• Technology in the 2011 Liberian elections: mobiles, monitoring and mapping

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
2. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
3. Completely wrong assumptions about technology in developing countries

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

In my opinion a lot of media still take what they read on Twitter or see on YouTube and  republish it without doing their due diligence – and this is not only true for the media but also for other projects and initiatives like Ushahidi that rely on social media for their data.

The BBC has now published elements process for verifying social media content, which makes for an excellent read. What emerges is a process that is more like that of a traditional intelligence agency, than what most people had in mind when joining journalism school. The steps include:

• Referencing locations against maps and existing images from, in particular, geo-located ones.
• Examining weather reports and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time.
• Checking weaponry, vehicles and licence plates against those known for the given country.

No related posts.

From the first I saw the service I really wanted to know how it works. How do they geo-tag the information, how do they work with languages etc. But unfortunately Ushahidi doesn’t explain any of that very well on their own site. Fortunately, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the people working on Ushahidi just posted a set by step explanation on his blog.

So, for everyone who wants to know how Ushahidi manages to do what they do, check out: Ushahidi & The Unprecedented Role of SMS in Disaster Response

Related posts:

1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
2. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
3. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure