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:
I was poking around the EPA Region 7 website today (really just looking for an address) when I came across this nice little Google Maps mashup of Region 7’s news items. Not bad! I’m all for this kind of thing obviously, and I hope R7 and all the other Regions (where are you Headquarters?) will consider putting as much of their geospatially enabled data on the web for public consumption. Even if you’re not interested in making a map of say, all the TRI facilities (TRI data are available, but individual facilities are not located in an easily mashable form – just aggregated by county) in a Region, at least create a GeoRSS or KML feed that updates when new data are avialable. By doing that, then other users can create mashups, for instance, a map showing water quality in wells and municipal supplies with poverty rates. EPA doesn’t have to make these maps themselves – others will mash them up with other relevant data. We’re now in an age where we expect transparacy from our government agencies, and this would be a good step toward making EPA more obviously transparent.
We have posted in the past about Ushahidi.com, which tracks violence in Kenya after the disputed Presidential election late last year. Sokwanele is a similar mapping project using Google Maps to show violent acts across Zimbabwe since the elections on March 29. Sokwanele is documenting acts of violence most perpetrated by supporters of Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since he lead a revolution to remove the British 28 years ago. The map is not participatory like Ushahidi’s map, but does use documented and verified incidents. You can read more about their data here.
You’ll have to bear with the speed of this map – it’s running slowly because of the large number of points that have to be rendered in the client. Even that is an awful statement on the situation in the country. There are so many acts of violence, that it’s slowing down the map.
U.S. News and World Report is running a story on post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans, and they’re showing this map, which depicts the amount of current activity for each city block compared to the activity pre-Katrina. Very clearly, areas that were hit the hardest have the least amount of current activity (Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East), while areas that had little or no damage are as active as they were before the storm.
One quick piece of commentary: It’s a shame on America that one of our great cities and my hometown is still in the state it’s in nearly three years after Katrina. I understand the political realities on the ground in New Orleans, but it’s clear to me that no real investment has been made in the recovery, and we’ve had no inspirational leadership or vision for New Orleans beyond what it was before the storm. We still have the opportunity to remake the city and show the world what Americans can do when their leaders ask them to give back rather than go shopping. Right now New Orleans is a shame on this country, but we can change that tomorrow if we want to.
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!
Google announced Tuesday that it had partnered with UNHCR on a Google Earth kml file that “takes you on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.” If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can check it out here. After the success of “Crisis in Darfur,” also a Google Earth tour of the devastation in the Darfur region of Sudan, it’s clear that web mapping – either in a browser or through a free application like Google Earth – can easily distill the size of the problem that a group like UNHCR is daeling with and can provide a really useful advocacy tool. Think of this in contrast with a typical type of advocacy, like a web page or a brochure that describes the conditions of one camp. Someone looking at this type of evidence might be moved by it, but they can’t interact with it, nor can they see how widesprad a problem this is. When people take a look at this new mapping layer at their own pace, I think each idividual story becomes much more powerful when seen in the context of all the stories on the map. Take a look at it and I think you’ll see what I mean.
This is a particularly ingenious use of Google Maps/Earth for advocacy. The Sunlight Foundation, which powers Earmark Watch, put together a simple Google map and KML file for Google Earth that shows all the Congressional earmarks in the House version of the FY08 Defense appropriations bill. Check out the Google map here, or launch the Google Earth KML here.
