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.

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:

Twitter: Search #mobdata

Tumblr: http://mobiledatainnovations.tumblr.com/

Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com/smextoday#MOBDATA

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MobileActiveOrg#g/a

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katrinskaya/tags/mobdata/

MobileActive.org: http://mobileactive.org/

UNICEF Innovation: http://unicefinnovation.org/

NiJeL was honored to be invited to the Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in the Middle East workshop next week in Amman, Jordan, hosted by UNICEF Innovation and MobileActive.org. Our executive director, JD, will have the pleasure of attending this workshop and is looking forward to showcasing some of NiJeL’s most recent work and learning from the impressive roster of attendees! You can follow JD’s updates from the workshop on Twitter here: @nijel_mapping

Here’s a quick description of the workshop:

UNICEF Innovation and MobileActive.org invite you to attend a three-day workshop on distributed and real-time data collection, monitoring, and visualization of data with mobile technology.

What is this About?

With the ubiquity of mobile technology, data collection and monitoring of key indicators from the ground up by affected populations is now possible. Mobile technology in the hands of people can now be more than a person-to-person communication medium but can be used for capturing, classifying and transmitting image, audio, location and other data, interactively or autonomously.

By involving people in defining and participating in their own data collection, this approach can address significant unmet challenges in large-scale data collection for public health and citizen participation.

In this three-day workshop, we will explore the critical issues, technologies, and architectures involved in collecting and utilizing data-from-below, bringing together the key technology and research leaders on distributed data collection and distribution in the Middle East.

What are the Goals?

• 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.
• Please note that the workshop will be held primarily in English (with some Arabic sessions).

The impetus for the workshop is 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.

As part of this work, MobileActive.org, a global community of people using mobile technology for social impact, and UNICEF partnered to explore, with key leaders in the Middle East, critical issues on large-scale, citizen-driven and bottom-up data collection.

And here’s a list of the impressive organizations invited to be there:

Al Jazeera
ArabiaGIS
Cisco
Development Seed
Gapminder
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Intel
Meedan
Mercy Corps
MIT Media Lab
Open Data Kit
Open Mobile Consortium
Rootspace
Royal Scientific Society of Jordan
Sharek961
SMEX Beirut
Souktel
Thoughtworks
UNICEF Iraq
Union of Arab ICT Associations
Ushahidi
Women in IT, Lebanon
Zain

Many thanks to Chris C. at MIT Media Lab for facilitating our involvement at this workshop, and to Katrin Vercalas at MobileActive for inviting us to attend. Thank you!!

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

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya is using GSM/GPS to track elephants and then map that data using Google Earth.  This is interesting and definitely on the frontline toward improving wildlife conservation efforts.  Though I don’t know the technical details of the project, I am hopeful that this technology will assist conservation biologists with species location, tracking, and identifying the extent of critical habitats.

Link to the maps here http://www.savetheelephants.org/tracking.html or read the article in Wired.

http://tinyurl.com/mappingelephants

We at NiJeL have always thought that it’s ridiculous for cell service providers in the U.S. to have that ability to provide GPS services, but not to roll them out because they haven’t yet found a way to make money. So, it serves them right that Google could very well scoop them on providing free or low cost GPS navigation in their new cell software. Many cell phones already have GPS devices, but the cell phone’s software (controlled by the cell service providers in the U.S. like Verizon and AT&T) doesn’t access that GPS device. Google’s new operating system and software for mobile phones could change all that. Google is ready now to offer local navigation services for little or no cost in exchange for location-based advertising. In this case, the ad revenue model is working more efficiently than the revenue model the cell providers have attempted so far – make folks pay for their GPS. Verizon charges $9.99 a month for the software to access to the GPS that’s already on your phone.

For NiJeL, we’re cheering for Google, mostly because their operating system is likely to be open source and freely avialable, will run Google apps, and might just break though in providing GPS to the masses. That means a map-literate public, and makes our participatory mapping projects much more feasible, especially in poor countries where cell phones are ubiquitous.

Google, Mozilla, and the Open Source Phone (New York Times Bits Blog)