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

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

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

View full map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Website Tracks Arizona Hate by Mother Mags, Daily Kos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope to see you there!

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.

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

“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/

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!!