The bad news is that it seems that those discussions about citizens’ feedback revolve about the involvement of “beneficiaries” only at a later stage, almost ignoring their role on the initial stages of a project design and implementation.

Dennis Whittle, which I had the pleasure to meet in one of these conferences, resumes very well in this post the main questions that the ICT4D community (and others) is trying to find an answer to:

1. How do government agencies, donors, and citizen groups provide incentives for broad-based feedback?
2. How do they know that feedback is representative of the entire population?
3. How do they combine the wisdom of the crowds with the broad perspective and experience of experts?
4. And, perhaps most important, how do they ensure that the feedback mechanisms are broadly adopted and actually lead to positive changes in aid projects?

Incentives to provide feedbacks

The question about citizen’s feedback is more or less the same question that the crowdsourcing community has been asking itself for quite some time now. When looking at a crowdsourcing project, you normally will see over time that participation in the project assume the form of a bell curve skewed on the right. Plotting time in the X axes and number of people participating on the project in the Y axes, you will see that the initial participation will be low, to increase then until it reaches a critical point, and then decrease again.

The variables that will affect this distribution are of course related to implementation strategies: the outreach campaign is particularly important in the beginning, while in the long term what become key is the ability to show an impact or to give something in return. This return may be a material incentive, money or information, or “gifts”, or a more substantial return: impact. The first one is difficult to maintain, unless you have a very good business model or endless resources. The second one will guarantee your success, but it is hard to prove and often not really achieved.

How to make sure that feedback are representative

This is a very important issue and it can be broken into two different issues. One is related to whom is engaged in the process. Most organizations that try to implement citizens’ feedback mechanisms use civil society organizations as a subject representative of the citizens. The problem here lies on the fact that depending on the context civil society organizations may not be representative of all the citizens and may have their own agenda. Most often they gather around one specific topic and for this reason represent only one sector of the population. By definition, in this case who is represented is only the sector of the population that is aligned with the vision of that specific organization.

The second issue is the fact that when using technology for citizens reporting, like SMS or mobile phones, or the Internet, only citizens that have access to that technology or knowledge on how to use it will be part of the process. Most often women and elders are left outside of the equation. Even more often, the illiterate part of the population and the poorest, which have no access to the Internet or mobile phones for example, are also left outside. In this case the people that will really be part of the feedback mechanism are the richest, most literate and most educated. Which normally are also the one that are less affected by whatever issues the feedback mechanism wants to address.

The Crowd vs the Experts

Several people lately have been questioning if citizens’ feedback are always needed or good. While I really do not have an answer to this, this issue looks to me less related to whom is right or wrong, and more related to a clear lack in education and 2 ways communication systems. If you ask me if I can take a Tylenol while drinking vodka, I will tell you no, and the reason is that I read the instruction on the Tylenol box and I know it is dangerous to do that. I am not an expert or a doctor, but I know that because I trust the expert that is giving me that information. If I don’t know anything about that, I may tell you that yes, why not? The ability of the experts to show evidence of what they say and decide, is what will make the crowd more informed and able to make the decision. It is also what may lead the experts to figure out that maybe they were wrong. If this ability is lacking, then the crowd may have a different idea on what the solto to a problem is. The same happens if the crowd does not trust the “experts”. The trick here lies in the evidence and in the trust, not in the talking, or in the assumption that just because you have a PhD you are expert in a specific issue.

Ensuring effectiveness of citizen’s feedback mechanisms

There is only one way to assure that feedback mechanisms have an impact, and that way is that the mechanism needs to lead to a result. Now how does it get to a result? Well this is the 1 m dollar question. A feedback mechanism leads to result if there is a structure and a clear goal behind the project. Collecting feedback without knowing what to do with it, or even worst, without knowing how to incorporate it into an ongoing project is completely useless.

The real question is, if I get the feedback and it tells me that my project is not working or that people are not happy with it, will I be willing and able to change my project? How will I do that? Will I be able to say: hey this is not working we should stop and start again from the beginning? Or to change entirely the way the project is being done? The fact that there is alost no conversations about what are we willing to do with feedback, is worrying me.

Why this is a false issue!

Don’t take me wrong, those are very legitimate questions and I do understand what lies behind asking those questions. But to be honest, I think that the very fact that we are asking those questions is a demonstration that we are missing a very important point: citizens’ feedback mechanisms will never work if citizens are not part of our project design and embedded into the ay we work. Until we will keep designing a project, implement it, and then ask people to give us feedback, we will never get to the point where people will trust our mechanism or where we will have a real impact. Once we have already put in motion the machine of project implementation there is no way back. Donors will not be willing to re-fund entirely a project that has been already implemented, we would be less willing to accept criticisms after we have worked so hard to start a project, and most importantly, “beneficiaries” will not trust our system once they see that they have not even been asked if they wanted the project in the first place.

Don’t take me wrong; I know that this is difficult. I have been there. Involving communities in the very first formulation of an issue is not easy and sometimes it is not even possible. If we had to ask people in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia to vote if they want or not projects to protect women, I doubt we will ever do any projects in that sense. On the other side, we need to stop using this feedback mechanisms mantra to avoid talking about the real issue. We are still very much working in a totally hierarchical system, where we decide, we involve in the project only the local partners that agree with us, we decide who are the voices that count, and after that we add a feedback mechanism to label our project as a participatory project. The truth is that to create a feedback mechanism that works people need to trust you.

You need to cultivate and create a relationship. And you do it only by working with communities since the very beginning. “Beneficiaries” are not stupid. They have seen our feedback mechanisms before. They have answered tons of surveys, got our SMSs, called our hot lines, participated in our focus groups, filled our forms, etc. But they know they are not part of the system. The very fact that we need to “create” a feedback mechanism means that we do not even have a channel to talk to them, and for them to talk to us, in our projects.

But there is also another issue that I want to raise. A lot of those projcts are being implemented in places where the goal is to “to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness”. There is a huge focus on having people providing feedback for government lead initiatives or to increase transparency. But this also a false issue. First because if an NGO (or the World Bank) needs to create a feedback mechanism for citizens, it means that there is no institutional way already embedded into the government for citizens to report on service delivery. If this is the case, wouldn’t it be much better to invest money into making sure that those system are part of the way the   government think and create policies, rather than into creating an external system that will ultimately lead to the same results – the ultimate responsible of those services (the government)  ignoring the voice of their citizens. Because let’s be honest, when there is lack of those intuitions is not that the government does not know that citizens are unhappy: most of the times, they just do not care. If on the other side those institutions exist already, then why are we duplicating a system already in place, instead of reinforcing the existing one?

But also the transparency issue seems a false issue to me. The fact that we ask people to report on the services provided to them – being it from NGOs or from the government - does not mean that we are transparent at all. We can even publish the feedback, but still transparency is a totally different issue. If we really want to be transparent we will need first to focus on two other issues: open data and real M&E. This is transparency to me; we need to start inside the NGOs world, not outside it.

Wanna be transparent? Even before you tell me how happy your beneficiaries are, I want to know where your money is coming from, how you are spending them, who is evaluating your projects, what is the impact – and here I am not talking about if people are happy or not, but if you actually achieved to change anything at all-. Open all your data, then we can start talking about transparency.

This is the problem. This is the question we need to ask: are we using feedback mechanisms because we have not been doing our job in the first place? Is this a false issue to hide the real issues behind the way we do development projects?

Let start with the good points:

1. The way Twitter users fused crowd-sourced data during the Libya War resulted in the creation of tactical military intelligence. This is indeed a super interesting matter, that in a way leads us to a broader discussion about the fact that tasks performed by hierarchical centralized systems may now be taken on by networked decentralized systems, in a way that may (or may not) lead to the same outcomes. What this means is also that crowdsourcing is creating a new way to process information that before was only possible by organizations that had the means and the money to do it. These new processes are so decentralized and embedded inside such a huge network (the Internet) that may be able to reach the velocity and accuracy of the centralized hierarchical systems and gain value because completely free and much larger in volume.

2. During the Libya Crisis War it was members  of the “crowd” who planned and directed collection efforts, and established  operating procedures for intelligence operations. This point is in a way very similar to what this article is formulating when talking about the “self-regulation” of Twitter. The social media space seems to be more and more described as a self-regulating and self organizing environment more than an “anarchy”. Balances and collective planning seem to happen in this space even with the complete lack of a unique authority to direct it.

3. Twitter provides both a platform for reporting information, and much of the infrastructure required to convert information into intelligence. The power of Twitter in this sense is incredible and undeniable: this platform I think has by far exceeded the expectations of the same people that created it. More than Facebook has done, or if you want in a different way, Twitter is being used for a range of tasks that all together make it one of the best real-time coordination tool. The division of tasks and the consequent combination of its component can be done, again, in a decentralized, real- time dimension, while the vetting of the information combined is distributed to the all network.

4. Twitter acted as a platform for collaboration on and compilation of intelligence products. Again, the inherent structure that Twitter has and the use of hastags makes is a very efficient curating system. What is happening is that this curation process is being done collectively and intelligently in real-time, making it possible not only to access already curated information, but also to have a sort of continuous verification/vetting system that constantly reiterate itself.

So, let’s make it clear here: people creating crisis maps and people using social media were and are creating intelligence. This was true for the Libya war, as it is for ANY crisis mapping deployment or social media coverage of an event. The first time I had a conversation about this, it was with Heather Blanchard, co-founder of Crisis Commons, in 2010, discussing about PakReport, a crisis mapping deployment in Pakistan. A big kudos to the authors of this paper to have reached the same conclusion 3 years later!!!

Now, let’s go to some of the major mistakes in this paper and to some of the weird points that the authors make in an attempt to prove their thesis.

Vocabulary and Glossary mistakes

1. Crisis Mapping is not equal to Twitting. Unfortunately it looks like the authors of this article are a bit confused about the vocabulary they use, when they attribute to people twitting the definition of “crisis mappers” and the contrary. For example, the Libya Crisis Map was clearly a crisis mapping effort, but did never engaged in active twitting, while people twitting were not necessarily the same one creating crisis maps out of twitter messages, even if involved in the curation of the data that was subsequently mapped. I suggest the authors to read this blog post to learn more about this.

2. Hashtags do not equal @. This is the most disconcerting mistake in this paper, namely because you would think that people writing a paper about social media would have done their due diligence work in understanding how social media work. In the paper the authors infer that people using the hashtag #NATO wanted to address the information in that tweet to NATO. At the contrary though, people use hashtags to underline a topic, or a specific actor involved in the action reported. For this reason if I am tweeting that the US have just passed a law on cybercrime, I will add an hashtag to US and one to cybercrime, but the reason why I do it, it’ s because I want people interested in the cybercrime topic to find that information, as well as people looking for information about the US. The very interesting part of this mistake in understanding how Twitter works is linked directly to the intentionality that the authors want to attach to everyone that used the hashtag NATO. In fact the thesis they are trying to support is that everyone that used the hashtag NATO wanted to actively pass information to NATO.

The missing point here is that as much as we can assume that the NATO was following its hashtag, we can infer that the rebel groups would have done that too, as well as the Gaddafi forces, as well as the media, as well as everyone on the Internet that wanted to see what the NATO was doing during that period of time. This of course is a very different issue than the Twitter messages that had @NATO or @NATOPress, since this was indeed a way to make sure that the specific accounts were getting that information. Without going into details about the actual intentions behind the willingness of people adding the @NATO to their tweets, those two groups cannot be merged together, nor can their motivations.

Factual Mistakes

As one of the person managing the Libya Crisis Map project I have to say that I am definitely pissed off by one main factual mistake done in this paper.

The mistake is about why and when the volunteers working in the project where reporting about military operations happening in Libya. Interesting enough the assumption that the authors make is that we started reporting about military operations because we wanted to actively support the NATO Operations in Libya. What looks strange is that the  Stottlemyres did not connected the fact that military related reports were increasing in the platform to the fact that military actions overall were increasing in number – since there was a new actor in the battle field, and namely NATO. The second factor that they seem to ignore is that NATO military operations were much more visible and reported than military operations done by the rebel groups or the Gaddafi soldiers.

In addition to this, the authors seem again to ignore a very important point here: if we are assuming that the Libya Crisis Map was reporting more military related information to support the NATO , why not to support the rebels? or the Gaddafi soldiers? as the internet is accesible to everyone in the same way, no causality can be drawn by the simple fact that more information was reported.

In addition to this, what really strikes me in this strong tentative to accuse 300 volunteers of wanting to support a military operation that caused thousand of victims, in a very complex emergency, is the subtle idea that the Standby Task Force is a unique body composed of people that are all politically aligned,  or, the even more annoying idea, that we, as the Core team, could have been instructed people to search and publish information specifically for the purpose of supporting NATO operations in Libya. Both those scenarios are not only unrealistic but also offensive.

To be added to this is the simple fact that the SBTF was acting under the activation of UNOCHA, one of the most independent and imparcial body of the UN. In fact, if the authors of this paper would have taken some more time to actually support their accusations, they would have seen that once UNOCHA took full control of the deployment, the reporting of military related operations stopped entirely. One of the main reasons why this happened was because, while in the beginning of the deployment the SBTF was mandated to give UNOCHA an overall idea of what was happening, and what was the humanitarian situation, in the second part of the deployment, when UNOCHA had more information coming from the ground, the focus switched to more attention to the provision of humanitarian relief.

Let me also add something else here: in order for the SBTF to give an overview of what was happening on the ground in Libya, the location and intensity of the combat was indeed a very useful information. For example knowing that Benghazi was under attack for days, and that the port was blocked, was indeed valuable to infer that civilians would have been in need of water and food, and that they most likely would have been trying to run away, causing an influx of IDPs and refugees in other areas. All in all, saying that combat information do not have a relationship with humanitarian needs is like to say that hunger has no relationship with availability of food.

Specifically in this instance, I would like to think that the authors of this paper are rather ignorant than to think that they are intentionally trying to accuse the SBTF to be an ally of NATO, which would not only be malicious but also dangerous for some of our volunteers, that live in Libya and could be subject to repercussions due to those accusations.

A piece of advice for the authors, is also to remove the twitter account names from the article, especially when they are publicly accusing those people of being NATO supporters.

Totally not supported assumptions

As I said before, this paper is a very good piece of research when it comes to the relationship in between the military intelligence process as done by the army, and the same process as done by the collectivity in the social media or in crisis mapping projects. I find this topic extremely fascinating and definitely in need of more research and possibly in depth research. What is very curious about this paper is the decision of the authors to infer intentionality for everyone using social media or doing mapping to support the NATO. I have been reading this paper over and over and I cannot find a good reason for the authors to add element this to their paper.

In addition to this, what is extremely curious is that, while in the paper the authors repeatedly use several reasons to support the argument of intentionality to support the NATO (i.e. the use of the # NATO or the number of tweets or maps monitoring the military operations), they also specify in the conclusions that “we cannot precisely extrapolate the motivation of crisis mappers who created finished intelligence products, nor can we determine how responsive crisis mappers would be to official PIR and RFI issued by military commanders.” It definitely looks like some confusion is going on there, but we can also notice that there is a huge stretch in the tentative to infer intentionality by using an argument that could be used as well as to infer intentionality to support the Gaddafi soldiers or the rebel groups, or whoever was in the field at the time.

The main questions were basically not asked 

This paper is just scratching the surface of the real issues. What is a shame is that the authors of the paper did not asked the right questions, as if they did not want to actually find out the two main  issues:

1) If the military was actually really using the data produced by crisis mappers or social media;

2) and related to that, if the data produced was of any additional value to what the military already had.

In this matter, clearly the authors of the paper did not noticed that the Libya Crisis Map, for example, had a delay of 24 hours – meaning that data posted one day on social media would have only been visible and usable the day after in the Libya Crisis Map. Would that data be of any value for military purposes?

The authors themselves say that “Public information is unavailable about the extent to which military commanders used information from crisis maps during the Libyan Civil War. Nevertheless, commanders had access to such information, and likely used intelligence products derived, at least in part, from information pulled from social networking websites.”  Forgetting for a moment that this is stating the obvious, since it would make no sense to even think that military do not look at social media data, the actual question for me is to which extend, and how, this data was used by the military, if it was ever.

Hoping that someone competent in the issue will take this topic on, I would love to understand this and know more about how the collectivity is being (or not) more reliable, fast and articulated than the military is in creating intelligence.

I have lived 3 years in Nairobi, and I have been working with journalists, media, technologists, mappers and so on. I admire and respect most of the organizations I will be mentioning in this blog posts, but still, there are some important questions that really need to be asked here.

Today is election day in Kenya, and a lot of organizations have been preparing for this day by setting up their own branded, advertised, funded and public electoral monitoring system.

Let’s have a look at them:

1. Uchaguzi. This is the well known Ushahidi project to monitor the elections in Kenya. Uchaguzi was used already 2 times, for the Constitutional referendum in 2010 and for the by-elections in February this year. Uchaguzi will be receiving SMS at the short code 3002 and also via social media #uchaguzi and via web forms, as well as via Android app and iPhone app.

2. Voice of Mathare. This is a project from Map of Kibera Trust, monitoring only electoral events happening in Mathare. The project also has an SMS number 0726300400, and also has a web form to report to.

3. Amani Kenya @108. This is a project from the National Steering Committee on peace building and conflict management, under the Ministry of state for provincial administration and internal security. The system will make use of the current District Peace Committees (DPCs), Peace Monitors and other relevant parties to gather crucial information from the field. Once information is gathered from various sources on the field, an analysis group will be able to analyze the information and to issue an indicator based Early Warning Report to the relevant parties for a response. Amani has its own short code for reporting on election related events, which is of course 108. In addition to this there is also a web form to report to on-line.

4. The Independent Electoral and boundaries commission Whistle Blowing Portal, where people can report via web any issue competency of the Director Risk and Compliance
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. They also have an election hotlines for issues, complaints or inquiries: 0711035606 / 0711035616

5. SiSi Ni Amani. Sisi Ni Amani Kenya has worked with local peace groups to set up an SMS-based programming available to subscribers through USSD code *762#. Subscribers are able to dial in for free from any Safaricom line to subscribe and receive SMS from SNA-K. The project aims at looking at rumors spreading via SMS and have a team of “peace-keepers” on the ground responding timely to it by directly addressing the problem.

6. And finally the actual formal national emergency services aka, Kenya Police: 0800 720002 and the ambulance service: 0700395395 or 0738395395, which also has a web-form reporting system.

7. And lastly the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights toll free hotline for election monitoring: 0800721410

So, let’s be clear here: I am all for more transparency and for multiple channels of communication. Especially in emergencies, the more people are ready to respond, the better it is. Now, the problem is exactly this one: are all of these people really ready to respond?

I have been looking and reading all the pages of those organizations and what strikes me is that, apart from SiSi Ni Amani, which is a system that has been working for almost 3 years now, and it is not a reporting system really, but more a prevention tool; the Kenyan police, which I believe everyone knows what it does; and Amani 108, which is using a very predefined system of Peace Monitors, all the rest of the projects here have very vague explanations of what is that they will be doing with the information they want to collect. Will they respond? Will they have responders on the ground? Will they only monitor for the sake of transparency and accountability?

But other questions are really coming out from this picture is: DO WE REALLY NEED ALL OF THOSE PROJECTS??? Do we really need 3 maps, 7 phone numbers, and several web-forms? Is that really such a crazy bad idea to have one coordinated number/web-form that could then have in the back-end multiple responders and organizations working together?

I mean, seriously, what the hell should a Kenyan do today when something happens? Send 7 SMSs and compile a bunch of web-forms for each event they see? They should all go around with a list of the specific topics that they should report on and which platform they go to?

This would look like something like this: “If you are in Mathare send a report to 0726300400 and to 3002 and to 108, but only after you have alerted the police at 999 or 112. But if it is something related to human rights violations, and more in particular IDPs, then remember to also text 0800721410. If the issue is related to violations competency of the  Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission then you should text 0711035606 / 0711035616, but if you get a rumor via mobile phone you probably should send a text to 8762 just in case SiSi Ni Amani is also working in your area. Oh, and by the way, keep safe and keep reporting to us. If you still have any credit in your mobile phone or if by the time you send us a message you did not ended up being killed!”

Now, I do know that coordination and partnerships are not easy things to do and set up, and that all of those organizations have been meeting on a regular basis before the elections. I also do know that they talk to each other and know what everyone else is doing. But on the other side I believe that the messages being sent out to the actual people that are supposed to benefit from those systems is vague, misleading and possibly dangerous. If technology is supposed to make our lives easier, than I am not sure we are really getting there.

Just a week ago GSMA launched their SMS Code of Conduct. I believe this document is still far from being complete and from addressing all the issues related to the use of SMSs during emergencies. But it is a great starting point, and a very necessary one. Looking at it though, I cannot not shake my head and think that there is still a long way to go from the “Code of Conduct” the piece of paper, to the reality of a Code of Conduct.

Some guidelines in that document COULD BE a good starting point for all of those Kenyan organizations and projects mentioned in this report are namely:

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 31,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

1. Journalists are the gatekeepers of information. No they are aren’t anymore. Today I gather most of the information I need simply by using twitter and facebook, or, if I am looking for some specific technical informations, I look for blogs written by experts in the area. Information’s landscape today goes much beyond journalists and traditional media, since everyone can reach everyone at any time, independently form their physical location. This is not valid only because of the internet, but also because of mobile phones.

2. Journalists are the one that have access to information before anyone else. Again, this was valid before, because journalists could get access to place and information much easier than others, but also because an information needed to pass from eyewitnesses through them to get out. Today eyewitnesses get information out before they even talk to a journalist: they tweet it, they facebook it, they blog it, they text it. For this same reason the meaning of “Breaking News” is becoming blurry and definitely not part of the “journalist” jargon anymore.

3. Journalists are the only one that can push information out more then anyone else. Again not true anymore. it is till true that probably there is not blogger that has as much readers than the New York Times or the Guardian, but the aggregated number of bloggers, twitter accounts or facebook pages that can push information out will always be higher than a single media outlet.

So what is the role of journalists? Is journalism really dead?

I was lucky enough to participate and moderate a panel titled “Verifying Crowdsourced Information – Journalists as Curators” and featured Matthew Eltringham, Founding Editor of the BBC UGC Hub, Erik van Heeswijk, Digital Editor-in-Chief of VPRO, David Clinch, Editorial Director of Storyful, and Charlie Beckett, Director of LSE Polis. The panel was indeed an incredible discussion on how user generated content can be and is indeed used both by traditional news outlets such as the BBC or by new typology of media initiatives  like Storyful.

What emerged in this panel was the extreme importance of context and analysis as well as the value that traditional journalisms has in terms of the ability to apply traditional media tecnics, like investigative jounralisms, to new media . In this context all panelists agreed that the rise of social media is an opportunity for journalists to turn user generated content into high quality news sources. But this also require traditional media to accept the new important role that social media is playing in today’s information landscape and the new role that journalists need to create for themselves.

A couple of months ago in a lecture given by Ethan Zuckermann in Nairobi, I asked him how to handle the difficult relationship in between traditional media and social media actors. Zuckermann replied back by saying that there should be no real difficulty and that the both actors needs to accept that they are now covering both tasks: journalists needs to be also social medi actors as well as social media actors needs also to realized that they are performing journalism tasks. The video of his presentation is here and I really suggest you to watch it!

Of course the usual argument used by traditional media stating that there is not such a thing as citizens journalism, since journalists are the only one that can do in-depth verification and analysis is not valid anymore. Looking at this very interesting article on the use of Twitter during the hurricane Sandy, it seems that “the crowd” itself is getting very close to elaborate spontaneous ways to verify information.

Looking at studies like this one on the spreading or rumors on Twitter, we can already identify ways in which “influential sources: on Twitter manage to spread counter- rumors in a timely manner. This specific study does also highlight how incredibly important the roles of journalists is in the sphere of social media. I had the pleasure to listen to a presentation done by Farida Vis, Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, Information School at the University of Sheffield, UK (@flygirltwo) on her study about the use of Twitter during the London Riots and 2 points she made were very interesting to me:

- The crowd on social media seems to still trust more than anything else traditional journalists and media, as shown in this graph:

- the use of less sophisticated content (like videos taken with the mobile phones) did not only not affect the user experience, according to the number of users accessing an using it, but increased the physical security of the journalists on the ground

To conclude, this is what I think is the situation right now:

1. Traditional Journalism will still exists as long as journalists will understand that they have no choice in embracing social media and the technology revolution.

2. The added value of journalism, being it in the creation and implementation of verification technics or the reliability of their voice as opposed to the noise of the crowd need to be created and demonstrated, it will not be given for granted forever.

3. There is not such a things as citizens journalism as opposed to “traditional” journalism  There is journalism, and it both a new and an old concept that needs to be continuously adapting to the change in the reality of information systems.

4. Tools like Storyful and the BBC User Generated Content Hub are demonstrating that journalisms is not really changing, it is doing the same things it was doing before but in new ways. The skills and the knowledge are there, we only need the will.

One of the main problem is, according to me, related to donors and how the funding systems in the development community works. So, I would like to make this blog post an open letter to donoros, and would love to see some of them to actually think about what I am writing here and maybe start experimenting with new methodologies.

But let’s start from the beginning.

When big donors put out calls for proposals or expression of interests, NGOs and big organizations start putting in motion their “project proposal” design mechanism.

STEP 1: what do we know about the country we want to implement the project in.

When a call for proposal is out, most NGOs and organizations need to collect and gather as many information as they can about the country they want to implement the project in. Most calls for proposals in fact are specifically design to target predefined countries.

There are 2 possible options here: one is that the organization presenting the proposal is already in the country and has money already – to spend from its own budget – to do some comprehensive research, assessments and collaborative design with the beneficiaries to come out with a meaningful project proposal. This case is very rare. Assessments, research and collaborative mechanisms costs a lot of money, and you have to be willing to spend those money not knowing if you will indeed get the money to actually implement the project.

The second option is that you do not have indeed all those money and you may also not be permanently in the country. What you do in this case is to collect as much information as you can from there – partners and local organizations – and try to figure out what would make sense to do. This is often the case. In this situation, your project design is based mostly on assumptions and “second hand” information.

STEP 2: Deliverables and objectives.

The most interesting part of what I have seen so far in a lot of calls for proposals is that you are being told what is the problem that your project should address. In a lot of cases, not only you are told what the problem is, but also what the solution should be. Especially ICT4D projects tend to propose solutions or methodologies that are suggested by the donors. In a lot of cases, those topics and issues respond to political choices of the donors or to “priorities” that donors have listed and decided in advance.

Most of the time NGOs and organizations working on the ground know that those “issues” are not really the real issues – or should not be addressed in that way.

So what to do? They design projects that address the problem as requested by the CFP, so that in this way they are able to get the money that can allow them to also continue doing their work. This is basically a little game: applicants learn how to design a project that adresses gender based violence when the problem is actually an economical problem, how to design a project that address Open Data issue when the problem is actually governance, or how to design a project that addresses security when the problem is actually resilience.

STEP 3: Create your work-plan and the timeline.

This part of the project is almost always a completely random- guessed- almost completely invented part of the project design. Even if you are in the country, you do not know all the possible variables that could come into play, what could go wrong, partners that could not be able to deliver, beneficiaries that could not be at all happy with what you want to do once you start doing it. Even knowing at your very best the country and the partners in advance, and even with a solid participatory design process at the beginning, you can only guess at your best all those components of the project design. In addition to that, once you have chosen your activities and your work-plan, it is going to be very hard to change them in the course of the project. As well as it is very hard, if you do not have in advance money to be allocated to that, to actually use a collaborative process to design those activities.

STEP 4: list all the possible challenges that you can find and how you intend to address them.

Again as the section before, this part of the project is almost all a big guess. You guess what the issues you will face are and you also guess what the solution will be. Since you have not faced the problem already, you really do not know what the best solution will be.

What in fact happen is that once you have written those things in a project proposal and you get the money to actually implement it, you have some power to make changes, but not for everything. Normally donors accept changes that happen either without changing the budget or inside a certain range of budget changing. If you find out in the middle of your project that what you are doing is completely useless, or that the beneficiaries do not really like it and want to change it, or that you should be using a completely different strategy, it is normally very hard to change it without a laborious renegotiation of the grant or the risk to lose the grant entirely.

Mitchell Toomey wrote about this already a year ago:

“ The traditional model of international development aid could be said to operate in a waterfall model – long term plans dictate specific requirements and success criteria, and these plans take a really long time to design, negotiate and agree upon. We often see that by the time a multi-year plan is finally signed, conditions on the ground have changed, and the agreed framework and reporting cycle is not responsive to the emerging development needs.

In a similar way, the long-term projects that are the foundation of traditional country development programmes are also designed and “fixed” in this long-term, highly documented way. In more cases than not, the original plan for how to design and execute a project needs to be revised and altered to fit with new conditions (regime changes, natural disasters, economic crises, famine, disease outbreak etc.).

The work effort that must be dedicated to administering and managing these highly scripted long term projects is significant, since the success of the entire enterprise is measured against the original design plans.

In a similar way, the procurement processes that a project manager is required to follow assume that long-term, detailed plans are not only possible, but preferred, so that very specific deliverables are identified long in advance and detailed, tightly bound contracts with partners can be drawn up and bid upon.“

Of course, if you are a donor that is giving out a million dollar for a project, you do want to know what people will be doing with it, how and when exactly in advance. I do understand that. But how about we take a more “agile” approach also to grant proposals?

Here there are some of the suggestions I have, which for sure are not the golden key to solve the problem, but I believe can actually really help out in solving this endless issues with donors requirements and project efficacy:

1. Ask for methodologies more than for activities: project proposals should concentrate on the methodologies that organizations will use to decide, plan and implement their activities. We should be giving money to people that know how to do things, not that will do things just because they have the money to do them. The focus here should not be what activities you are planning to do in advance, but how you will use collaborative processes, agile methodologies and iterations to make sure that your activities do indeed make sense considering your objectives.

2. Ask for positive changes more than for deliverables. We should stop focusing on how many people will benefit from the project, how many workshops will be done, how many households will get aid and so on. We should focus on what is the expected changes that the project  is supposed to trigger. The activities to achieve those results may be changing and should be – if we follow the agile methodology we should iterate and continue adapting our activities to the situation on the ground. Deliverables end up most of the times as mere lists of numbers of people or activities, and much less as qualitative measurement of changes that the project is creating on the ground.

3. Ask for collaborative design approaches more than for “local partners”. Workplans that do not have beneficiaries as one of the stakeholders in a project should not be even considered. We are in 2012, I think that only stones by now do not understand how the partecipation of beneficiaries is one of the main factor that can make a difference between a successful project and a not successful one. Most of donors focus a lot on local partners thinking that this is the key to “beneficiaries” participation, but this is not the case in most of the places. The exclusion of local authorities, local chiefs, local communities is very much embedded in the fact that local partners is normally refereed to “institutionalized” local organizations that not always are the actual voice of beneficiaries.

4. Ask for business plans more than for budgets. Most NGOs and development organizations, not to speak about Humanitarian organizations, do think that they cannot and should not work with businesses and the private sectors. On the contrary, I think they should learn a lot from business. Actually they should have business plans in all their projects, and they should make sure that whatever they crate is 100% sustainable. I know that if you are doing a distribution of food, most likely this is not gonna be sustainable, but if you are doing education programs, protection programs and so on, you MUST have a long term plan, long term expected results that will make either your project not meaningful anymore – you achieve the goal so you are not needed – or able to continue without you. What you need to do is to create business. That’s what makes a project sustainable. not a budget. A business plan!

5. Fund assessments in advance. If you want a good project to be designed, divide your call for proposals in 2 sections: one is the preliminary assessment and the other one is the project design. Pay up front for the people you think have chances to win the grant to actually do their work in advance and do researches and assessments on the ground. Or, if you REALLY want to be serious: do the research and assessments in advance for them, get them the means to design and think about processes in a much better way. Be part of the collaborative process in a meaningful way. Chose with them the problem and the possible solutions and not the contrary. Unless you have an ongoing presence on the ground most likely your vision of the problem and the issue is not that accurate.

6. Ask for real and independent M&E and not quarterly reports.  I know how much big donors like fancy quarterly reports, with pictures and “catchy” quotes and cool graphs. Those reports takes time to be made and can tell you everything and anything your grantee wants you to believe (apart from the fact that we all know, almost no one reads them). This is how it works: everyone knows about how stupid this practice is and everyone plays the same game so that everyone is happy. NGOs and organizations on the ground spend an incredible amount of time preparing those reports and they take this time of the actual project implementation.

If you really want to know what a project is achieving or not on the ground, pay independent, ongoing M&E teams, that follow the development of the project and that can tell you what is going on without having to bother the people actually doing the work. A project is not just the numbers and the fancy pictures in it, a project is the actual daily implementation, the little challenges of the day to day work. On going monitoring is super costly and normally the budget allocated to it is very little. M&E should not be a side part of the project, they should be the entire base of the project.

I know: what I am proposing here is not that easy. But I believe it is easier than continuing throwing money in the bucket making the work of NGOs and agencies on the ground difficult . Organizations are forced to be part of this system to be able to get the money to survive, while they know that they will end up most of the time  implementing projects that are meant to fail.

In today’s world we have the means to change the way we do things to make sure we are accountable and we deliver meaningful and sustainable projects. I am sick of sitting down with colleagues and hear discussions about those same very problems over and over. I believe that no one working in the development and humanitarian world will find any of the issues listed in this blogpost new. We all know what is the game we are all playing. Then we should just change the game. We should get serious if we really want to achieve changes. And we should start getting some serious accountability based on real measurement of achievements and not on fancy pictures on a quarterly report.

So, what’s the agile manifesto? On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met and created the Agile Software Development Manifesto to respond to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes.

The Agile Manifesto states the following:

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

The Agile Manifesto also has 12 principles:

1. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

Looking at this manifesto and the principle it is clear that this software development methodology can easily be applied (and should indeed) to ICT4D projects. Looking at the following graph it is impossible not to notice how this methodology seems indeed to fit development projects overall and not only software development.

Shouldn’t this be the way we always design ICT4D projects – and probably all development projects?

The system as explained here is actually very simple:

You first think about your Strategy, what is the problem that you are trying to address and how do you think it would be the best way to address it. The you start rolling your project out and you review it all according to feedbacks from the beneficiaries and the users of the actual system. You look at how people  are actually using your system, your technology if any, and then you start re -working your project again according to the outcomes of this first interaction. The entire project design is done in a phase to phase way, where the actual results, activities and work-plans are not a predefined variable but an on going process.

Once your project start taking shape you then look closely at the day to day type of interactions, they actual rolling out of the system, its sustainability and its long term effects on beneficiaries and local communities. This all system lead you to a complete different methodology where the project may be subjected to transformation over the course of the implementation and where the majority of the energies of the team are concentrated on the actual development and customization of the project and not on the necessity to follow a plan or a predefined list if deliverables.

In 4 words: adaptability, transparency, simplicity and unity. This i what ICT4D project should be, Adaptable to the real necessity on the ground, the actual technical literacy, the existing workflows and existing power relationships. Transparency in terms of actual results and methodologies, based on a collaborative design. Simplicity in the way the project is created, implemented and rolled out: not tons of deliverables and activities but actual results linked to real needs on the ground. Unity of the stakeholders, where beneficiaries, implementers and donors are not different actors in different times but can be part of the same system that discuss and create the project on a daily bases.

But how to we achieve this point? How do we get to the point where we can actually use this methodology?

A year ago, Mitchell Toomey, from UNDP, was asking those same questions:

“ The big problems remain: large development institutional processes are still primarily waterfall, when the work calls for an agile approach.

In my experience as a manager operating within such a traditional context, I often run into roadblocks that are basically caused by a systemic bias towards “waterfall” thinking. Take for example the process of procuring specialized professional services (such as training consultants, or software developers). In contrast to the highly volatile conditions into which a project is being deployed, the rules governing the procurement of services to support and achieve the project are still governed by lengthy documentation processes that were originally designed to “manage risk” before the advent of the more iterative lower-risk processes were made possible and transparent via information technology.

Who will become the first international institution to actually mandate an agile development model in its programming? What would donor agreements look like? What about programming agreements? Procurement rules? Project management tools?  Success criteria? Evaluation methods?

The parallels between software programming and “human development” programming are encouragingly clear. Both help people by providing access to tools and capabilities that they did not have before, and both can be successfully managed, with a clear focus on results, if the most appropriate methods are employed.

It’s time for development 2.0.”

Let’s do an experiment then: let’s take this approach and re-work the Agile development Manifesto to fit not just the way we design and implement the technology part of an ICT4D project, but the way we do development project design overall.

Here we have our Agile Manifesto then:

“We are uncovering better ways of developing development (and humanitarian projects) by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working and sustainable projects over comprehensive documentation and reporting
• Beneficiaries collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a workplan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Let’s look at the principles:

1. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the beneficiaries through early and continuous delivery of valuable and sustainable projects.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in the development of the project. Agile processes harness change for the beneficiaries competitive advantage.
3. Deliver meaningful deliverables frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Beneficiaries, donors and aid/development workers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development project is face-to-face conversation.
7. Sustainable and meaningful projects are the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The donors, developers, development workers and beneficiaries should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
11. The best results, sustainability, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

I would love to see organizations subscribe to this manifesto. I would love to see us learning a bit more from the software development world, and if not going that far, at least make sure that we use that methodology for our ICT4D projects, where the very design of the technology is extremely important for the actual success of the project.

Filed under: Humanitarian Affairs, ICT4D ]]> http://crisismapper.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/agile-development-manifesto-for-ict4d-projects/feed/ 13 486px-Agile_Software_Development_methodology anahiayalaiacucci 486px-Agile_Software_Development_methodology http://crisismapper.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/towards-the-design-of-a-communication-model-with-affected-communities/ http://crisismapper.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/towards-the-design-of-a-communication-model-with-affected-communities/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:00:00 +0000 Anahi Ayala Iacucci http://crisismapper.wordpress.com/?p=762 Continue reading →]]> Several weeks ago something incredible has been released by Infoasaid that seems to have passed under silence.

Infoasaid is a DFID-funded project that is being implemented by a consortium of two media development organisations – Internews and BBC Media Action. The overall goal of the project is to improve the quality of humanitarian responses by maximizing the amount of accurate and timely information available to both humanitarian responders and crisis-affected populations through enhanced information exchange between them in an emergency. The project has two main objectives:

• To strengthen the capacity and preparedness of aid agencies to respond to the information and communication needs of crisis-affected populations.
• To partner with a number of aid agencies to help inform and support their communications response in a variety of emergency contexts.

Infoasaid works at multiple levels to improve communications with crisis-affected communities. This involves the development of a range of preparedness tools to help aid agencies communicate better in an emergency; deployment of teams to the field to support partners in delivering communications responses; advocacy at system and organization level; and research to promote learning and strengthen the evidence base in this sector.

Some weeks ago they launched a new website, which has been an incredible effort from part of the team. The new website, which you can find here, is an amazing resource for all agencies and NGOs that need to face the difficult talk of communicating directly with affected communities during emergencies or disaster, or in general in complex emergencies.

Let’ have a quick look to this website.

Section one: the Media and Telecoms Landscape Guides. This edition of the website shows something that I personally find one of the best resources in terms of research and practical resources for media and telecommunication landscape in a country. When deciding how to communicate with affected communities in fact, one of the first questions is how to channel this communication and what best ways to deliver the message are already available in the country. This is what you can find here: Mobile providers, radio stations broadcasting in the country, press and TVs, availability of mobile network , Internet penetration, and a contact directory of media and telecoms operators in the most crisis prone countries in the world

These online guides are a useful tool for humanitarian responders seeking to communicate effectively with crisis-affected communities. The information contained in each guide acts as a baseline of the media and telecommunications environment and therefore can serve as a useful preparedness tool. In the immediate aftermath of an emergency, an information needs and access assessment can be undertaken in order to verify whether the channels of communication outlined in the guide are still functioning. The guides are being developed for 22 countries at risk of both natural disasters and conflict or both.

The second section of the website is indeed the best part of it.  The message library. When the CDAC network was created the first time in 2009, the network emerged in response to the policy paper ‘Left in the Dark’ with a view to improving two-way communication between aid actors and disaster affected populations. CDAC Network members believed (and still believe) that information to, and communication with, affected people is essential – as a life-saving device, as key to taking ownership of their own recovery, and as critical to accountability and genuine participation. CDAC Network members believe that communication is aid.

In one of the following deployment of the CDAC network, in Haiti, one of the main problem that emerged was not only the need to communicate but the need for a coordinated and homogeneous message to be delivered to the affected communities. The problem was posed by the fact that as agencies and organizations were growing in number and size, all of them were trying in different ways to deliver messages to the beneficiaries of aid, with the result of many messages, sometimes contradicting each other, delivered to many people, sometimes not the right receiver for that message.

What emerged from that experience was the need for a coordinated afford to organize this communication channels in a way that could avoid confusion and misunderstanding (and frustration) from part of people that were already in distress. The CDAC network in Haiti continue to do this specific job, under the direction of Ben Noble, which I had the fortune to meet when I went there in August 2011, who is not only coordinating this effort but also leading, according to me, to the development of what will be called the first model for the functioning of this kind of initiative in a protracted and complex emergency like Haiti is right now.

Out of that experience, and many others, like the deployment of CDAC in Pakistan, this concept of coordinating the messages being sent to affected communities became even more complicated by the emergence of new technologies that allow everyone, even the tiniest organization, to set up its own communication channel and broadcast messages to large groups of people.

The Infoasaid Message Library is so far the very first experiment in this sense: a complete, searchable library of messages categorized according to topic, target and communication channels.

The message library is an online searchable database of messages that acts as a reference for those wanting to disseminate critical information to affected populations in an emergency. It has been developed in collaboration with a number of different clusters/sectors in humanitarian response, including, Health, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Nutrition, Food Security, Protection (Child Protection, Gender-based Violence, Mine Risk Education) and Education.

The messages include: warnings and alerts, advice on risks and threats and how to mitigate them and prompts for programmatic interventions. Embedded in the message library is guidance on contextualisation, including advice on how to adapt each message according to language, feasibility, education levels, cultural belief and practice and the ‘do no harm’ principle. The message library is designed to be used as a reference tool and each message should be translated, piloted and adapted to suit the local context and to ensure comprehension before dissemination. All messages are downloadable and exportable in different format and the website offers also a complete guide on how to use the library (and an illustrative video).

For each message there is a specific section that shows the target of the message, the possible issues related,to the messages, like sensitivity issues or cultural issues and the  preferred means to spread that message. See a couple of examples here.

In addition to this, for each message that have a high sensitivity Or risks associated to it, there is a window that ask the user several questions to guide him/ her through the process of thinking if the message selected is really the right one for the specific intent of the sender, and if all possible risks and consequences have been evaluated with the right attention.

 The third section of the website is an online curriculum for communication officers, small NGOs and humanitarian officers. This curriculum has one very practical and ought through course on how to communicate with affected communities. The ‘Communication is Aid’ e-learning course aims to raise awareness about the key components of effective communication with crisis affected communities and to build knowledge and understanding on how to communicate in practice.

The course is divided into five modules. The first two introduce learners to the course and the key concepts it covers. The remaining three modules are interactive, scenario-basedchallenges and involve learners having to make key decisions to do with communication during an earthquake, a post conflict situation and a hurricane/flood.

The modules are divided up as follows:

1. How to use the course
2. Why communication matters
3. Knowing your target audience
4. Crafting and adapting messages
5. Communication: A two way process

 The course is based on practical and real cases and is completed with exercises and tests to measure the level of understanding of the user all the way through the course. In addition to this, the course is free and can be re done as many times as possible.

The fourth section of the website is a set of diagnostic tools aimed to enhance the effectiveness of communication with crisis-affected populations. These include checklists and information sheets on the following:

• Questions on Community Profiling
• Questions on Information Needs and Access Assessments
• Radio Feasibility Assessment Checklist
• TV Feasibility Checklist
• Assessing the Mobile Environment
• Characteristics of Different Channels of Communication
• Emergency Preparedness and Response Checklist
• Communication Strategy Template

This website is the first tentative to create a coordinated “conversation model” with affected communities and I hope that all concerned actors will use it as much as possible, contributing to is and enriching this pool of resources to include all possible typology of messages, case studies and additional information to it.

As coordination is indeed one of the most difficult thing to achieve during humanitarian emergencies, the existence of CDAC can make a huge difference in the provision of humanitarian aid.

My dream is that one day we will not need to have CDAC anymore, because humanitarian organizations will have incorporated in their own mandate, as part of humanitarian aid, communication with affected communities.

I have been interested in accountability systems for Humanitarian organizations since long time and I blogger before about this very topic. This DRC project is the first project I have heard about (ever) that uses mobile technology and crisis mapping to create a completely transparent and direct communication system in between a humanitarian organization and its beneficiaries on the ground. And if this wasn’t enough, this project is taking place in Somalia, not exactly the safest place on earth.

The SMS Beneficiaries Feedback project is a very simple system that basically creates something that most NGOs and humanitarian agencies should have done and learned from the private sector: it creates a calling center for DRC beneficiaries in Somalia. Since the start of the project in September 2011, beneficiary SMS feedback has been implemented in 31 towns and villages in the North and East of Somalia. Now, the project is extended to a number of districts in Mogadishu from where hundreds of SMS’ are submitted every months (see here).

Since then Fatuma has been going around in Somalia basically talking to all those families and beneficiaries and explaining them the project and the possible outcomes of it.

The fact that she actually went to meet all of them in person respond to one of the first possible criticism against this project: managing expectations and deliver a clear message. The fact that beneficiaries can contact the aid organization in fact is always seen as possible disaster in terms of what they will expect once that direct channel is created.

For the past 2 years, every time I have been talking about the possibility to do something like this, the answer I got from aid organizations was that this would have let people think that once they communicate their needs, the aid organization had to respond by delivering what beneficiaries need or ask for. The nightmare of humanitarian organizations thinking about doing something like this, is the prospect of thousands of messages asking for more help, that would then become thousands of angry people that have seen their expectations deloused by overwhelmed aid agencies.

Fatuma did what is the most simple and easy way to do this: went to meet people in person and explained to them what they could expect and how – leveraging also on the fact the Somali society is based on an oral culture. She also explained to them something really simple: this is not a crowdsourcing/help line, this is a system to find out how and if beneficiaries of the DRC program are actually satisfied from the service provided to them and what can be done better.

The ways people can communicate with DRC is channeled in two ways: SMS and phone calls. So what happen next?

1. The first thing that happened is that all the messages are translated into English and channel to the right department/office inside the organization. Each message is reviewed and given an answer to. The speed of the answer depends of course on the readiness/speed of the relative office/officers inside DRC that can respond to that inquiry.

2. Once the relative person has provided an answer to the question/comment, Fatuma’s team delivers the answer directly to the person sending the information. This communication happen in 2 ways: they can send an SMS, if the information they have to deliver is appropriate to this mean (short and not sensitive) or they directly call the number that send the SMS/called. See here the workflow:

3. This all process is documented step by step on a Ushahidi platform, where all SMS are mapped and all responses/commentaries are showed.

The incredible part of this project is that the entire process is completely public and open: all messages and all answers are made public in the platform, including complains, no yet responded messages, appreciations messages and so on.

See here an example:

Another part of this project also provides the mapping of all the DRC projects in the area allowing everyone to brows the map, search for projects, and see what DRC is actually doing on the ground. See here:

Again, this is not just “dots on a map”: each mapped project had attached the financial and beneficiary report, where it is possible to monitor how much  money have been spent, where and from whom the money are coming from.

The reason why I love this project is that it is really showing not only that transparency and accountability is possible in humanitarian aid, but also that it is pretty simple and can be done avoiding to raise expectations with very simple technologies.

In addition to this, the system is also supported by a Flickr page, a Twitter account and a Blog. Again all messages (complains as well as compliments or appreciation messages) are shared on the Twitetr page, while it is possible to see the sites and the projects pictures on the Flickr page and to read stories from Somalia on the Blog.

The SMS system, based on a Galaxy Tab app to receive and send messages to the Ushahidi platform,  needs to be online to work. The system DRC is using, based on a Galaxy Tab app to receive and send messages to the Ushahidi platform that therefore needs to be online to work, could be improved by using a simple method like FrontlineSMS or, if the number of SMS is actually high and she envision the possibility to receive hundreds of SMS a day, to use something more robust like RapidSMS or Souktel.

What DRC could also to make this system faster and more sustainable in the long term would be to outsource or better crowdsource the translation and processing of the SMS by using, for example, students from the Universities in Somalia and giving them credits in exchange of this. DRC could also think about creating a Crowdflower account and have the entire translation process done by anonymous volunteers around the world – something that could be done only giving a closer look to the sensitivity of the information and the possibility to anonymize the sources.

This pilot project is an incredible project that should be looked at the first experiment in the field of transparency and accountability for humanitarian organizations and crisis mapping. The M&E of this project could be used to pave the path for more projects like this, and lessons learned from this project could be used by other organizations to follow the same route.

If I have to think about the lessons learned so far, after my discussion with Fatuma I would say that there is a lot to learn already:

1. Do not use technology to replace the in person dialog. Use it to support it.

2. Manage expectations with dialog and timely accurate information, not with silence.

3. Make sure that  a response mechanism is in place, so that people may not have what they want, but they feel they are being heard and they are having a dialogue.

4. Integrate all the system you have and you can possibly use: face to face, SMS, voice calls, social media. A combination of tools is also a combination of resources and people, and as such as a great potential.

5. Transparency in humanitarian aid is and will continue to be a fundamental factor that will not only make the difference in between successful and unsuccessful projects, but also in between sustainable and not sustainable relationships with beneficiaries on the ground.

Kudos to Fatuma, the DRC team and the Humanitarian Innovation Fund for this incredible project!

It is done. I have been dreaming about this project for the past 2 years and today, I am incredibly proud to announce the launch of the Internews Crisis Map for Central African Republic.

The “Integrating Local Media and ICTs into Humanitarian Response in CAR” project is a collaboration in between Internews, Ushahidi, the Association of Journalists for Human Rightsin Bangui and UNOCHA–RCA and funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund. This is an innovative system that comprises a bounded network of trusted local media organizations who gather real-time first-hand information from affected populations to create a two-way communication flow with humanitarians to improves emergency response, community participation and community resilience.

This new media and communications system aims at increasing the efficiency, transparency and accountability of humanitarian relief efforts and increase community resilience by leveraging the relationship that local media have with their communities while being strengthened in this task by technological solutions. If you want to read more about this project you can go here and here.

I am particularly proud to tell you all about the incredible (and yes most awesome awesomeness) customizations done by Robbie McKey to the Ushahidi platform we are launching today (yes yes, this will all be available on Github to be used, spread, and admired by everyone!). A big thanks to Patrick Meier as well for being so pro-active about this partnership and seeing the huge potential two years ago (together with Mark Frohardt).

So let’ start from the user interface functionalities: 

1. Printing Maps: the CAR map has a printing map functionality available for three different types of pages. The big map (which is our home page); the list of report page; and the single report page. The idea behind this customization is that you can print (or save as PDF) any report you like without having to copy and paste it manually. This also allows people to search for specific reports (like water needs in Bangui) and print the reports/save it.

2. Action needed/urgent and actionable plugin modification. This plugin was already created some time ago, but we tweeked it a bit. Now from the main home page, you can see only urgent reports, reports that needs to be addressed or reports that have been addressed already. This system has been developed with the ideas of allowing for a better organization in between humanitarian organizations responding to needs on the ground.

3. Low Bandwith version.  This is really not a modification that we have done but just a trick. Basically you can decide to brows the entire platform as a mobile version (even on your computer). This comes extremely useful for places like CAR, where the internet connection where available, is often very weak and cannot necessarily load the entire platform.

4. Offline Version. This is the most important piece of the puzzle: this Ushahidi deployment allows users to browse all the reports and see them offline. In the incoming weeks the functionality will be expanded to allow people to actually edit reports offline and then upload the content once they have connectivity back.

5. Information Evaluation. We have changed the information evaluation criteria according to the peculiarity of the project. Since we are working with humanitarian organization and radio stations, we have decided to use the only criteria that we normally use in the media world: direct source, indirect source, I don’t know. The same has been done for the probability of the information: confirmed, not confirmed, I don’t know.

We also changed the appearance of the platform and specifically:

1. Change time span for report visualization. When you go the home page of the platform you will see only the reports that have been inserted into the platform in the past 2 weeks. The reason behind this change is that we don’t want to end up with a super crowded platform – since this is supposed to be a long-term project – and we also want to make it easier for humanitarian organization to find the latest information on the map. By going to the TimeLine, people can always go back to the visualization of all reports inserted in the platform.

2. Possibility to set an icon/color for All Reports category. We ended up not using this, since we cannot find an icon that can work with all categories, but still we now can set up an icon and change the color of the All Report categories.

3. Big Map as the home page. We realized that we needed a bigger map on the home page but also that the map was our main way to add value to the feed of information that we are already collecting from the ground from radio stations. Having the Big Map as the home page we get rid of the report list, already available in the List of report page, and of the news feeds, that are now coming in only from the back end for the managers of the platform to decide what to do with it.

On the back end side we have done only one customization, but a very important one:

1. Editing information: this customization basically allows us to see who has modified what and when. The functionality that was there before was allowing admins to see when someone had opened one report from the back end and changed something. With this improved system, we can now see from a Log Report page, who has changed something but also what exactly – the field- was changed. This customization was specifically done to make sure that humanitarian organizations that have access to the platform and journalists can always monitor who is doing what and preserve the integrity of the information.

This platform is an incredible achievement, not only with respect to the technology customization, but also visi-a-vis the framework of the agile development methodology that we want to use in future innovative projects in humanitarian emergencies. The technology here is just the starting point and the base for the creation of something that is entirely customized around the users and in this way designed to respond to specific operational needs.

In the coming weeks we will continue working on the translation of the platform into French and to finish all the customizations (and making sure that everything is working). We will also gather feedback from the humanitarian community using the system in Central African Republic and will refine the customizations done to make sure that this is really going to become a tool that will support humanitarian organizations in their work in CAR, by providing them meaningful and actionable information coming directly from the affected communities. In September we will come back and assess what are the outcomes of this novel project are in terms of consequences for the local communities in CAR.

One thing is left to say here: KUDOS to the Internews team on the ground; to the Ushahidi team; to  the UNOCHA staff in Bangui; and of course to the Association of Journalists for Human Rights, who made this all possible with its incredible daily work, trying to bring better information to affected communities in one of the poorest countries in the world.