Social Media 4 Good » Elections

Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia

Timo — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:23:13 +0000

I just noticed a post on Mobileactive.org on how technology was used by different organizations to follow the 2011 presidential elections in Liberia. The article focuses on the differences between election monitoring and crowd sourcing and also give some insights in the specific challenges that the organizers were faced with in Liberia. It’s worth reading:

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

Lack of communication fuels panic during riot

Timo — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 11:41:44 +0000

Those of you who follow the elections in Liberia have probably heard about the violent incident that took place in Monrovia last Monday. A local paper has an interesting article on how the simultaneous outage of one of Liberia’s two mobile phone networks affected people who were close to the riot.

The bottom line of the article is that people got even more scared and more worried because they were not able to reach family members and find out what was going on in other parts of the city.

This reminded me of an incident in a border town where I was a couple of months ago: there, all of a sudden people were running away from the market place in a panic. However, most people didn’t know why they were running. They were simply running because everybody else was and in the end there was no real danger and I doubt that people would have used mobile phones to find out what is going on in that small town even if they had a mobile phone network.

However, for bigger cities like Monrovia I can see how that kind of dynamic could very quickly turn a local incidence into mass panic and I’m sure that information/communication can play a major role in limiting how far the panic spreads. Governments should keep this in mind.

Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure

Timo — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:29:43 +0000

For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com (the elections were held on 11 October). Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi: After all, Ushahidi is just the technical platform and it is the responsibility of others to feed the system information, but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information.

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.

Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

Timo — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 12:17:00 +0000

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.

Book review: “Yes We Did” – Obama’s social media strategy

Timo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:17 +0000

Given how obsessed everyone was with how social media helped elect Barack Obama, I’m surprised that I haven’t read more reviews of this book: “Yes We Did – An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand” by Rahaf Harfoush, which gives an excellent overview over how the Obama campaign used social media to mobilize people to donate time and money.

Harfoush (@rahafharfoush) was a volunteer with Obama’s new media team. She describes the different tools that the campaign used along a rough chronological narrative, which works surprisingly well. In addition to her own observations, most chapters also contain at least one short interview with a team member who had been working on that particular aspect of the campaign. Each chapter also has a short summary with “social media lessons”.

Yes We Did - An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand

Good balance

The thing I really like about this short (185 pages) book is that Harfoush managed to keep exactly the right balance between strategy and operational details. Too many books about social media still explain step by step how to set up a YouTube account or explain what a Facebook page is. Harfoush doesn’t do this. She assumes that her readers know the tools. She focuses on how they were used in this particular context and what the thoughts were behind this.

Know what you want to say

It is exactly the explanation of these thought processes which I find one of the most valuable things about the book. Because it shows clearly how crucial two elements are that are missing from most social media initiatives – certainly in the non-profit sector: an actual social media strategy and a clear message.

Harfoush shows beautifully how the different tools were used in concert to:

Tailor messages for each micro-constituency while keeping the overall message intact.
Escalate involvement strategies on an individual basis.
Give people a feeling that this was their campaign.
Ask for small actions offline (thus creating an instant satisfaction feedback loop) to help the long-term goal.

Resources, resource, resources

The second thing I find really valuable about the book is that it gives you an idea of the resources that the campaign had at their disposal. Harfoush doesn’t give an exact number in her book, but by my count the new media team consisted of at least 35 people.

Where most NGOs have (maybe) one web-person who is expected to be a jack of all trades, the campaign had their own email team, design team, online organizing team and even analytics team - you name it, they had a team. And from the sounds of it these guys and girls were busy seven days a week and working long hours. No non-profit or international organization has those resources. This makes this book an excellent instrument to counter questions along the lines of “Why can’t you do what the Obama campaign did?”.

To summarize: “Yes We Did – An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand” is an easy to read, interesting and really useful book. It is not a set of step-by-step instructions how to duplicate the Obama campaign. But if you are working with social media on a strategic level, I highly recommend you getting it.

Interactive election soap helps understand political platforms

Timo — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:00:20 +0000

As mentioned in an earlier post about the Germany will have general elections at the end of September. As a result some interesting web applications are appearing on the web, geared at trying to help voters with their decision.

Germany’s most respected political magazine, “Der Spiegel”, is trying to make abstract political platforms tangible through a “web soap-opera” called ”Zeit der Entscheidung” (Decision Time). Each webisodes lasts for 15 minutes before the viewer is asked for his party preference. Then, the video continues according to what the parties are promising in their political platforms. Unfortunately the videos are only in German.

Gay marriage, weed and workers rights

"Decision Time" election soap opera

In the first episode a student catches his teacher smoking weed. If you vote for the conservatives then she will lose her job and receive a commuted sentence. If you vote for the Greens, the you will see her sharing a joint with a policeman. In a similar fashion the video shows the different attitudes of the political parties to gay marriage and lay-off protection. You can “vote again” to see how the story would play out if another party was in power.

The webisodes are set in a small restaurant and very well produced. The fact that Der Spiegel is behind it helps because it means the videos have probably been produced fairly and not with a particular angle in mind.

What I find interesting is, that they take the opposite approach of the “Elect-O-Meter” which I wrote about last week: The videos are not letting people chose issues and then tell them which party supports those decisions, but assumes that people know which party they support (even though you can “vote again”).

The good and the bad

I like the idea because it makes political platforms tangible; it gives the differences between the political parties a voice and a face. It helps you to understand what the complicated party programs can concretely mean for people.

What I don’t like about it is that the format has to simply things a lot in order to work. I also don’t like that there is no way to account for the political realties of coalitions. No party in Germany will have the absolute majority which means that particularly the more extreme positions of the small parties will never become law.

Overall, I like it. I think it is an excellent idea and I suppose it is particularly attractive for people who don’t like too much detail. However, I think it would work better in countries which have two party systems like the US or the UK .

See also:

The Elect-O-Meter: Whom would you vote for if you were German (in English)