Map Kibera

It has been an eventful couple of weeks here in Nairobi picking up where we left off with Map Kibera. I think we’ve finally proven that we meant it when we told everyone we’d return – how often have such promises been broken in Kibera? Now, we’re looking more broadly at what it takes to empower people to create, share and use information (maps, data, news reports, personal accounts) about their community to gain greater understanding, spark change and influence policymakers. We’re here for another six months in part to work toward the elusive, coveted goal: sustainability.

A lot has happened since December. We have several different potential partnerships on the horizon – organizations and businesses that want to adopt community mapping in their own programs, and others that want to work directly with the mapping group to collect more data within Kibera. The group has met in our absence and begun to think about how to constitute itself as an organization. This is the outcome we were hoping for.

But, first some plain facts: the mappers needs a lot more support in order to become self-sustaining, in terms of things like organizational know-how, partnership building, avenues for financing, and the most straightforward – improving their skills so they have a strong enough grasp to teach others. This is what we’re ultimately hoping will happen in other slum areas of Nairobi and/or elsewhere in Kenya.

We’re also preparing for a big “push” on community media support, meaning working with a team composed of lead local journalists (some of whom double as mappers) to make full use of the Ushahidi Kibera site, providing technology support (read: getting a website) for their respective publications, and ultimately forming a network of those who wish to collaborate and support each other to produce a truly representative picture of Kibera using new technology. We think that these citizen reporters in combination with the mappers are a formidable team, and at the forefront of new kinds of journalism in Kenya. There’s also room for more creative illustrations of the map including personal videos, stories, and photos. We think the map and related digital media can involve a lot of people in conversations about their vision and hopes for Kibera, and want to spend this time reaching out to as many different people as possible. We think that this way, folks on the ground will be able to influence and share with powerful actors like international organizations and government. This is an evolving vision, and we welcome your comments and thoughts – and always, your help.

We’re also going to work on creating better documentation and analysis of the project for publication and curriculum development, building up the Nairobi social technology and new media community of practice, and various tech projects such as printing the maps (a cartographical challenge).

We’ve also had some interesting visitors. Last week, Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan blogger and one of the founders of Ushahidi, came to Kibera with a Swiss documentary film crew in tow to meet some mappers and also the Kibera journalists who will be working on the Ushahidi site. We realized that she has something (well, probably many things) we lack – the ability to relate to the challenges of being a youth in Kenya: unrepresented by politicians and the media, unemployed, poorly educated, and generally ignored in decision-making, but with the responsibility to build the future of a nation and the strong desire to shape it for the better. Ory grew up near Kibera and started her blog as a way to express some of these frustrations, and she was keenly interested to hear how their encounter with technology had so far inspired the journalists and mappers (I, for one, learned that they were using their phones more often to access the net and particularly the ever-popular Facebook). I wanted her to stay and visit them every week just to inspire them to new visions of how all the work they’re doing can have an impact, and help them break through the barriers they’ve grown up with. It was clear to me that we’re trying to support a new paradigm of citizenship in a country where resignation and cynicism (if not resentment and anger) greets any mention of politics. Ory latched on to one mapper’s shy admission that she enjoyed the “celebrity” of getting attention for this project – such pride can transform into real community leadership and a sense of confidence and possibility. And she is the living example of that.

It’s official: we’re back in Kenya after more than a month visiting family in the US and having meetings and vacation in Europe.

Of course, while we were away, the largest natural disaster since the Asian tsunami took its toll on one small country in the Caribbean. So, as we begin to engage with the next steps of our work here in Kenya, we’re also thinking of the still urgent needs on the other side of the globe.

In fact, OpenStreetMap volunteers around the world have already been quite active making the digital map of Haiti more complete in order to aid relief workers. But now, we have been asked by Ushahidi and Google to consider what it might take to include mapping of Port-au-Prince slums in the response effort. As in Nairobi, these slums are not included in any map that’s been so far made available. Thinking of Map Kibera and our experiences here, how might these efforts be replicated in Port-au-Prince? This could help relief efforts reach into the slums and for the Ushahidi response, would help locate some of the reports and requests for help. It might ensure that slum dwellers are not neglected and have the same access to relief as others. In the long run, such a mapping exercise might bring more local control to the rebuilding process, providing a platform for advocacy for the residents of the informal areas and helping them to assess their own needs.

Of course, Kibera is not Cite Soleil, and we aren’t sure just how much more difficult a mapping exercise might be after a disaster this extreme – or even during normal times. Several years ago, I paid a brief visit to an informal settlement in Port-au-Prince where Haitian staff of the NGO I worked for were afraid to go to work due to insecurity, and the clinic was frequently closed. One thing we are sure of, and that’s the necessity of having local partners who work in the informal settlements and can quickly advise us of the need and feasibility of a mapping activity.

Our questions:

• What are the current conditions in the slums? This is something I haven’t found out from the continual stream of media reports on the Haiti situation.
• What are the possibilities of carrying out either a brief mapping in those areas highlighting landmarks and road names, for immediate use, or a long-term community mapping similar to Map Kibera?
• Remote OpenStreetMap contributors … is there anything further to contribute from satellite imagery and other data sources in the informal areas highlighted by this KMZ layer compiled by Anna Schulz?

We would love to hear from those of you active on the ground or with any useful contacts in Port-au-Prince.

Just yesterday, I imported the Map Kibera data into OpenStreetMap. I thought I’d take the opportunity to review how the data collection went in this entirely unique process, allude to a few of the mind-changing map features of Kibera that I’ve yet to fully comprehend, and provide some guidelines for further data clean up. I’ve been spending spare time over the last few weeks in Chicago working on the data, but realize this needs the help and energy of the entire community. If you’re interested to help, please get in touch.

In short, a pretty map geeky post! Divided into ways and nodes. This may excite you, or not

Ways

Ways in Kibera encompass roads, paths, streams, sewer lines (sometimes hard to tell the difference between those two), village boundaries, the railroad line, walls, permanent buildings (there are many, yes), open grounds/playing fields, and markets. So far. An incredibly dense, informal area, there is a challenge to the uninitiated to simply decide what constitutes a public road in Kibera. As it turns out, Kibera has a complex structure well known to its residents. Collecting these ways required a combination of GPS surveying, which worked reasonably well even in a dense area of corrugated iron roofs, and satellite imagery, notes written on Walking Papers and in conversation. Both introduce their own accuracies and inaccuracies, so there’s also an element of artistry involved, as usual with cartography.

These were initially traced by [User:Harry Wood|Harry Wood], from purchased DigitalGlobe satellite imagery collected in February 2009. Harry did a phenomenal job locating paths in this new terrain, which for the most part were later verified by GPS tracks. During and after the surveying phase, myself and other mappers traced from GPS tracklogs uploaded to the Map Kibera site, and from higher resolution GeoEye satellite imagery collected in July 2009 arranged by Lars Bromley of the [http://shr.aaas.org/geotech/ AAAS Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights program]. The GeoEye imagery was higher resolution (50cm, vs 60 cm for DG), brighter with a better color balance, but didn’t match the rectification of the February imagery, or of the GPS tracks. What followed was a series of tweaks and feedback between a very patient Lars and myself of re-rectifying the imagery; we finally got something which matched the GPS tracks more or less, and both learned that satellite imagery has shades of accuracy, subject to shakes in orbit, different angles of acquisition and lighting, that mean any correction in one direction results in a mistake in another region.

Besides the July imagery, the AAAS very generously donated purchase of another 5 satellite images from over the past three years in Kibera. We are very eager to explore the possibilities of automated and manual change detection and story telling using this resource; Kibera, like slums everywhere, changes rapidly, due to improvements by residents, resettlement by the government, acquisition and construction on private plots (mostly churches), and conflict on small and large scale. Imagery will help inform our understanding of these dynamics. For the moement, we have simply posted the layers to [http://aerial.maps.jsintl.org/layers/], and you are free to browse and select a slice of time. Particularly interesting are the Toi Market area, completely destroyed in the post-election violence and re-built in a new planned model, and the east side of Soweto East, the site of the first relocations and road construction. From these images is possible to date the Google imagery over Nairobi as pre-2006. For mappers, there are still a few permanent structures and walls that could use more tracing .. get in touch, and I can give you the JOSM or Potlatch settings for using the imagery.

Nearly all traced paths in OSM had GPS tracks associated, but not all, and in very dense areas, some artistic judgment was required to trace where a narrow path might really be going (these can of course be improved as more data is collected by other mappers). Road classification is still a challenge. In the formal villages, Olympic, Karanja, and Ayani, the roads are wide enough for vehicles, unpaved or in bad enough repair to qualify as unpaved, and very clearly evident in satellite and GPS, so highway=unclassfied or highway=residential. In the rest of Kibera, the situation is more interesting; for a place with no official centralized planning, there has definitely evolved a hierarchy of roads, branching fractal patterns intimately influenced by Kibera’s rugged topography. Some are wider, full of commerce, and obvious “main” roads; these have been tagged as highway=track. There are narrower paths, that are still very “public”, with significant commerce and foot traffic. These have been tagged as highway=footway. Also tagged as highway=footway are public paths through primarily residential areas. There are also even more narrow paths, nothing more than spaces between buildings, but still public; and paths that are practically private, through private plots. These all need differentiation, possibly though use of abutters=residential/commercial and private=yes tags. Complicating matters, the railway is the main thoroughfare of the area, so should be also indicated as a pedestrian area, and many of the creeks/sewers sometimes serve similar functions.

The village boundaries were initially roughly drawn from a [http://warper.geothings.net/maps/1640 map commissioned by Carolina for Kibera 7 years ago]. These were tweaked by mappers physically walking village boundaries when possible. Often these boundaries follow streams/sewers, or particular roads, and everyone is aware of precisely where they lie.

Nodes

Points of interest were the primary survey and editing activity of the Map Kibera mappers. They marked waypoints on the Garmin eTrex Legend HCx GPS, and made marks and notes on Walking Papers. They very quickly got hang of this, though there were particular subtleties, and sometimes not so subtleties, which we are still working to master.

One error that crept up occasionally were waypoints placed in an location different from where the mapper was standing. This occurs when the joystick on the GPS was moved, and quickly depressed, which the units interprets as intentionally placing a point in a different spot; vs holding the button down for 2 seconds to mark the present location. I have to say, that joystick is too clever, a persistent usability problem that has a steep body learning curve, especially for people who haven’t grown up with game controllers. Most of these errors were picked up immediately and resurveyed later; they were obviously misplaced, either in absurd locations or mappers in the wrong village, but certainly there is possibility that a few slipped through.

Each mapper definitely had their own style. In the intense density of Kibera, selecting which features are “important” is a judgment call and a matter of interest. There’s a baseline of water and sanitation features, clinics, religious and community buildings, etc. Some folks found m-pesa points important to collect, others not. Some folks picked every water collection point or water tank, even if private. Both of these things still need consistent, new tagging. Features like posho mills, battery charging stations .. entirely non-existent on any other maps. Is a movie theater in Kibera a movie theater, when it consists of a small dark room, a TV, and a DVD playing pirated movies? How to tag a witch doctor’s clinic, which these days are called “herbalists”? Most of the details on all these new features are simply in the NOTE or even name tag, all POI need some review.

Caution is needed. Even a name may not be a name. The use of a structure changes more rapidly than the availability of money to repaint a sign. So the sign might show a beauty parlor, but it’s currently used as a tailor, and everyone knows that and calls it by it’s “spoken name”. How can the map reflect both what residents already know, and what an outsider might need to know to navigate.

Some villages have much higher density of collection … as some places do have higher density of commerce, while others may be primarily residential, due to their placement peripherally to Kibera. Some are quite small, like Soweto West, so possible to comprehensively collect all. Others large places, like Makina, required additional surveyors in addition to the primary mapper, and it shows — occasionally I saw duplicate features. Capitalization never seemed to sink in with everyone … they just don’t use computers enough to care. Also, there was little care for which side of the “road” a feature sat on … something we can also improve with error checking days.

The density of features is really going to require moving to abutters and ways for many commercial areas. For web interfaces, we’ll need to separate things out into thematic, toggle-able layers. For print, we’re going to do a series of maps, atlas style, each focus on a different theme, with more narrative and photos.

So

Chickens, goats, dogs, movie theaters, hardware stores, pubs, kerosene, charging stations, butchers, trees, sewers, rocks, mud

mapkibera twitter

The snow has been falling steadily outside in Chicago, bringing the pleasures of snow shoveling: a little Sisyphean circulation in an overfed and over-rested body. That body has too gladly fell into near hibernation on our holiday return from Kenya. I can’t help thinking of Kenyans here, this unimaginable climate, people who even turn down iced drinks on hot days in fear of catching cold. Their relationship with holiday foods is a lot more healthy and real than what’s happened here, unless you’re a vegetarian like me (again nearly inconceivable back in Kenya).

For me, the icey temperature and the holidays have forced us to do absolutely nothing, after two of the most intense, rewarding, difficult, successful, frustrating months ever. I’ve been so tired I’ve totally missed the pleasure of reverse culture shock; it’s been just like a dream. There’s hardly been time for reflection and writing. Erica somehow managed to record her experiences and thoughts, the dedication of a professional. I hope I can recapture this incredible time in retrospect. Time to rejuvenate in 2010. We feel the strong pull to get back there, and we’re landing in Nairobi towards the end of the month.

Two weeks ago we left Nairobi. And we had to squeeze in one more conference before leaving, TedXKibera #2, very much the best meeting of the entire trip. Every presentation and conversation was lit with such excitement and optimism … of doing some genuinely innovative and impactful and astonishing.

Our friends from the Kibera Film School presented, their positive attitude, technical mastery, and connection to the wider world, an inspiration in the toughest moments of mapping in November. Organic farms are harvesting right in Kibera, built on the site of old dumping grounds, building local food security … the kind of land reuse and consumption issues challenging the status quo everywhere. PeePoople are introducing innovation to water and sanitation, a flying toilet that actually breaks down waste to safe fertilizer, and considering work on green roofs to harvest rain water and reduce heat in metal roofed homes … in addition to other group’s incredible work in sanitation, like the biolatrines. The excellent venue for TedXKibera, Mchanganyiko Women Self-Help Group, was itself built on a former dumping site, and entirely driven by women empowering themselves.

All these things need mapping … the organic farms are already on the map, and the map can be used to locate more. The stories of Togetherness Supreme, the locations where it was shot, those can be mapped for promotion and for advising on locations with Hot Sun clients. Sanitation facilities, of course are mapped … some mappers even complaining that toilets are littering the map (a good thing!). The Map Kibera group, they fully represented at TedX, and have been meeting in our absence to plan how to institutionalize the work we’ve started.

Working in Kibera is important to innovation everywhere. Working in Africa is important to innovation. Necessities are driving incredible creativity, a creativity the rest of the world needs to pay attention to for tomorrow’s challenges in urban and rural living … sanitation, food, water, and how to peacefully live together. Even the design challenges tomorrow’s technologies, augmented reality, have everything to learn from how space is negotiated in off the grid, on the edge places. Kibera is innovation.

That’s why I’m very excited about the TedXKibera Fellowship program, announced last month … there are so many enthusiastic people, that only need advice and connections and pathways. Before I get back, I’ll practice clearing paths on the snowy Chicago sidewalks.

Now that we’ve finished the initial training and mapping phase of the project, it’s time to look at where we’ll go from here. I have a particular passion for working with community and citizen journalists. Put that together with a map and you have an opportunity to actually locate where stories and events are taking place geographically.

In my view, the map is a way to represent visually the community’s knowledge about itself – it’s both factual and representative of the way this group of 13 wants the rest of the world to see Kibera. Good local journalism is the same, and ultimately we wish to support the kind of empowerment that comes from self-representation and local production of information. When a community becomes engaged in telling the story of who they are and reporting their own facts and their own news, a new kind of communication becomes possible.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in Kibera, it’s that there is A LOT happening in this tightly packed city-within-a-city. As a journalist by nature (and sometimes profession) I get very excited about this. There are a few local organizations that produce community media – print, radio, video – with room for more. Kibera has a population estimated to be as high as one million – larger than many cities in the United States. So we’re now developing a project to put these existing streams of information together in one place on the web.

The entire time we’ve been here (and even before we arrived), I’ve been talking to everyone I can about local media in Kenya. We partnered with two NGOs who happen to work on media in Kibera. Carolina for Kibera (CFK)houses a small volunteer group known as Kibera Worldwide that uses Flip cameras to tell stories about Kibera. Kibera Community Development Agenda (KCODA) publishes the Kibera Journal, a monthly newspaper. We have now trained two journalists from the newspaper and one from local radio station Pamoja FM on mapping. The Flip camera group followed us throughout the mapping process, and I’ve been working most closely with them to create video portraits and interviews around Kibera to bring places on the map and issues of concern to light. They have also picked up some of the mapping skills along the way and produced a short film about the project.

We’ve begun working with Ushahidi to bring these different outlets together along with citizen reporting on events in Kibera. The purpose is not so much to report through the website to Kibera’s residents, who aren’t online most of the time; it’s to link together stories and facts from various community media to allow them to amplify their own coverage to the rest of Nairobi and the world. It’s to provide a shared platform that isn’t owned by any one of them. It’s to offer a way for ordinary residents to SMS reports into a channel that can be accessed by more than just one station or paper when an even occurs, and that can also be seen by authorities and police. It’s also because of a meeting I attended where Kibera’s community leaders met with journalists from Nairobi to discuss what they considered to be poor coverage – none of the positive things that they were doing made the news. The hard work on peace and reconciliation, economic improvement, democracy, health, you name it, went unrecognized. This is a complaint I’ve heard echoed everywhere while working in the community. It became clear that local media in Kibera was missing a link to the mainstream media, but also that they wanted to directly represent themselves – to shout louder.

In fact, sometimes the question about benefit to those who aren’t online misses the point. The digital divide is a fact and needs to be addressed, but when it comes to community information there is also a need for expression outward and collaboration within Kibera. Something like the Kibera Journal or Pamoja FM allows Kibera to talk to itself, while putting facts and stories online allows it to speak to the rest of the world (including wired Nairobi, politicians, national press). Our job, now, is to make sure the world is listening. A place of that size cannot be ignored, but it can and has been spoken on behalf of. This is where I think technology can serve even the poorest and enable them direct access to the eyes and ears of the powerful. It can also project their voices, so that those in power can no longer ignore them. A community with a voice is a community at peace.

Invitation is extended to two Map Kibera events at the UN East Africa Centre this week (OSM Map).

Of course, we’ve just finished three weeks of mapping in Kibera, the Map Kibera project, with great initial results.

We are now focusing on getting the data in use, and getting the techniques of OpenStreetMap in use, and generally promoting concepts of open data.

If you are interested in either of the events below, please RSVP ASAP by sending email to contact [at] mapkibera [dot] org, so I can reserve seats.

Mapping Party

Wednesday, December 2, 9am-early afternoon, Block I upstairs (UNICEF Conference Room)

* Introduction to OpenStreetMap and the Map Kibera project
* Surveying with GPS and Walking Papers
* Editing OSM
* Discussion on Open Data, and exploration of potential map and data projects

10 Tactics Screening and Dialogue

Friday, December 4, 9am-lunch

• Screening of 10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action
• Presentation of Map Kibera and other best practices
• Open Dialogue on technological tools and approaches to collaboration and transparency

Mapper Diaries

Here are some excerpts from the short diary entries that mappers have made upon uploading and editing their data in OpenStreetMap over the past three weeks:

This was my first day to do mapping and the day was quite intresting. Being that it was my first time to use a GPS machine. In the morning we went for afieldwork using GPS and we cuptured alot of thinngs. In the afternoon we used paper walking. So its quite good that as days goes on i will be knowing alot concernin Kibera. THANKS
Posted by anekeya at Tue, 10 Nov 2009

The campaign against Kibera’s Isolation: Early on the morning of 9th nov I and my associates came together and joined the team of Mikel in the mission to map and put Kibera on line.
Posted by Gee at Tue, 10 Nov 2009

Great to have volunteered in this exercise. For sure, there are lots of new stuff to learn ranging from the kibera community response on the mapping exercise and the new enhanced technologies.
Posted by Marimba Fednance at Thu, 12 Nov 2009

i enjoy mapping my ghetto, it is adventure
Posted by kevin at Mon, 16 Nov 2009

my fellow friends it has been a very nice experience to learn new things as a team and the challenges, i will urge to continue with same spirit please keep the fire burning. Guys we are the people we must be proud of Kibera and upgrade is part of our country Kenya
BRAVO
Posted by millicent at Mon, 16 Nov 2009

With time the marking got easier and interesting in Katwekera.
Posted by Gee at Fri, 20 Nov 2009

On 19th i mapped Makina. I realised that Makina is a wide village.
Posted by anekeya at Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08

mapping Lindi on this day was very cumbersome considering the fact that the rain had caused a lot of mud making it difficult to explore far flung areas of Lindi.
Posted by leonard kwaks at Fri, 20 Nov 2009

I got to learn more about the area especially the challenges facing the residents
Posted by lucy at Tue, 24 Nov 2009

Hello, guys it has a very nice experience to have new faces in carrying out Kibera map where we are trying to collect the hidden features and bring them into light. These will also help people of Kibera and country wide to access and know what we really have, positive changes and reality of Kibera. Thanx.
Posted by millicent at Tue, 24 Nov 2009

We’re now on our second week out mapping Kibera. Our group of intrepid explorers has had two days of training, two days out mapping their neighborhood, and now two days in the computer lab uploading and editing their map data. They have been quite patient and dedicated to the task of learning new computer software, and we’ve pretty much brought the Sodnet offices to maximum computing capacity. Thankfully, we have five technical volunteers who are helping them learn the OpenStreetMap program, upload data, and scan in their paper maps.

We’ve now changed our schedule to accommodate the extra time – and focus — needed in the computer lab – spending one full day in the lab, then one full day in Kibera mapping and discussing our progress.

Here in the lab, we’ve found that computers are funny partners for those who weren’t brought up on Windows, much less Facebook (though we’re proudly starting a Facebook group!). There is the whole problem of click-and-drag, of click versus double-click, of opening and finding something in a web browser as opposed to a folder or flash drive, of typing web addresses precisely and passwords with proper capitalization (common practice is to flick on caps lock instead of shift). The use of a computer is not actually as intuitive as I had come to think. Certainly the keyboard, with its shift and control keys and illogical location of the letters, is not a straightforward tool. A few times, I have been reminded of how I painstakingly studied typing in grade school via a little computer program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Thanks Mavis! Wish I had a copy for our participants now.

But the fact is, after just three days in the lab and two days in the field, we have quite an impressive amount of marks on the Kibera map. It’s starting to not only resemble other urban areas with churches, schools, and public toilets marked in abundance, but also to reveal the astounding density of the place. After the second day out mapping, we took just five of the villages and had the mappers tally the features they recorded. Here’s the impressive list they made:

I spent Friday morning walking around the village of Raila with Regynnah, one of the mappers, tripping up the dirt pathways alongside trenches filled with running waste water, past small kiosks selling soda and cell phone top-up cards and toddlers chanting in unison “how-are-you!” We stopped at a few pre-primary schools – they seem abundant – and were treated to a little dance and song at one of them.

We toured a toilet facility under construction, and marked an AIDS clinic, chapatti shop, a cobbler. The sheer amount of potential landmarks led me to wonder what everyone had decided was important to map, and we came to a kind of consensus after making that list on the whiteboard. Then underlined features are essential to map, the rest are up to individual discretion.

So the next challenge on our plate is to help build bridges to make use of the information and demonstrate where it fits in to the bigger picture. We’re bringing in various speakers to Kibera to share some of the possibilities for this kind of mapping and introduce the participants to the wider world of technology. So I would say our ambitions are high – it’s a matter of not only teaching computer skills but envisioning the mappers as eventual full participants in the global wired world.

I really wish I knew Swahili. Sitting in the hot sun listening to speeches by every manner of councilor and administrator, including what were apparently fiery political diatribes, some basic Swahili might have kept us there just long enough to hear Prime Minister Raila Odinga himself give a speech. In fact, we’d thought we were going to actually get a chance to meet the PM ourselves, since the Area Chief of Sarangombe – now a fan of Map Kibera – had indicated as much. But this didn’t seem remotely possible once we were sitting in the Olympic primary school grounds at a fundraiser, surrounded by crowds of Kiberans and various suited men and brightly-dressed women. Oh, well. We’re never quite certain of anything until it actually materializes.

But things have materialized, right in front of ours eyes, time and again. On Friday, I showed up at the Ngong Hills Hotel at the invitation of our new friend Kepha, not sure exactly what I was there for. It turned out to be a forum organized by the Moraa New Hope Foundation, where approximately 40 people in various influential positions in Kibera and the Nairobi media discussed how to improve coverage of Kibera. Community leaders complained that some reporters asked for handouts in exchange for coverage; reporters tried to defend their coverage by explaining how something becomes “news”; community journalists (our friends at Pamoja FM and the Kibera Journal) pointed out their vital role as a non-commercial source of local information. It was right in line with our efforts to develop community-generated information sources through Map Kibera. It was clear to me that Kibera residents are tired of being seen negatively, while outsiders want more nuanced information. Hopefully Map Kibera can fill part of the gap between the local self-representation and national and international perception.

In fact, I’ve hardly ever seen such a vibrant, active place as this slum. On Saturday, the streets of Kibera teemed with life – cars covered in ribbons for a wedding party, church groups headed out in matching outfits for service projects, young kids playing football, everyone out shopping or selling, CD kiosks filling the air with music, brightly outfitted music and dance groups getting ready for the PM’s visit. Mikel and I hung around drinking sodas and taking in the scene. It was nice to see kids running about and a general levity that we were told is in sharp contrast to the post-election violence of 2007 and early 2008 – which people mention frequently in conversation, the scars obviously not yet healed.

There seems to be no limit to the energy of Kiberans working as civil servants and community workers, even while plenty others that we have not met are causing the trouble that they seek to remedy. Even our young candidates for the mapping plainly admit that other youths are not so civic-minded, more than one indicating that they wanted to volunteer because “idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” It was difficult to say no to any of them. These are high school graduates, some with college too, in a place where the opportunities don’t measure up to their talents. In fact, we’ve been rather overwhelmed with their interest. And I had worried that the time commitment would be an issue.

The bigger issue might be that for many of them, their computer skills are quite basic. The principal benefit of the project for these participants may turn out to be increased computer literacy – a valid objective in itself. Luckily we’ll have some tech volunteers to help out in the computer lab.

We’ve also invited some video reporters to participate from a group called Kibera Worldwide. They will be gathering stories alongside the mappers, which will provide further illustration of the place from the point of view of the residents. My hope is that this can further blossom into a map-based platform to connect local community media to the rest of Nairobi and the rest of the world. So the meeting with the PM might never happen, but I’d be satisfied with the respect of the average Kibera resident.

Map Kibera is on the verge of starting. We’re building a high caliber team of young people from Kibera to map, but they’re still going to need support to get started with the OpenStreetMap software. That’s where I’m hoping technical folks in Nairobi — can play a key part in making the project work well.

Are you experienced in software development, GIS, and OSM? Come help us out!

Here’s the rough plan for the next three weeks…

On Monday, November 9, we are having a day long kick-off Mapping Party at Carolina for Kibera offices. This will cover mostly surveying, which I think can be quickly grasped without too much help. But it’s going to be a fun introduction, and if you’re interested to come please please contact us.

On Tuesday, we’ll be in the offices of SODNet, for training on OpenStreetMap software. We’ll take the data collected the day before, and teach people here to use the OSM editor, JOSM. This is where it would be great to have your support. Even if you haven’t contributed to OSM before, your experience is going to allow to quickly get up to speed, and help others, or at least help to communicate my instruction in more detail.

From Wednesday until the end of the month, we’ll have a daily cycle of collecting data in the morning, and editing in the afternoon. In the afternoons, especially during the first week, it would be great to have your support by working directly with mappers and helping them edit.

SO please let me know soon if you are interested in taking part, and what your availability would look like. Our email is contact [at] mapkibera [dot] org