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!
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!!
Last week, I was privileged enough to attended the Innovations in Mobile Data Collection in the Middle East Workshop sponsored by UNICEF Innovation and MobileActive.org in Amman, Jordan. The pre-workshop materials described the “impetus for the workshop” as “UNICEF’s national-scale project in Iraq collecting data from various populations about key indicators and use that data to effect policy and programmatic changes that can improve the lives of children.” The workshop had several stated goals, including:
“An exploration of key issues in citizen-driven data collection in the Middle East. These include technologies, systems, architecture, tools, standards, and people, among others.
Kick-start a regional working group / community around open-source data collection, aggregation and visualization using mobile technology
Map the landscape in the Middle East of applications/technologies, developers, and key thought leaders around real-time distributed data collection, monitoring, and visualization using mobile technology?
Help UNICEF build a roster of potential partners, possible vendors, academic institutions of interest, and groups or individuals to advance UNICEF regional goals.
Prototype new products or improvements of existing products about distributed data collection.”
First, the participant list was loaded with impressive, talented people from the mobile technology, software development, and international development fields. It also included a high level delegation from the Iraqi government from several ministries who were there to begin a dialogue about their future mobile efforts with UNICEF Iraq and ThoughtWorks, the software development firm contracted to develop mobile data collection systems for Iraq. I was honored to be there, and I learned much from each field not only about new mobile apps (and new applications of open source apps), but also about process and language issues that permeate across these fields and cultures, both professional and regional.
Day one began with an introduction from Katrin Verclas, Co-Founder and Editor of MobileActive.org, and Jaya Murthy from UNICEF Iraq both of whom described the interactions they were hoping to facilitate during the three days. Namely, they saw this workshop as an opportunity – with experienced leaders in software development for humanitarian issues – to create an action plan form developing mobile data collection applications and processes that would work in Iraq. After introductions, there were roughly twenty five-minute ignite talks on software and hardware platforms, specific analogous projects and the challenges facing Iraq, especially Iraqi children. Next, we broke up into small roundtable groups to discuss projects that were groundbreaking, why they succeeded and what obstacles mobile projects face in general (and suggestions for overcoming them). I volunteered to lead a table through these three main questions and had several members of the Iraqi delegation at my table.
There were signs at this point that the Iraqis were feeling a bit overwhelmed by the ignite talks and they did seem somewhat frustrated by the roundtable discussion. The group I led did hear some of their issues with the glacial pace of data collection that is currently the norm in Iraq, but I think because the discussion wasn’t directly focused on solving their specific issues (but talking about success stories and challenges), they had a tough time following and seeing parallels between what was possible (as evidenced by the successful projects being discussed) and the issues they were facing. One ray of light during this discussion came from Nadav Aharony, a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, who suggested one way of overcoming the lack of data network coverage could be to use so-called “data mules” such as wi-fi or bluetooth enabled laptops on buses that serve areas with limited data connectivity. Mobile devices could automatically connect to these machines and pass stored data to them, which in turn would be pushed to the data network when the bus reaches an area with connectivity. The Iraqis present for Nadav’s short presentation were very impressed and engaged – they peppered Nadav with questions about how exactly this could be implemented – and it seemed like a promising and fruitful discussion would happen after lunch.
It turns out, however, that the Iraqi delegation felt overwhelmed by the host of tools and projects presented to them and were unsure how any of this could benefit them in Iraq. To the organizer’s credit, they quickly recognized the seriousness of the problem they were facing and sequestered the Iraqi delegation with a handful of software developers – mainly from Thoughtworks – to take several steps back and regain the Iraqis confidence in, generally speaking, the concept of a mobile data collection project in Iraq. Being part of the contingent not in the room with the Iraqis, I can’t relay much of their discussions. Yet, it did take the better part of two days for the Iraqis to feel comfortable enough to re-join the others and present their issues and ideas for mobile data collection projects, which they did during the final afternoon of the workshop.
While that was happening, the other group of workshop participants had a rather academic discussion of the life cycle of data during the first afternoon and began day two with a general overview of agile software development from Thoughtworks. Personally I found this presentation and the follow-up roundtable discussions interesting if somewhat outside of the focus of the workshop, but others in the room either found the topic too specific to software development (and not for international development or other areas) or too basic or general – many folks in the room were experienced developers an agile software development process already. The afternoon of day two featured barcamp style, free form roundtable discussions of general topic areas suggested and led by the participants. I spent some time at Jeffrey Warren’s two sessions – one on Cartagen and the other on using kite/balloon aerial photography to build your own participatory maps – and some at a discussion of the challenges of geo-distributed open source volunteer software development teams (ways to keep them on track, meet deadlines, etc.).
The morning session of the third day featured two “peer assist” sessions where the audience is presented a real, concrete problem and asked to devise solutions. The first issue was related to getting Lebanese youth 18-25 generally engaged in civic participation and more specifically in the upcoming municipal elections. The group devised two tracks of solutions: 1) to develop a Facebook application Lebanese youth can join to answer questions and get information about the elections, and 2) to train youth leaders to conduct audio interviews of other youth at various locations across Lebanon and to archive and plot those interviews on an online map. The latter would allow adults and other youth to hear exactly why someone does of does not want to participate in the upcoming elections or more generally among other things. This was generally acclaimed as a very successful session.
The second issue related to the slums surrounding Cairo and how to use mobile technologies to bring them city services like police, emergency services and sanitation. Sherif Tawfik from the Egypt Child Rights Observatory (part of the Egyptian Ministry of State for Family and Population) gave an impassioned plea for help from this community to somehow use mobile data collection technologies to serve these communities, and the group spent a significant amount of time defining the scope of the problem that Sherif wanted to tackle. Here’s a video of Sherif’s ignite talk, where he gives more detail about the problem:
During the roundtable, I discussed NIRMAN’s efforts in participatory mapping in Dharavi (photo of the hand drawn effort below), the well established slum in Mumbai, India – perhaps the most densely populated spot on the globe. This mapping effort showed in great detail the huge economic assets that exist within the slum in an attempt to persuade the formal banking sector to offer banking services to Dharavi residents. A similar “asset mapping” project – mapping the economic, social and environmental assets that exist within these slums – could have a transformative effect on not only the Egyptian government but Egyptian society, and convince government and businesses to provide much needed services within these slum communities.
In the end, Sherif agreed to develop an action plan based on our discussions and share that with us. It might include a plan to bring several experienced mappers to a Cairo slum to do this kind of “asset” participatory mapping – involving the community! – and publish the data in OpenStreetMap. Perhaps this effort could piggy back on the next MobileActive.org conference? There were some whispers around the workshop that the next MobileActive conference might be in Egypt in May, and if so, that would provide a great opportunity either before or after the conference to at least begin work on an OSM project in a Cairo slum with an eye toward community assets.
The afternoon of the the final day the Iraqis rejoined our group and reported on their work over the last two days. They ultimately focused on two areas where using mobile data collection would be beneficial and appropriate. The first was to use mobiles to collect information for a small portion of the Millennium Development Goals, namely on the prevalence of working children who are not attending school and the barriers to school attendance. The other was the development of the Iraqi Child Protection Information System, which as best as I could understand was a system designed record incidences of child abuse. We then split into two groups so the Iraqis could have some time (about an hour) to interact with the developers/technologists present. I decided to join the MDG group.
It was clear from the start of this last session that to make this a truly beneficial dialogue, we would need many more hours to foster interaction between the Iraqis and the developers. But we only had an hour and our facilitators tried their darnedest to make the most of the hour. Most of the questions from the “technology” community centered on the parameters of the data – what data are they going to collect?, how will they collect it?, who will they collect it from? – the answers to which are imperative to know in generating ideas for what type of technology application is appropriate in this situation. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have more time with the Iraqis to fully flesh out their ideas and our thoughts about appropriate technologies, but it’s my hope that UNICEF, ThoughtWorks, and the Iraqis themselves will reach out to this community to assess their ideas for projects and applications over the next several months.
After the last session, I gave a short interview that you can view below:
For me, it was truly excellent to meet some of the top thinkers and doers in the mobile applications field, and I hope to continue our discussions that began here over the coming months. Thanks everyone for a great workshop!
If you’re interested in more information, videos, photos, etc. on this workshop, follow these links below:
The following is an excellent short talk by Schuyler Erle at FOSS4G 2008 about the need for free and open-source geospatial data. I could not agree more.
I came across this BBC article today detailing the OneGeology Project, which will serve a dynamic, web-based map of the geology at the earth’s surface globally at 1:1,000,000 scale. The finished product will be unveiled in a few days at the International Geological Congress in Oslo, but you can view the prototype here (doesn’t work in Firefox 3 though). Being a trained geologist, I’m very happy to see all of these geological data in one place, which will obviously foster collaborative partnerships between researchers and probably generate some new, possibly groundbreaking ideas about tectonics that have yet to be solved. As a web-mapping professional, I’m also intrigued that the group decide to use WMS and that participants will serve up their own data via their own WMS service. In a way, this is a participatory effort where new information (say a new field study identifies more complexity in the geology) can be added to a local WMS and those changes will be reflected in the global map instantly. Very cool!
This video is a “hallway chat” with Lela at the 2008 NetSquared conference talking about NiJeL, what she hoped to get out of the conference, and what her favorite project from the conference was. Enjoy!
The Des Moines Register has put together a mashup where people can post damage to their homes along with photos and videos and coverage from the newspaper. It looks like not many folks are participating – Iowa City has no content yet – but hopefully we’ll be seeing more people posting shortly.
Scott Madry, a professor at the University of North Carolina, best known in the Google Earth (GE) world for his moniker as the Armchair Archeologist, actually has skills in many disciplines. I first met him years ago when he was lecturing on space sciences at the International Space University.
He’s also worked with GIS (Geographical Information Systems) for many
years. Recently he was contacted to help with projects in Myanmar to
help humanitarian relief efforts understand the situation in the
aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Scott sent me an E-mail last week which
does a great job of describing how Google Earth is really helping in
disaster situations like this:
I am working with a group called the GISCorps, which is a volunteer group of GIS professionals who volunteer their time for humanitarian relief activities:
I got a call to ask if I could help with doing image analysis and
GIS for the Myanmar, and I have been working for the past week in using
Google Earth to digitize areas of the country. What is very interesting
about this effort is that it is entirely voluntary and uses GE. We have
a wiki with the interpretation instructions. People around North
America and Europe are involved, and we are all using GE to do the
image analysis and GIS work. When we finish one area it is sent to
another person for QA and then is further analyzed for damage
assessment. The final results are converted to ArcGIS and are sent to
the UN for creation of detailed maps that are made available by the
internet to relief organizations.
I think it is fascinating that GE is largely making this effort
possible. We have 20 people working now, identifying features such as
structures, roads, airports, and places that can be used as assembly
and relief sites (mostly Buddhist monasteries) on pre-cyclone imagery.
Another person does the same using post storm imagery and the two are
combined with the results mapped. We can do this around the world
quickly and get results in to the UN in days. By using GE we don’t have
any issues with data formats, proprietary software, etc. We each use
our own computers and KML files sent to us with the areas we are to
analyze. We submit our KML files as soon as we can and are given
another place to work on. It really harnesses the potential power of
the GE community.
Andy Isaacson has a story in the most recent issue of Wired Magazine on how native tribes in the Amazon basin are fighting back against “developers, ranchers, loggers, miners, oilmen, and biopirates.” They’re using inexpensive GPS units provided by Amazon Conservation Team to map the extent of their lands and help fend off the legal claims of other organizations. Isaacson get’s right at the heart of why participatory mapping is so powerful:
Of course, just because the tribes have mapped the lands doesn’t mean they control all the legal rights to them. But it’s a step in that direction. Suriname now uses maps generated by the Trio and other groups as official government documents. In Ecuador, the Shuar tribe, long embroiled in a struggle with American oil companies, was recently granted title to its communal lands, as mapped by GPS. The massive sandals-on-the-ground charting campaign and delineation of once imprecise boundaries have also given the tribes greater confidence in asserting their interests — in some instances, natives have driven out illegal miners and have established settlements and guard posts on their borders.
In addition to GPS mapping, tribes are using Google Earth as a tool for territorial vigilance. The app’s satellite imagery can identify threats — an encroaching soy farm, say, or a river stained by the runoff from a gold mine. A few tribes in Brazil with Internet access are marking the coordinates of surreptitious activity they see in the images, then investigating on foot or passing the information to government enforcers.
However, Isaacson also points out an interesting twist that I had not contemplated before. Perhaps this mapping might lead these tribes to realize the natural wealth in their forests only to exploit it:
Ultimately, though, this advanced technology may just help the Indians turn on the forest to enrich themselves. (And who can blame them, really?) Carrying a carved wooden cane and wearing slacks, a plaid shirt, and a Casio watch, the Trio’s chief hints at this uncertain future when I ask whether his newfound territorial security makes him more likely to get into the business of extracting natural resources. Education and technology, he says, have helped his tribe make more-responsible decisions. He then adds, “The maps have helped us realize our assets.”
I came across this interesting project today called the San Francisco Emotion Map, which the website describes as:
“a participatory mapping project by Christian Nold and commissioned by Southern Exposure. People go for a walk around the Mission district in San Francisco with the aid of a Bio Mapping device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot an ‘emotion map’ that highlights point of high and low arousal. By sharing and reflecting on this data, we can construct maps that visualize where we as a community feel stressed and excited.”
You can get a PDF copy of what the end product map looks like here, along with the Google Earth KMZ file here. The results are what you might expect – people are stimulated by commercial corridors like Valencia and Mission Streets or at stunning view points and pretty calm on the mostly residential streets. What’s interesting to me are the outlier points where people had unexpected reactions, like on 25th St. where the person says “Really nice, clean neighborhood up here with good garbage separation.” I also like that this project purposefully got particpants to walk to other parts of their neighborhood and record what they were feeling. It’s a simple idea, but I think it’s a very powerful one.
