Lela and I had the distinct honor in giving the Woelfl Seminar on Public Policy at John Carroll University. First, we wanted to deeply thank the Political Science Department at JCU for affording us the opportunity and especially to Dr. Jen Ziemke, Assistant Professor in Political Science and Co-Founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. It was truly a pleasure and an honor both to be asked to speak in such a prestegious forum and to have the opportunity to speak with such engaged and thoughtful faculty and students. It was a breath of fresh air, to say the least.

I’d like to take a minute here to highlight a few points from our talk that resonated with attendees and that might be of interest to the participatory mapping, crowd sourcing and crisismapping communities. With the advent of so many new technologies and pathways to gather real-time, crowdsourced data (Twitter, SMS, web forms, ect.), and tools constructed to harness these real-time data streams (Ushahidi most notably), the focus in the among crisismappers tends to be the rapid-onset, acute crisis. And we’ve had a number of these rapid-onset, acute crises to deal with in the last several years (just think about the number of crises since the beginning of 2011 in which crisismapping has been valuable - Egypt, Libya, Japan, Christchurch, among others)  many of which have driven the development of these tools.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this focus on the acute crisis, and perhaps these tools when applied correctly can have the greatest impact under these conditions. However, we’re concerned that crisismapping is taking participatory mapping as a whole down the road of focusing exclusively on the acute crisis. Clearly this is not intentional among crisismappers – these are incredibly hard working people who in large measure are volunteering their considerable expertise to help save lives. We wanted to raise the issue not to curtail the fantastic work on acute crises, but mainly to point out that it’s critical to mitigate the slow-onset, chronic crises if our ultimate goal is to improve community resiliency such that when acute crises happen, communities have the capacity to respond to them with limited outside intervention.

Much of NiJeL’s work focuses on the mitigating the slow-onset, chronic crisis, and our talk also focused on 1) how some of the lowest tech  methods can be you most valuable tool when mapping chronic issues (health, poverty, food security and safety, climate change, sexual harassment, urban neglect…), and 2) how technology is often the easiest part of mapping chronic issues. The hard part is gathering people to your issue and building a cohesive, collective movement to both document where and what positive and negative events are happening and, ultimately, to lessen or remove a social, economic or environmental ill. Participatory mapping provides the tools (both low and high tech) to capture, describe and analyze any of these chronic issues, but we emphasize the need for community building before one deploys whatever tool they’re considering in their work.

Again, many thanks again to Dr. Ziemke and JCU for this opportunity!

We are honored to be invited to speak tonight at John Carrol University‘s Woelfl Seminar on Public Policy, and annual seminar sponsored by the JCU’s Political Science Department. Lela and JD will be discussing trends in participatory mapping and crisis mapping, including the long term and recent history, the democratization of participatory mapping tools, and viewing participatory mapping through the lens of both the rapid-onset, acute crisis and the slow-onset, chronic crisis.

Our lecture is scheduled for 6pm EDT, in the Donahue Auditorium of the Dolan Center for Science and Technology in JCU’s campus. We hope to see you there!

Below is an annoucement of the seminar from the JCU Political Science Department:

Woelfl Seminar on Public Policy:
“Trends in Participatory Mapping and Visualization”

The Department of Political Science presents the Woelfl Seminar on Public Policy on Wednesday, April 13, 2011, at 6 p.m. in the Donahue Auditorium of the Dolan Center for Science and Technology. This year’s seminar is titled “Trends in Participatory Mapping and Visualization: HarassMap, Community Participation, and Volunteer Networks” and will feature keynote speakers JD Godchaux, Executive Director of NiJel and Lela Prashad, Chief Technology Officer of NiJeL.

The Woelfl Seminar on Public Policy was established in 1981 in honor of Rev. Paul A. Woelfl, S.J., the founder and long-time chair of the Department of Political Science at John Carroll University. The purpose of the Woelfl Seminar is to provide an academic forum for the discussion of significant public policy issues.

JD Godchaux is a founder and Executive Director of NiJeL. JD is a trained policy analyst and a program evaluator always seeking to improve the impact of nonprofit and governmental programs. He is also a trained geologist and has extensive experience with numerous geospatial technologies both in the physical and social sciences. In the humanitarian space, JD has a particular interest in protecting vulnerable populations through the use of simple, affordable technologies, such as SMS.

Lela Prashad is a founder of and the Chief Technology Officer for NiJeL, an organization which builds open source data visualization and analysis tools for social change and environmental issues. She is also the director of Arizona State University’s 100 Cities Project at the ASU Mars Space Flight Facility.

This event is free to attend and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Department of Political Science at 216.397.4311.

 

Hania Shuleimy was walking home one night after teaching a late class. She says “someone just grabbed me … he grabbed my breasts and I fought my way out and I swore madly and screamed at him and he ran away. But no one did anything. … I cried and cried and cried all the way home.”

Shuleimy is a professor of gender studies at the American University in Cairo. She says harassment is now endemic in Cairo.

“I also find that many veiled women get harassed and many little girls get harassed and people who are not particularly hot get harassed. I think it has more to do with denigrating femininity in whatever guise,” she says.

Stories like Professor Shuleimy’s, documented in Lourdes Garcia-Navarro’s NPR story yesterday, are all too common in Egypt. But, as Ms. Garcia-Navarro unearthed in her reporting, there is great hope that the January 25 revolution will instill a “sense of respect” for Egyptian women – a respect that some felt was exhibited in Tahrir Square during the protests. Over the 18 day uprising, men and women congregated together in the square with less harassment and more equality than usual, and some felt that this was a sign of new liberation for Egyptian women. However, these steps forward have been overshadowed by the February 11th attack on CBS’ Lara Logan where she was beaten and raped in Tahrir Square. This unusually brutal attack on the CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent has brought the world’s attention to the systemic problem of sexual harassment in Egypt.

In an effort to draw attention to the problem of sexual harassment in Egypt, NiJeL built HarassMap, a website where Egyptian women can report incidents of sexual harassment and visualize where harassment occurs across Egypt.

We are partnering with a fantastic group of Egyptians dedicated to eliminating sexual harassment from Egyptian streets. HarassMap uses the Ushahidi platform to gather crowdsourced information on sexual harassment from multiple channels, including SMS, Twitter, email and the web. HarassMap also provides a simple interactive map and timeline to show where and when sexual harassment occurs.

While sexual harassment occurs as individual incidents it is a degrading act against the entire community.  We think that it’s important for the extent of the problem to be publicly mapped, visualized, and analyzed so women know they are not alone and can fight together for their rights.

HarassMap started as an idea from UCSD neuroscience graduate student, Justin Kiggins, whose wife was subjected to daily harassment while in Egypt as a Fulbright scholar. Our first action was to submit HarassMap as a proposal to the NetSquared USAID Development 2.0 Challenge , which made it into the Top 15 Projects. While HarassMap did not receive funding from this effort, we gained momentum and confidence to move forward with the project.

Since then, our partners in Egypt, led by Rebecca Chiao, have been conducting community engagement around HarassMap to ensure that women who experience sexual harassment and intimidation have access to resources and are building a dedicated volunteer network in Cairo.

We hope HarassMap will continue to be an important tool in stopping sexual harassment in Egypt and that one day soon HarassMap will only house historical data to teach about sexual harassment in Egypt as a past problem that has been overcome.

Links:
HarassMap – www.harassmap.org
Blog – blog.harassmap.org
Facebook Page

HarassMap in the News:

• HarassMap featured on NPR’s All Things Considered
• HarassMap discussed by Mona Eltahawy on CNN American Morning
• PSFK: Future of Real-Time: See Something, Text Something
• The Guardian: Women in Egypt get hi-tech aid to beat sexual harassment
• The Christian Science Monitor: In Cairo, an effort to put sexual harassment on the map – via Twitter and text
• The Huffington Post: Harassmap Aims To Curb Leering, Groping On Egypt’s Streets
• MobileActive.org: HarassMap: Tracking Sexual Harassment in Egypt with SMS

Our colleague Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping at  Ushahidi asked us to write a guest blog post about croudmapping during the Jan25 Egyptian revolution events. Below is the text and you can visit the Ushahidi blog post here:

As mentioned briefly in Patrick’s last post, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) created a CrowdMap instance on January 25, right at the start of the protests in Egypt. However, the last reports were approved by mid-day on January 26, over a day before the Internet was shut down in Egypt. No new reports have been posted to this instance even though the Internet is now available in Cairo.

There are a number of possibilities as to why this CrowdMap instance is not currently being administered, but obviously the lack of Internet service made it impossible for the ANHRI staff in Egypt to log in and administer the site. It’s also likely that most – if not all – of the ANHRI staff are taking part in the protests. It should also be noted that ANHRI’s offices are near Tahrir Square and might not currently be accessible.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that concentrating the administrative functions for an Ushahidi/CrowdMap instance in the hands of a small number of people, all in the same geographic, social and political space, creates an obvious vulnerability in the system. CrowdMap is fantastic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the distributed, cloud-based architecture. In this case, the Egyptian government could have blocked CrowdMap altogether, but they could not have taken this site down for others outside of Egypt. But, CrowdMap and Ushahidi can not on their own overcome what we call the “administrative vulnerability” that the 25Jan CrowdMap instance faced.

We think that there is still need for a dedicated site for the ongoing events in Egypt and the work of the Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC) to re-purpose theirU-Shahid installation is a great starting point for that effort. We would very much like to see the efforts of the ANHRI and DISC merged together in some way. Having redundancy here only serves to confuse. There is also a need over the coming days and weeks to include other data on a dedicated Egypt installation to help Egyptians find and share basic necessities like working ATM machines, food locations, and other information. We’re working to forge partnerships to do exactly that and any help that the CrisisMapping community can provide would be much appreciated.

We know from our experience in this area that to be most effective, there must be dedicated volunteers on the ground backed by strong organizations who can coordinate the volunteers,  publicize the system, and set standards for incoming reports. Organized Crisis Camps and allies outside of Egypt can play an important supportive role, but we think that the Ushahidi instance will serve the affected people best if organizations on the ground take the lead on what the purpose of the instance should be. Additionally, there will likely be government interference with the system and the administrator of any sensitive system should be prepared. To these points, we continue to offer our assistance to ANHRI, DISC and any others interested in improving a dedicated Egyptian CrowdMap or Ushahidi instance.

Finally, with continuing unrest across the Middle East, there appears to be a need for both a region-wide collection of reports to show the scale of the pro-democracy protests, as well as a proactive attempt amongst organizations in countries with nascent political uprisings to use tools like Ushahidi and CrowdMap to document these efforts. To overcome the administrative vulnerabilities we’ve outlined, it is useful for these organizations to forge partnerships with trusted, like-minded groups outside of their geographic, social and political framework to help them administer their instance if something goes awry.

NiJeL is proud to announce the addition of Lyzzette Bullock to our Board of Directors. Lyzzette, a graduate from the The University of Michigan Law School and Wellesley College, is an attorney practicing in commercial litigation and criminal law at Quarles & Brady, LLP. Her practice focuses on general litigation, including contract disputes and criminal defense. Lyzzette is also a founding member and financial secretary on the board of directors of Community Resource Initiative (CRI), a San Francisco based non-profit which provides legal and non-legal support for people accused of capital crimes. Prior to her current work, Lyzzette worked as a law clerk for an Arizona Court of Appeals judge and a legislative aide for a Massachusetts State Representative. Welcome Lyzzette!!

As thousands of opponents of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) march on the Arizona State Capital and a counter demonstration supporting SB 1070 are under way, I thought it would be a good time to delve deeper into the geography of boycotting Arizona.

I’ve lived in Arizona for over 8 years now, and I know many, many people who do not support this xenophobic bill, myself included. As such, I think a boycott of the entire state of Arizona misses the point. There are 9 legislative districts across Arizona where the sitting Senator and House members all voted against this hateful legislation, and another 8 districts where the delegation was split (1 or 2 votes out of a possible 3 for SB 1070).

Especially with respect to the 9 districts with no legislators supporting SB 1070, it’s fairly easy to make the case that the majority of voters living in those districts did not want this law and therefore should not be subject to a blanket boycott of Arizona. The districts where the delegation was split are a bit more difficult to discern and, if you’re considering a boycott, you’ll have to decide for yourself if you want to include those districts in your economic protest. Of course, the districts where the entire delegation votes for SB 1070 should be the target of any boycott.

With that idea in mind, I created a simple map detailing how the delegation from each legislative district voted of SB 1070, which you can see on Geocommons below.

View full map

The dark blue areas of the map show the 9 districts where the entire delegation voted against SB 1070. The lighter blue are 3 districts where 1 member voted for the legislation, and the light red are districts where 2 members voted for SB 1070. That leaves the dark red for districts where all 3 members voted for SB 1070.

By panning and zooming aroound the map, it should be pretty easy to see that the downtown cores of Phoenix and Tucson along with Tempe and Flagstaff should be out of bounds for a boycott – they’re legislators all were against SB 1070. So, if you were planning a conference at the Phoenix Convention Center or were planning a stay at the Clarendon Hotel and you canceled your reservations because of SB 1070, please reconsider! It’s also okay to fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (but not Phoenix-Mesa Gateway!), rent a car in the Rental Car Center and drive to the Grand Canyon, but please don’t stop for lunch in Sedona, Prescott or Camp Verde. Flagstaff, however is just fine! The same is true of the entire Navajo Nation and some of Arizona most beautiful places like Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley and some of the Painted Desert. Also, if you’re headed to southern Arizona, virtually all of Tucson is a “go” zone, with the exception of the extreme eastern and northern sides. Don’t boycott Tucson (mostly)!!

One thing about this map surprised me – across the Arizona-Mexico border there was not a single legislative district where all legislators supported SB 1070. Of course, the converse is also true – no district voted completely against SB 1070 – but it did surprise me (perhaps it shouldn’t have) that the majority of support for SB 1070 comes from cities in the East Valley (Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction, etc.), the north and western part of the Phoenix area (north Phoenix, Peoria, Surprise, Buckeye, etc.), and the northwestern part of Arizona with limited support from the border region.

Finally, all three state universities are outside of the boycott zone, as are the stadiums for the Arizona Diamondbacks (Chase Field/BOB) and the Phoenix Suns (US Airways Center). The new Cardinals stadium, however, is someplace you might want to consider staying away from. Perhaps this might get the team to consider playing their home games at Sun Devil Stadium again?

You can download a network linked KML of these data to use in Google Earth, Maps and other applications here.

Many thanks to Patrick Meier at Ushahidi for giving us the opportunity to guest post on the Ushahidi blog. You can read the post in it’s entirety here.

We’ve been very excited by the amazing and overwhelmingly positive response we’ve seen over the last several days as we have been rolling out Unite Arizona, a website using the Ushahidi Platform that allows Arizonans to report acts of harassment and intimidation. To recap our blog post from last Friday, Arizonans can now anonymously report harassment, intimidation, raids/sweeps, or unreported criminal activity via SMS (text message), Twitter, email, or the web, and Unite Arizona is currently live and accepting SMS data at 602-824-TALK (8255), Twitter updates with the hashtag #MHRSAZ, and emails at report@immigrantharassment.com. We asking the community for support in a number of ways, namely, help with report moderation, organizational support, and donations to help further the project. To learn more about how to get involved, please visit the About Us page on Unite Arizona.

In addition, we’ve been fortunate enough to receive several media reports about the site, which you can read and watch below. Thank you to the Phoenix NewTimes, ABC15, Telemundo (KTAZ), and Daily Kos for their stories on Unite Arizona!

Immigrantharassment.com to “Crowdsource” SB 1070 Fallout in Arizona by Sarah Fenske, Phoenix NewTimes

New Website Tracks Arizona Hate by Mother Mags, Daily Kos

New website tracking ‘immigrant harassment’ in Arizona by Tim Vetscher, ABC15

Today, NiJeL is proud to announce the launch of Unite Arizona (ImmigrantHarassment.com), a web resource provide both a way for Arizonans to anonymously report harassment, intimidation, raids/sweeps, and an outlet for unreported criminal activity via SMS (text message), Twitter, email, or the web. Unite Arizona is currently live and accepting SMS data at 602-824-TALK (8255), Twitter updates with the hashtag #MHRSAZ, and emails at report@immigrantharassment.com.

With the passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, global media, politicians, human rights groups, and concerned individuals have turned their attention toward Arizona, rightfully concerned about the negative impacts of this new law. Minority groups in Arizona have been and will continue to be subject to verbal and physical harassment and intimidation from organized hate groups, some members of law enforcement and xenophobic Arizonans. Moreover, many more victims will likely cease to report crimes out of fear of detention and deportation due to this law.

NiJeL created Unite Arizona (ImmigrantHarassment.com) to provide an outlet for harassment, intimidation and unreported crime. These incidents will be filtered by the type of incident and visualized on a participatory map and a timeline for the community to see. Unite Arizona uses the Ushahidi Platform: free and open source software designed to gather real-time, crowdsourced data for crisis response.

Incoming data can be tagged by location, category, date and time, and each report can include references to news items, photos and video. Trusted site administrators are charged with mapping and coding incoming messages, approving and verifying each incident, scoring the reliability of the source and indicating the probability that the event is real. Users of the site can also rate the importance of incidents, promoting those that are particularly egregious. Finally, anyone can sign up to receive alerts of approved incidents, filtered by location. With this system we intend to provide a powerful reporting platform for victims and activists, an alert system for crisis responders, and a compelling visualization of the scale and scope of harassment, intimidation and unreported crime in Arizona.

There are a number of ways to help us with this project:

Moderation Volunteering
If you would like to help us moderate reports of harassment, intimidation and unreported crime and comments form the public, please contact us using the from under the contact us tab. You will need to go though a background check process and attend a training session to learn how to use the internal moderation tools. Thank you!

Organizational Support
If your organization would like to show support for this effort and would like more information about how to get involved, you may also use the contact us form under the contact us tab. Thank you!

Donations
We are also accepting donations to help us support our volunteer coordinators, train new moderators, disseminate SMS and other site information, and improve the site technology among other items. Any amount would be much appreciated. Please see the About Us page on Unite Arizona to dontate using PayPal. Thank you!!

There will be a CrisisCamp in Phoenix this Sunday from 10am – 5pm in association with the upcoming GITA 2010 Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference next week. The CrisisCamp will be focused on “creating and improving online tools & services for the relief efforts in Haiti and for future crises”. Both techies and non-techies are encouraged to participate and help. Sign up at the link below. (Note that the times are wrong on the sign up page.)

Sign up: http://crisiscampgita.eventbrite.com/
Blog post on upcoming Camp by organizer Andrew Turner: http://highearthorbit.com/gita-crisiscamp-phoenix/
CrisisCamp Phoenix Wiki:http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/CrisisCamp_Phoenix

Hope to see you there!