were backdated, which is a serious mistake. In either case, it is confusing, hurts the credibility of the whole monitoring exercise and might even give rise to allegations of manipulation. For a project like this, that is a disaster. (Update: See response from Ushahidi in the comments section)

Finally, I noticed at least one report that was shown in a completely wrong location on the map, which ain’t great for a mapping project.

Where are the results?

On October 12, only two reports were posted to the platform. This shows how thin the network of contributors really is. While the results of many polling stations had already been posted on the doors of the local police stations, none of this information made it onto the web platform. Obviously, there were not enough monitors in the field to report that information.

No infrastructure, no crowd, no crowdsourcing

I had been very curious to see, how well the Ushahidi platform would work in a country with as limited an infrastructure as Liberia. Unfortunately the answer is: it doesn’t work.

The success of any crowdsourcing initiative depends on the size of the crowd. As I mentioned before, many Liberians don’t have mobile phones and even those who have one, frequently don’t have credit on the phone or the electricity to charge it, or they are living in one of the many areas which have no mobile phone reception. Of the remaining people, I doubt that many were even aware of the monitoring initiative.

Internet access is even rarer and for many people the concept of a web based monitoring platform must be something terribly abstract and not very relevant to their lives. All of this limits the size of the crowd almost exclusively to the nine partner organizations that were supposed to feed information to the platform. Some of these organizations, like UNMIL, would certainly have been able to contribute something of value. But in the end they didn’t – UNMIL for example did contribute a single report.

Last but not least, the low quality of maps of Liberia certainly posed an additional challenge for Ushahidi. Many villages, and even towns, simply cannot be found on Google Maps and most places, and even districts, can be spelled three or four different ways.

Potential versus reality

Don’t get me wrong: the potential for crowdsourced tools like Ushahidi is enormous. But in order to fulfill that potential, we have to take a critical look at what the problems are. Any database is only as good as the information that you put into it and in Liberia neither the quality nor the quantity were good enough. Admittedly, my perception would probably be slightly different if the polling station reports I mentioned above had been published after the polls closed and not before they even opened. But these things are important and those reports were even published as “verified”. However, none of that shouldn’t stop us from trying to do it better in 2017.

For the time being, let’s enjoy that everything been peaceful and hope that everything will remain calm.

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
2. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap
3. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia

Campaign poster for the presidential elections in Liberia, October 2011.

Liberians will go to the polls on 11 October 2011 to vote for a new house of representative, a new senate and – most importantly – they’ll decide who will be the president for the next six years.  Ushahidi has set up a website to monitor the elections.

This is going to be the first time I’m in a country where Ushahidi is used to monitor elections. And while I’m skeptical about its usefulness as a tool for (first) responders in an emergency situation, I think that it can be a very useful tool to monitor elections or in development contexts.

I’m looking forward to seeing what reports Ushahidi will have from Nimba County and Sanniquellie, where I’m based, because I think that in Liberia Ushahidi has to deal with a number of challenges in order to be able to give a comprehensive picture:

• Many people don’t have mobile phones or no credit or no electricity to charge their phones. This has an impact on how many people will be able to send reports to Ushahidi
• SMS are not widely used by Liberians
• Very, very, very few people have access to the internet
• The monitoring project has not been promoted very well. I only found out about this weekend – from an ICT-interested expatriate.

All of this limits the size of the crowd that Ushahidi can draw on and I would be interested to see a demographic breakdown of the people who submit reports.

Update 11 October 2011: It turns out that Ushahidi is working with 11 organizations in Liberia who are submitting reports to the web platform. These include local organizations, organizations specialised on monitoring elections and UNMIL. While this limits the size of the crowd it probably means that the reports are more accurate and more topical. Particularly the inclusion of UNMIL is interesting because UNMIL is in charge of providing security in the country in case anything goes wrong.

Update 13 October 2011: Please read my follow-up post on how I experienced Ushahidi’s performance.

Related posts:

1. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
2. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The difference between data and information

Data or information?

In my experience one of the biggest problems is that people don’t understand the difference between collecting data and analysing information. When you talk to a beneficiary, fill out a form and then archive that form somewhere, then you have collected data. However, that data only turns into useful information once you have entered it into a database or spreadsheet so that you can filter, sort, aggregate or calculate data.

If you work for a big retailer, you might think that this is obvious. However, in the humanitarian aid industry it sadly is not.

Three examples:

1. An organization working with refugees announced during a meeting that they would relocate between 2,000 and 4,000 people from host communities to a refugee camp during the next few weeks. Another organization that is in charge of providing food to that camp, said that they’d need to have a more precise number so that they know how many sacks of rice to buy. However, in the rush of the crisis the first organization had only registered heads of household and was not sure how many people were part of each household.
2. Different meeting, different actors, similar issue: Somebody announced that 458 people would be relocated to a refugee camp in the coming week. Someone working for a an education agency asked, how many of these would be children for whom schooling would have to be provided. The first organization was not able to provide that information since, while they had captured the age during registration on paper, they had only entered “minor” or “adult” into their database.
3. A while age I got to work with a big Excel spreadsheet that contained data of people who had been registered. Many of these people had two or three names (Last name, Middle name, First name), all of which were entered into a single cell called “Name” in the spreadsheet. However, people would sometimes give their last name first, and another time say their first name first, making it difficult to find them in the list. This problem was made worse by the fact that many of the people were illiterate so spellings might differ slightly from one time to the next. Once we put each name into a separate field, it was much easier to find even the ones that were misspelled because at least one of the three names would normally be consistently spelled and then you could simply scan the list of remaining names for phonetic matches.

Granularity and structure of information

I realize that collecting data during an emergency is a very challenging task. However, the three issues I described are not about an inability to collect data, they are about a lack of knowledge how to treat data properly so that you can use it to inform your decisions. In other words: they are examples of bad information management.

One frequent answer to this is “True, but we didn’t think about that in the beginning.” Well, that is exactly why you need to have professional, experienced information managers!

Particularly during the first phase of an emergency, organizations should invest in people who can help them structure the information they need in such a way that it is collected and entered in a useful way. This is something that can even be done by consultants on short-term contracts. Then, once the structure is in place, other (less expensive) people can enter data into those spreadsheets or databases and programme people can use the information as a tool.

Data confidence and errors

The second big challenge is to ensure that the data is entered correctly and stays correct. Everyone makes mistakes, particularly when you have a mind-boggling boring job like entering a list of thousands of names or dates of birth into a spreadsheet. One of the most efficient ways to prevent data entry errors is the double entry method. This means that everything is entered twice, by different people. Once all the data is entered, you can automatically compare the two data sets and look at the differences. I know, I know … I can almost hear cash-strapped managers groan at this suggestion, but hiring two data entry clerks might be only marginally more expensive then hiring one more qualified person.

The second way to reduce errors and increase data confidence is to have programme people work with the data themselves. I’m not necessarily talking about the initial massive data entry, but of the subsequent steps. In a lot of situations, updates are simply given to a person, whose job it is to update the database. This person normally has no knowledge of the programmes or the cases and most of the time never leaves the office. So for him, the data has no context and he will happily enter things that are written down, even if they don’t make sense. On the other hand, a programme person will notice inconsistencies or even be able to suggest improvements to the database. However, that means that organizations have to invest into teaching their programme people the basics of information management so that they understand how to do things and why certain things are done a certain way.

Stop reinventing the wheel

Last but not least, I’m still amazed to see people reinvent the wheel over and over again. A lot of the data that has to be captured is the same in different emergencies, with only small adjustments being necessary to fit the specific context. However, in each emergency people seem to start from scratch and build their databases and spreadsheets as they go.

It should be the role of the global cluster leads to provide standardized information management tools that can be reused and adapted. And while some clusters are already doing this, it is still too few and in the cases where the clusters do provide these tools, a lot of organizations are not aware of them – which again calls for an experienced information manager who knows where to find these tools and how to use them.

I know that hiring people with laptops and spreadsheets is not as sexy as buying trucks or as photogenic as handing out food to beneficiaries. But I am convinced that if we are serious about being efficient and about using the money that we have been given to the greatest advantage of the beneficiaries, we need to professionalize and invest into information management. The people who can do that job already exist, you just need to have to the will to find the budget and hire them. You programmes will improve because of it.

Related posts:

1. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”

Not far from where I live, an organization that shall remain nameless installed two massive water tanks, which are supposed to serve a community. And to make things easier, this organization installed an electric pump that uses solar power. Unfortunately, what might have sounded like a great idea is completely useless in reality, because the solar panels never made it through their first rainy season and there is nobody who could repair or maintain them – today the tanks are completely dry and empty.

So yes, technology is great and can be sexy, but it has to be appropriate to the context and you have to make sure that you train people in their use so that they can continue to use and maintain it.

Related posts:

1. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia
2. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
3. Rural Liberia: Where mobile phones are still a rarity