08 May 2009
Online Maps Enable Citizens to Report, Track Events
Internet tool being used to monitor India elections
Washington — Online mapping tools like MapQuest and Google Maps are known for helping people get from Point A to B. With the help of some technical experts, these maps can also be used to track and monitor critical events in real time.
As violence broke out following Kenya’s December 2007 presidential elections, Erik Hersman, who grew up in Kenya and Sudan but was in the United States at the time, realized how difficult it was to get specific information about where violence was occurring. With the help of friends — some in Kenya, others in the United States — he built a simple mapping Web site named Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili) that tracked the violence.
In a country where traveling and getting information was difficult, Ushahidi enabled anyone with a mobile phone to report an incident and “say where they are and what’s going on, so we could have some record of what was happening around Kenya,” Hersman told America.gov. The best way to get information “was to go straight to the people, start gauging what was going on in their lives by SMS messages.”
“We provide a way to source information from areas that aren’t capable of doing it any other way,” he said.
The information people submitted was displayed on a map, highlighting incident locations and allowing users to click on points to gain more details. Ushahidi’s mapping program, known by technical experts as a crowd sourcing tool, enables users to gather and document a great deal of information gathered from a community on a specific topic.
Creating such a tool did not require knowledge of cutting-edge technology, Hersman said, noting that the technology had been available for years and it took just two days to build the site.
SHARING TOOLS
“Technologists are good at what they do and can create interesting things. And by and large, technologists make a pretty healthy salary, so we don’t have to worry about a lot,” Hersman said. “But we look around the world, and we’re from parts of the world oftentimes that do have struggles. So you look at ways you can use the gifts and talents you have to effect change in those areas.”
So when Ushahidi’s tracking of the Kenyan elections drew attention from humanitarian groups eager to use a similar platform, Hersman created an open-source tool allowing anyone to take the code and develop their own mapping and tracking tools, “without starting from scratch,” he said. While the Ushahidi team has worked directly with organizations to help them set up their own maps on Web sites, anyone can take Ushahidi’s code and build their own page.
“There’s real power in creating platforms,” Hersman said. “Here is a basic tool set that allows you to do a number of different things. … We can’t come up with all the instances you might use it for, so let’s just give you something to play with and go from there.”
Among those who have used the Ushahidi platform is Gaurav Mishra. Mishra, a Yahoo Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, had long been thinking about how technology could be used to promote social change in his home country of India. He saw the value of online tools such as Twitter for reporting the latest information during ongoing events like the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. But there was a need to find a way to better track events over a sustained period of time, Mishra told America.gov.
Using Ushahidi’s basic mapping tool and with the help of about 35 volunteers scattered across the globe, Vote Report India was built in a week. A Web site featuring a map enabling average people to report and track election-related events, Vote Report India provides real-time information about the elections. India’s national elections are held over five phases which began April 16 and conclude May 13.
Visitors to the Vote Report India site can see where incidents of violence, voter bribery, voting machine malfunctions or other problems have occurred. The Web site provides instructions for those who want to report their own event: They can do so via Internet form, Twitter tweet, e-mail or text message. The site also aggregates video and photos of the elections.
“It’s not that we’re doing something new here. We’re just aggregating everything together,” so all the information is available in one place, Mishra said.
In the case of Vote Report India, efforts are made to ensure the reported information is accurate; reports are verified and moderated by volunteers. This means that some citizen observations may not make it online. But how much editorial control is exercised is up to the user. In the case of Ushahidi’s map tracking H1N1 influenza, unverified accounts from citizens are included.
With a number of elections coming up this year, groups in other countries are considering similar voting-report Web sites. Ushahidi is helping a group in Lebanon use the tool to monitor and track its June elections.
More information about Ushahidi and its code is available on the organization’s Web site. See also Vote Report India.
