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

Many thanks to Annie Heatwole, Katrin Verclas and Anoush Tatevossian at MobileActive.org for taking the time to interview Rebecca Chiao and myself for the story on HarassMap that follows. It’s well written and speaks directly to the issues that the HarassMap project will try to expose and the challenges that the project will face. Enjoy!

For women in Egypt, sexual harassment is an unwelcome but all too common part of life. In 2008, the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights released statistics stating that 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women in Egypt reported exposure to sexual harassment. HarassMap, a project based in Cairo, plans to give women an outlet to report instances of harassment. Combining FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi’s mapping platform, HarassMap aims to be a voice for women.

Rebecca Chiao, who currently heads the development of HarassMap, worked for the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights; in 2005, she started a campaign to raise awareness against sexual harassment in Egypt. She left the ECWR in 2008 and used some of the things she learned from that campaign to shape HarassMap. However, the project is still in development because it has not yet secured the necessary funding. Chiao says, “We’re basically just waiting for a funding partner so we can get it up and running.”

Developed by NiJeL, a US-based company that creates online mapping systems, the project will run on the Ushahidi platform, funneling SMS submissions onto a map that will display where harassment is happening. JD Godchaux, executive director of NiJeL, says that HarassMap will be the first project by NiJeL that maps data collected through SMS submissions. Says Godchaux on why maps will be a particularly effective means of tracking sexual harassment: “There’s nothing more powerful than seeing a map with all these points. […]These are all real, these are all people who’ve taken time out of their life to send in a message to us.”

In both her work at the ECWR and with the development of HarassMap, Chiao has faced the challenge of getting people to understand what sexual harassment is and why it’s a problem:

For the first couple years of the sexual harassment campaign [through the ECWR], things were going really well in terms of the idea being spread. And there was a lot of opinion change in the public. When we started running the campaign, you couldn’t say ‘sexual harassment’ in public; people were offended by it, and they didn’t know what it meant – they thought it meant child molestation or rape. And there’s this blame the victim attitude here towards it, where women didn’t feel as though they could say anything. […] And this changed a lot, and there was a lot of public pressure for the government to do something.

Unfortunately, although a law against sexual harassment was proposed in 2008, it was never voted on and there are currently no laws against sexual harassment in Egypt (although according to The National, a new law was recently drafted). The goal of HarassMap is to once again draw attention to the problem of sexual harassment in order to bring the issue back to light, and hopefully push the government to pass laws that give women more legal recourse against their harassers. According to Chiao, it’s very difficult for women to report sexual harassment to the police; they can, but it’s a difficult process and often futile. In fact, some police forces have taken an active part in street harassment at times. Strict anti-harassment laws would hopefully give women more leverage to report problems.

The Technology

When Godchaux began his work developing HarassMap, he knew he wanted to have an SMS-based system that  displayed the information on a map. He says they considered developing the system themselves, “but after a few weeks of thinking about it and talking about it, it became increasingly clear that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel on that. The Ushahidi engine will do really well here I think.”

Ushahidi allows for information to be submitted by users via SMS, Twitter, and webforms, although the concentration will be on SMS submissions.  It is noteworthy, however, that in most instances of Ushahidi deployment to date, submissions from the public overall have been extremely low (possibly due to lack of awareness of the platform by the general public) and SMS submissions constituted just a minor percentage – in some cases just a handful of submissions.

Chiao hopes, however, that there will be greater uptake.  She notes that “any person on the street will be able to send an SMS to a number. The number is tethered to the Ushahidi site; a volunteer will validate the report and then map the incident. At the same time, the data will be collected for analyzing and [we can] look for harassment hot spots.”

The group chose to focus on SMS reports due to the ubiquity of the mobile phone in Egypt. The information sent to HarassMap will be anonymous, but will be compiled in order to gain a better picture of the current state of harassment in Cairo. Chiao hopes that once there is hard data showing the widespread problem of harassment in Egypt, that it will once again compel the public to push for anti-sexual harassment laws.

Where is HarassMap going?

The HarassMap team is currently comprised of six volunteers who are focused on securing the funding to get the project launched. Chiao says that between the necessary marketing expenses and the technology expenses, it will cost a minimum of $25,000 to launch for the first year, with the cost decreasing in later years.

Says Godchaux, “We’re in the process of looking for funding; the technological development is, I don’t want to say trivial, but in the grand scheme of the project it’s the easy part. The difficult part is having funds to do the advertising campaign, making sure that people in the community in Cairo know the short code to use to submit data, that we have a committed team of people there who are ready to verify data when it comes in.”

Both hope that once the project launches it can serve as a basis for similar programs in other countries. But as the group works to secure funding for launch of the project, it remains to be seen how the project will affect both women’s reactions to sexual harassment and occurrences of sexual harassment in the first place. Says Chiao,

We’re hoping that awareness will spread through this – that when we tell people about the service they’ll also be hearing about sexual harassment. And they’ll be hearing about it in a way that’s not like,  ‘stay home’ or ‘get veiled.’ We’re presenting it as a violation of women’s rights – it’s your right to walk down the street safely, and if someone violates that right, you have an action you can take.

Hot off the presses! We blogged a while back about JD’s Ignite talk – Empirically Derived ‘Fault Line’ Analysis: A Proposed Early Crisis Warning Tool at ICCM 2009, and now we have an extremely well produced video to share of the talk. Because of the speed of the talk, following JD through the model might be a challenge, but if you’re interested in talking a more in depth look at the model you can read more about it here.

Thanks again to Patrick Meier, Jen Ziemke and the team of JCU students who filmed and produced each of these videos. Thank you!!

NiJeL is proud to announce our new partnership with Water.org! Over the coming months, we’ll be building the WaterCredit.org Map – an interactive, web-based map that will, among other things, showcase Water.org’s WaterCredit Partner Organizations (POs) and projects.

Across the globe, over one billion people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water and over 2.5 billon have no access to rudimentary sanitation. Much of the problem lies in the relatively large capital costs associated with building or connecting reliable water and sanitation infrastructure to the homes of poor families. Water and sanitation can often be differentially expensive for poor people – several studies suggest that poor households can pay up to 20 times more for water than their wealthier counterparts. Add to that the increased costs associated with poor heath and the opportunity costs associated with walking long distances for water, and it becomes clear that a small micro-loan to help a household connect to clean water and sanitation infrastructure will put dramatic downward pressure on these costs and be a clear economic winner in the long run.

Water.org aims to create access to microfinance for water and sanitation infrastructure projects through its WaterCredit Initiative, which provides financing for their POs to run demonstration water and sanitation microfinance projects. The ultimate goal is to prove to traditional banking institutions that these loans are not excessively risky (i.e. repayment rates are very high), and indeed, they can be profitable as well as environmentally and socially beneficial to the entire community. To that end, it is critically important to showcase the positive impacts of the WaterCredit Initiative on families and communities, and to demonstrate the willingness and ability of these households to repay their loans in a timely fashion at reasonable interest rates.

Working toward the goal of building a simple, visual, participatory tool showing project impacts and healthy repayment histories, NiJeL will build the first two phases of the WaterCredit.org “See It” Map. Phase 1 will focus on building the database, mapping and dashboard infrastructure, while Phase 2 will create better tools to gather and share detailed information about each PO and WaterCredit project. In Phase 1, NiJeL will build the foundational WaterCredit.org “See It” Map, a web-based, interactive map featuring three main views – a global view, a country view, and a partner view – each showing spatial data layers specific to that view. The global view will show data layers relevant to water and sanitation microfinance, such as global poverty, general microfinance data, and data on access and quality of water and sanitation infrastructure. In addition to the data shown on the global view, the country view will show the locations of the WaterCredit Initiative’s POs, the individual WaterCredit projects facilitated by the POs, and local financial institutions supporting the WaterCredit Initiative. Finally, the partner view will show more detailed information about each PO along with an access point to a fully featured partner view. This second, more detailed partner view, part of NiJeL’s Phase 2 work, will include a site map of the PO’s project area along with specific information about each project associated with that PO.

In conjunction with the Phase 1 portion of this mapping project, NiJeL will also create Water.org’s centralized PostgreSQL database where data for the WaterCredit.org “See It” Map and many other applications, including the Projects-Parners-Funds (PPF) Dashboard, will emanate from. NiJeL will also work to create the PPF Dashboard, a comprehensive, customizable, and searchable intranet data portal that will allow Water.org staff access to all critical organizational and project data.

We’re very excited about this work with Water.org, so stay tuned to the NiJeL blog for updates as we move forward on this project.

NiJeL’s long time client, Beatitudes Center DOAR, recently went though a re-branding effort in which they changed their name to Duet, changed their logo and print materials, and, of course, they also changed their web presence significantly. Duet is the same organization, however, providing the same quality service to homebound adults, family caregivers, nurses in faith communities, and grandparents raising grandchildren.

With the website redesign, we worked with Duet to redesign their Volunteer Services Map, which shows where homebound elders across Phoenix need service now. Each icon on our Ongoing Services and Transportation Services Maps represents an actual person who is waiting to get groceries, a ride to the doctor, or simply talk with a friend. The Volunteer Services Map is updated several times daily showing only the homebound elders who have yet to be matched with a volunteer.  If you’re in the Phoenix area and are interested in volunteering to help out a homebound elder in town, please take a minute and visit the Volunteer Services Map!

Today, NiJeL is proud to announce the launch of the AzAfterschool Directory, a joint project with the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence. The AzAfterschool Directory is both a listing and a location-based search of all out-of-school time programs for children ages 5 to 18 across Arizona.

Parents that are looking for a quality afterschool program near their home, workplace or any other location can now easily log on to the Directory and search for programs by typing in an address, choosing a search radius (3, 5 or 15 miles) and clicking “search.” Parents will then see an alphabetical listing and a map showing all the programs within that search radius. Users can see a pop-up bubble with more information about each program by clicking on any link in the alphabetical listing or on any of the points on the map. Within the pop-up bubble the link “Click Here for More Program Information” will lead parents to a dedicated page for each program with information about the program activities, ages served, hours, contact information, and other information that might be useful for parents looking for a quality out-of-school time program. There is also an advanced search tool that allows parents to narrow their search for programs that fit their specific needs.

To get you started, we created a short 5 minute video demonstration of the AzAfterschool Directory. The Directory is very easy to use so feel free to jump right in, but if you would like to sit back and watch the test drive, click the video link below:

If you happen to run a quality afterschool program in Arizona, whether large or small, non-profit or for profit, licensed or licensed exempt, we would love to share your information with parents in the AzAfterschool Directory. Adding or editing your information on the map is simple and, best of all, FREE! It takes only a few minutes to enter your program details, and programs with multiple sites have the capability to enter each site individually. The AzAfterschool Directory also allows afterschool providers with summer programs to list the details of their summer programs separately.

To add or edit information about you program, click on “Add/Edit Program” on the right near the top of the Directory’s main page. You will be prompted to enter your login information or to sign up as a new user. Oce you are logged in, you can search for your program by address, and, if it’s in the Directory, you can edit the information by clicking on “Click Here to To Edit This Program” in the pop-up bubble. If you’re program is not listed, you can always add your program to the map with the “Add New Program” form.

Once added, you will receive an email confirming your submission, and after an administrator at the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence has had the opportunity to review your submission, you will receive another email approving or declining your sumbission.

We’re very excited about the release of this tool that we think could be extremely valuable for Arizona parents. We’d also be very interested in hearing from you about your experices using the AzAfterschool Directory – you can always use the comment field on our blog, or contact us in one of many ways from our website. Finally, if you have any questions about the AzAfterschool Directory or afterschool programs more generally, please call the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence at 602.279.7100.

Late last month, NiJeL traveled to Kansas City to introduce the International Programs and Communication teams at Water.org to GIS and GPS concepts and techniques. Water.org works with partner organizations to deliver access to safe drinking water and sanitation projects in Africa, South Asia and Central America. Last month they reorganized to from Water.org after merging two organizations, Matt Damon’s H2O Africa Foundation and WaterPartners. Water.org is also on a the upside of a steep growth curve – they served three times as many people in 2008 than they did in 2007.

Our training covered a wide range of topics – from basic desktop GIS concepts to neogeography tools – but we focused mainly on open source solutions many of them from the open source geostack. We came prepared to use the OSGEO LiveDVD from FOSS4G 2008, but it became clear immediately that laptop wireless connectivity was going to be an issue, as we were going to use several web-based tools throughout the day. While each participant now has a lovely LiveDVD to share with their colleagues, they were not used during the training.  Instead, participants downloaded and installed QGIS and OpenOffice during our first break, and the also downloaded a ZIP file with data we had them use in several exercises.

During our desktop GIS exercises, we had our participants navigate, symbolize, identify and query some basic vector data, digitize some polygon data from a satellite image and create point layers by delimited text data to QGIS. We also had participants make a point layer by geocoding addresses using batchgeocode.com, OpenOffice and QGIS. Conceptually, we covered map projections and datums and how to gather, import and export GPS data using GPSBabel and QGIS, and we also did an exercise adding GPS data to QGIS. Finally, we did a brief overview of neogeography tools and participatory mapping, giving participants an introduction to our participatory maps, and the opportunity to create their own Google MyMap and export that data as KML.

For us here at NiJeL, it was an absolute pleasure delivering this training. Not only were all of the participants quick studies on GIS software and concepts, but they asked insightful questions and were fully engaged during the whole session. Many thanks to Water.org and especially Heather Arney for her work in getting us to Kansas City, and to Marcia Nation for connecting us with Heather. Thank you!!

It’s the last day to vote in the NetSquared’s N2Y4 Mobile Challenge! Please consider voting for NiJeL’s two projects, HarassMap and FloodSMS!

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NetSquared recently announced their 2009 N2Y4 Mobile Challenge – an opportunity to develop and collaborate on Projects using mobile technology for social change, which solicited innovative project proposals using mobile technologies to impact people in the developing world. At NiJeL, we decided to submit not one, but TWO project proposals, and now we’re asking for your help.

The Challenge received 112 project proposals and now it’s your turn to vote on them. Voting is only open for a week beginning Monday, April 6 at 9:00am Pacific Time (U.S.) through Friday, April 10 at 3:00pm Pacific Time, and the top 14 vote-getting projects will be invited to participate in the N2Y4 Conference. You must vote for at least three projects, but no more than five.

We’re asking you today to log on to the 2009 N2Y4 Mobile Challenge project gallery and vote for both of NiJeL’s projects and also a project from our friends at FrontlineSMS:Medic.

The two NiJeL projects are:

• HarassMap – Reporting and Mapping Sexual Harassment on the Streets via SMS
  This project will implement a system for women in Egypt to report sexual harassment via SMS. This tool will act as an advocacy, prevention, and response tool, highlighting the severity and pervasiveness of the problem and alerting police to hotspots.
• FloodSMS – Early Detection and Warning of Catastrophic Flooding via SMS
  This project, a joint effort with ekgaon technologies, will create a flood early warning application, which will push SMS messages to people downstream of a flood event giving them up to 24 hours advanced warning. We intend to pilot this project in the Terai region of Nepal-India.

Our friends at FrontlineSMS:Medic also have a project worthy of your vote:

• FrontlineSMS:Medic – SMS for Medical Records and Mobile Lab Diagnostics
  FrontlineSMS:Medic is a team committed to empowering community health workers in the developing world using appropriate mobile technology. After almost a year of working with FrontlineSMS in Malawi, we are launching FrontlineSMS:Medic to extend the capabilities of this software and bring it to health centers across several continents.

There are a few simple rules to voting:

• If you don’t have a NetSquared account yet, register for one at: https://www.netsquared.org/user/register (please check your junk mail folder if you do not see a registration email confirmation)
• You can only vote for each project once
• Each registered user has one (1) ballot
• You must vote for at least three (3) projects and no more than five (5)
• All votes are weighted equally (in other words, your first choice and fifth choice have equal value)

Thank you so much for voting for our projects!

Yesterday, a groper in Cairo was convicted for the first time. This is a positive step forward in taking sexual harassment in Egypt seriously. We hope our HarassMap tool will be able to help contribute to this progress.

Our HarassMap project with our colleagues at Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights will give women a way to anonymously report incidences of sexual harassment as soon as they happen, using a simple text message from their mobile phone. By mapping these reports online, the entire system will act as an advocacy, prevention, and response tool, highlighting the severity and pervasiveness of the problem.

You can read more about our HarassMap project on the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge site: http://tinyurl.com/5hu3jd HarassMap was one of the final 15 in the Challenge. We are currently searching for full funding for this project.

Noha al-Ostaz, a 27-year-old Egyptian filmmaker, was standing on the side of a busy, traffic-choked Cairo street last June when a van driver reached out of his window and groped her. Then, pulling at her body, he looked into her face and laughed. Ms. Ostaz had seen women harassed on the crowded streets of the city before, and had seen them do nothing about it. Something inside her clicked.

“I just felt, I’m never going to let this happen again,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.
So Ms. Ostaz shouted and demanded that the driver get out of the van. He refused, so she jumped on the hood, vowing she would rather be hit by the vehicle than get off and let the man drive away. A crowd formed. Finally, the driver got out of the van. Ms. Ostaz, with the help of a female friend and one or two other bystanders, then physically dragged the man to a police station about four blocks away.On Tuesday, an Egyptian judge sentenced the van driver — Sherif Jebriel, 30 — to three years imprisonment with hard labor, a remarkably lengthy jail sentence by Western standards for such an offense. He was also ordered to pay 5,001 Egyptian pounds ($895) in damages to Ms. Ostaz. Women’s rights activists in Cairo hailed the verdict and sentence, saying that to their knowledge it was the first time an Egyptian court had ordered a groper to prison.

Full article: NYTimes

NiJeL will be starting a refugee mapping project in Seattle and I have been assigned to begin researching for information.  I will be looking for data sets that include low-income housing, food banks, hospitals, esl classes, and schools to name a few things I am searching for.  There are many other data sets to find for this project but we will start with those.  I will be saving the links of the data on google notebook so the team will all have access.  I am excited to be apart of this project because I am from Seattle.  Hopefully there will be data sets already available. If not, I may have to manually find the information to then convert and creating it into a file. I will be posting updates regularly on the status of this project. Be sure to check back for updates!

-Richard