Map Kibera

Nice piece on Map Kibera in Episode 4 of Geospatial Revolution. Lots of great footage featuring the whole crew, interviews with Douglas, Mildred, Erica, and myself, and crazy zooming graphics. Map Kibera portion starts at 10:40 … of course the whole episode and series is a great exploration of the latest in mapping stuff.

A trio of nice pieces on Map Kibera.

Wired UK, “The Place That Wasn’t There”

(though I wouldn’t say the government has responded, yet)

Brussels Airways Magazine: We Are Here Thanks Doug for spotting it!

And Global Voices profiles Kibera News Network! Kenya: Citizen Journalism of the Kibera News Network

Want to read nearly everything Map Kibera got up to in 2010? Our very functional 2010 Year in Review.

“Kibera’s people deserve to know the facts about their lives.” – Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities.

The excellent book Shadow Cities narrates a conversation the author had with a Kibera NGO officer who had overseen research into water pricing in Kibera. The ad-hoc system of water vendors and CBOs in Kibera led to water costing 5, 10, 20 times what a resident of nearby wealthy suburbs paid for municipal water. When asked for the reaction of Kibera residents to this news, the officer told him that he couldn’t possibly share this information with residents because there could be riots.

We strongly disagree that Kibera can’t handle truth. Unfortunately this was one of many research projects we heard about that produced reports about Kibera for other audiences, with disinterest to sharing the results even with Kiberans who helped organize the research. It’s unethical.

Map Kibera has received its fair share of research proposals, and have only so far worked with IDS. They shared our values for how research might best work in partnership with ‘practitioners’ (that’s us), and the proper position in the “Research-Practice Balance”. This post is a quick draft at pulling out principles that guide us in research, and hopefully can serve as a brief guide for other research projects that wish to work us, within Kibera, or within any ‘development context’.

Design in Partnership

For us, research is a partnership. We want a core role in the design of the research project, well before they shape of the research is finalized.

If you’re studying development, or designing some kind of technological intervention, you must at least talk to the subject of research well before submitting the proposal (amazingly this doesn’t happen). They will have very specific guidance on what will work, what won’t work, how your research will be better and more beneficial. It’s possible they don’t want to be studied, respect that choice.

With IDS, we met Evangelia last June, and have had a very strong dialogue throughout the entire process.

Contribute concretely to the research subject

Research, especially in Kibera, is often simply extractive. The researcher interviews, surveys, holds group discussions, and analyses the findings, and publishes in a journal. How did the subject benefit? And we’re talking more than simply sharing the results (though that’s important of course). How can a research intervention promote positive change? Yes, this is anathema to usual “objective” research practice. However, our view is that it’s impossible to be disengaged from the subject of development research, and is in fact unethical to not contribute something concrete.

With IDS, all of the interviews and meetings were facilitated by Sammy, leading up to a gathering of everyone to reflect on the results. This was incredibly valuable for everyone to share their perspectives and understand others. We thought of it as Group Therapy. Additionally, we organized an amazing inquiry led learning session with Aptivate, which contributes to creating a guide book for future trainings.

Complement ongoing projects and schedule

Participating in research takes a lot of time and energy. Map Kibera is busy! The perfect time for you might a horrible time for us. Again, let’s work together to design the research so that it doesn’t negatively impact the actually doing stuff.

This isn’t easy of course. Even with IDS, we were going 150% to do both the research and the rest of the day to day. But we worked it out!

Avoid Survey Fatigue

Kibera has survey fatigue. Imagine having a complete stranger coming to your door to ask you detailed questions about your family’s toilet habits. And then someone else doing it. And again. Would you even answer the first time?

Question whether a survey is really required. Can you get the information you need from someone else, or by a different technique. If you must survey, design it in such a way to reduce time required to answer your questions.

Publish data and results open access

Not surprising, I hope, coming from us. Share your research paper openly, in an open access journal or by publishing to your website.

You’ll be able to find all the IDS research results on this blog when finalized.

Further, publish the data, or make it easily available to other researchers. Your data can live its own life, and benefit way beyond what’s possible in your own work. If the data is sensitive, then of course be careful, but remember the default is sharing everything.

What else?

Let us know in the comments!

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

Take a look around Nairobi OpenStreetMap and a few places are really high fidelity: Kibera of course, Mathare, the UN complex at Gigiri … and now the University of Nairobi!

This wasn’t due to a concerted effort of the core Map Kibera team, rather than enthusiasm of the growing Kenya OSM community. I met Simon Ndunda at the awesome Maker Faire Africa. Simon was a CS student at the University of Nairobi, and they needed good maps for their final software projects. I offered Simon the use of GPS through the Map Kibera GPS loan program (available to mappers in Kenya who need GPS).

This map is the awesome result.

They used the map in a couple projects, still in development:, Nairobi Sizzle, a local guide for students, and masters project in remote train control. Simon hopes to find opportunity to expand the mapping to other campus, and into all of Kenya.

We were happy to facilitate with a little equipment, and hope to find more uses for mapping at the University especially.

Back in October 2009, Erica and myself explicitly intended to NOT start a new organization in Kibera, a place awash with hundreds of NGOs and CBOs. Now in January 2011, we are two of four (growing to seven) Trustees on the Board of the Map Kibera Trust, a Kenyan based organization with staff and over 30 participants in three programs and a national outlook. How the heck did we get here? I wanted to explore a bit of the history, social process and discussion that went into the formation of the Trust, and in a later post outside this series, will give a full introduction to how the Trust is structured and operates.

Early during the first phase, it was clear sustainability would be an issue. Without some organization or network to keep the torch moving, the work Map Kibera started in October-December 2009 would stop there. The participants, while enthusiastic and skilled, are mostly young and had their own individual priorities. They didn’t have experience forming organizations, and as soon will be clear, neither did Erica or myself! We had maybe hoped that the “community” would pick this up, but with such a new kind of activity, there wasn’t a natural home that immediately had capacity.

Our first response was in December 2009 to present the issue to the mappers, and ask them to discuss and self-organize in our absence over January. They needed to take the lead, to take ownership, and we would help support them in the process. On our return in February, we found things hadn’t gone smoothly. The group didn’t have a single strong direction or vision, egos were colliding to take control, and our Kenyan partners at SODNET had been called in to mediate. We, being the initial leaders, needed to provide direction in the process, clearly present the vision, and at the same time balance that with empowering the group to lead. And, we were already getting ready to start training in online media and video in Kibera to expand on the toolset available, as well as work on deeper issue-based mapping. A tricky, tricky, ongoing process.

We started in discussion with the mappers, the intention being to support them to create whatever vehicle they needed to move forward. There was consensus around starting formal registration, and building an organization that had national scope and could do a variety of things, including crucially provide some level of support for the individuals. After examining a number of different types of organizations, like NGO, community based organization, and society, the group settled on a Trust as best fitting our needs and being relatively easy to set up. With that mandate, we formed a working group of Philip (from SODNET), Douglas (mapper), Jane (Map Kibera administrator) and myself, and began to meet to work on the nitty gritty. That meant hiring a lawyer, drafting a Trust Deed, selecting and inviting Trustees according to criteria, deciding a structure and draft a Constitution, terms of reference for Trustees and Advisor, HR policy, partnership policy, financial policy. We soon decided to invite ongoing friends of Map Kibera Kepha Ngito and Douglas Ragan to join the Board of Trustees.

On top of all that, we had the activities of Phase 2 moving full steam, and the full expansion of the project into Voice of Kibera and Kibera News Network. We were all busy, and communication broke down on the progress of the Trust. Though by August 2010 we had made decent progress, the participants were beginning to grumble – especially since by now there were three young programs and things seemed to be changing at a fast pace. We hastily organized a meeting of all the participants, had excellent team-building activities led by Rosie from Community Cleaning Services, and introduced the Organizational Overview we had created for the Trust. But when it came to the detailed discussion of the Trust, it was perhaps too little too late for clarity.

The Mappers felt the remit of the Trust had widened to include the new programs (Voice of Kibera and KNN) without their consent, while the other groups felt the Trust was a structure set in stone, making them beholden somehow to the Mappers. There was a feeling that the Trust was more driven by myself and Erica then the guys from Kibera. We felt we had carefully communicated the purpose of the Trust, and especially, that we wanted to co-develop the organization of the Trust with everyone, but on reflection we’ve seen how our words and actions were in conflict. We know well now that ambiguity and open-endedness is not something easy to communicate to the youth of Kenya. When dealing with “figures of authority”, and lacking experience, the usual expectation is to be told what to do, very clearly. The conflicting needs of our organizational development required input and ownership from everyone, but also very strong guidance to produce what’s expected. We had also been in something of a conundrum, since we had created a partnership with Unicef for Phase 2 and made plans to move ahead on activities, sending a message that we were still in charge. Yet we wanted the group to start taking more ownership of the project.

We pushed forward, and there was no better time for the focus groups and reflections with Sammy Misoyuki, which helped air all this out in a productive way. Kepha stepped up to really make clear what this Trust thing was all about. While those discussions didn’t quash all uncertainties that the Trust was indeed working in their interest, it set things in the right direction for a productive, bottom-up structuring. By bottom-up, we emphasized that the Trust is set up to support the programs, and rather than being explicitly told what to do, the programs themselves are responsible for devising their own vision and mission, activities, budgets, membership policies, structures, and in iteration with the coordinators, come to a workable structure.  Perhaps this is more difficult in the short term, but in the long term a more resilient and empowered organization. Even now, we are looking at how to structure a program of training in the skills needed for planning an organization, and required deliverables, to get into a solid place; while the guys are probably wondering again if the Trust has packed its bags along with Erica and I.

Meanwhile, we finally got agreement that all three programs were going to have equal say and participation in a coordinating body for the Trust, but could still manage themselves independently in terms of their internal structure or operations. There was a lot of back and forth on this but I think we finally got everyone to see how working together could be more beneficial than creating three separate organizations. This was eye-opening for us since we easily saw the links between video, Voice of Kibera, and mapping – we tend to live in an online interconnected virtual world. On the ground in Kibera, the tendency is more to mark off your territory and huddle together with those you trust.

If the this wasn’t enough, we also experienced outrageous problems with our “lawyer” – who ran off with our registration fees without even filing properly – and had to make a very late switch for someone more reliable. Caveat emptor.

Yes, it’s been a lot of back and forth, between the initiators and the participants. Perhaps that’s the only way to proceed, with everyone’s inexperience in this (especially our own), and the terrifically difficult balance this kind of development engagement and relationship requires. I sincerely appreciate everyone’s patience and energy to this process … it hasn’t been easy.

The usual procedure is for some kind of founders to form the organization, set up the mission and operations of the group, and then do activities. We did it backwards. We started with a big splash of an activity, and then founded an organization of necessity, and that led to confusion. I still think this is a wise direction to proceed, to build off of real work before formalizing and ask trainees to envision what they want and need. We’ve actually gone a lot further in our thinking now, by thinking along with  IDS and Sammy Muyoki about how participatory development can work with new technology in communities. However, we’ve learned from this experience and from the reflection in the study that serious thought and preparation must be given to what happens after we (GroundTruth) are invited to initiate an activity, and leave, as our role is of necessity not long term. In Mathare, the Map Kibera Trust and Ground Truth have clearly engaged a network of groups prior to start, and explicitly told them to think of how they can maintain the activities after March, with the ongoing linkage but not ownership by us. We are eager to see how this open-ended future forms!

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

Map Kibera, and especially the reflection part of our research with IDS and DFID, has finally changed assumptions that have led my work for the past five years. Open Source software development, and its progeny in collaborative media and especially OpenStreetMap, are all guided by core values. My assumption has been that these values are so powerful and inherent in the practice of engaging with these technologies, that they can overcome the gaps international development attempts (but often misses) to bridge. Turns out, maybe obviously to non-technologists, that technology rapidly adapts to different cultural contexts and individual conditions, and those vital values can be lost without a well-thought-out methodology of working in new communities.

Open Source is transparent in its operations, requires collaboration among very different kinds of actors, requires self-motivation and a spirit of volunteerism, and is a true meritocracy. Anyone can participate, and the results are available to everyone. This is ensured by open source software licenses, and backed up by well-developed communities of practice. These ideas have influenced the formation of the Web, and Web 2.0, participatory projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. In OpenStreetMap, we are completely driven by individual contribution, and ideally the most expert mapper is anyone who knows their home and neighborhoods well. When it comes to international development, engaging within an open source approach means valuing the individual, trusting them inherently, making sure they benefit from giving something away, and opening up new opportunities. Transparency has potential to improve the efficiency and accountability of international development, which too often operates business as usual, opaque with its finances and its results. Personally, this potential has taken me to India, Palestine, and influenced my involvement in the HOT response in Haiti.

We’ve had some success this way, but for this to really work, it takes a lot more context. I’m reminded of my disillusionment with Artificial Intelligence. The idea is that human-like thinking and knowledge-grappling can by engineered entirely from algorithms, separate from the entire physical, emotional, social experience of being a human being. The view is that “Intelligence” is something separate from its emergence in human beings, and can be transplanted to another context completely. Whatever. When you realize that computers can’t even successfully replicate the intelligent workings of an insect, and that insects are actually very complicated, you start to appreciate not only the complexity of the entire system, but its absolute necessity. In my case it led me to study emergent systems.

Open Source is a lot like that. It emerged from a particular cultural domain and we’re still learning how it will adapt to other contexts. I particularly find interesting the interaction of 1960s American counterculture, American expansionism, and early Silicon Valley, explored in What the Doormouse Said. We’re free and we can do what we want … with the machines! Douglas Englebart, the pioneer of making computers humanly approachable, had plenty of time in hippie hot tubs in the woods above Palo Alto. The Homebrew Computer Club pranksters believed in openly sharing knowledge (even if some of them founded secretive Apple). And as the meme of open source spread out of the States to Finland, Germany, India, wherever, it has had to find suitable grounding in a culture which supports these sames values in some form. Any kind of endeavor, including participation in Open Source, needs to be tied to someone’s personal motivation, and often the motivation for hacking into the night or writing Wikipedia articles is to stand out and show off, do something never done before, to contribute something important after the drudgery of everyday needs are taken care of.

Kenya and Kibera are certainly entrepreneurial places, but so different from freewheeling San Francisco. We’ll talk about the challenges facing individual participants in other posts, but broadly, the prime concern is on day to day survival, and there’s little space for frivolous activities. Especially if you are working with foreigners, the community expectation is that you are banking it today, not necessarily contributing to growth for the entire community in the future. People operate in groups, are used to face-to-face communication and are most comfortable working in teams. Standing out from the group and taking personal initiative is an exposure risk that is usually too great. Transparency is still viewed as a risk by organizations operating in Kibera; even if they see the value, they face a prisoner’s dilemma of possible short term loss by giving away their details. Certainly personal motivation is more oriented towards finding immediate economic opportunity. There are other intangible motivations for participating in such a project, such as acceptance as equals in OpenStreetMap, on Youtube, as colleagues in Nairobi and international conferences. However, they’re usually not the same rewards that motivated those who started the Open Source movement or those who keep it going in the rich world, today.

There’s a hierarchy of needs, and I guess a hierarchy of open source needs. Just introducing a participatory technology doesn’t lead to participatory development. It doesn’t mean open source isn’t the right or appropriate choice for technology, it usually is. However, it must be embedded within another context and methodology that accounts for the much more vital and complex lives and social scene. The challenge will be to show that the opportunity to share freely is so important, as the urgency to address poverty is so high and a barrier as simple as information should be easily hurdled. In the Kenyan context and culture, the focus of open source work is much more on well functioning groups and networks, rather than individuals, who need a supportive space within which to express their individual motivation. And when forming such groups or networks, meritocracy in the technology must be matched by meritocracy in participation in the program as a whole. For participants, the opportunity for real influence on how a project operates is key, with the ultimate goal of ownership. As ever, we don’t have all the answers, but especially through this research, we have learned that we have to find ways to keep listening and adapting.

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

This past month, Map Kibera became a research subject. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.

With all the excitement (or hype) around technology and mapping in development, there has apparently been very little academic or solid web based research into the challenges faced when applying the methodologies of participatory technologies to participatory development and aid (excepting a few highly valued voices like Paul and Linda). Basically, what will make you pull your hair out when trying to bring Open Source to the Whole Wide World? We’ve long recognized our own shortcomings in Map Kibera, and make no effort to hide them, but we have lacked an objective and constructive critical view. It’s so difficult to find critics of our project, that I was contacted to possibly provide the dissenting view to the recent BBC World Service report on Map Kibera based on this blog post!

What especially interested us about working with Evangelia Berdou from IDS and Samuel Musyoki from Plan was that the research was designed to not be extractive, resulting in research papers only for the eyes of academics, but to be immediately practically useful for the program itself. Evangelia and Sammy conducted interviews and focus groups with just about everyone, and wrapped up with a general meeting with representatives from all facets of Map Kibera to present the results together. It’s totally appropriate to call this group therapy! Sammy did a masterful job at drawing out honest reflections on the past year with just a little prompting, and I will be keeping the small trick of passing a literal baton between tight lipped participants to get them to open up. The focus groups were followed up with an incredible 3 day workshop on understanding learning, so that everyone is prepared for training others in Mathare and elsewhere.

One year on. It was the second Monday of November 2009 that we started mapping. Kenyatta Day (now Mashujaa Day) marked our official one year presence in Kenya. It was only supposed to be one month to start, then four months, now one year! Looking back over the past year, honestly so much has been accomplished, it’s staggering. With a small informal and fluctuating initiating team, and eager and motivated young people, Map Kibera has done incredible work and made huge waves. I think we demonstrated that the technology and the training totally work. What we continue to struggle with is everything else! The sticking points are the social and organizational dimensions of the introduction of this technology, but maybe more crucially ourselves as newcomers, to an extremely complicated community with a complicated relationship to the international community.

There’s much to reflect on the topics of Money, Organization, Expectations, Communication, Commitment and more. Each of these deserves at least a post in themselves, and I’ll return to these and others to dig into what we’ve learned about making open source work for development.

This post is part of a series exploring the ideas and issues that have emerged in our research project with Institute of Development Studies, supported by DFID. All posts from the Map Kibera team, the researchers from IDS, our trainers and colleagues are collected here. As always, we are eager to discuss this work, so we hope to hear your comments.

Update: Zack has his visa! After some kind of intervention by friends, Zack was called by the High Commission to receive his visa today! Thanks very much everyone for the support. We now have our best hopes in place for Douglas to have a successful application. And as Kepha noted in the comments, even with friends to push for Zack, the underlying problems remain in a prejudiced system, and we will continue to advocate for fairness in the international system of development.

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to raise our predicament publicly, but an injustice has been done. I must try all avenues available to right this situation. If after reading this, you have any ideas on how to proceed, please get in touch.

One of our participants, Zacharia Wambua, applied for and received a travel scholarship to attend the ICTD Conference next month at Royal Holloway, University of London. Zack is one of our brightest mappers, and shows great promise to take on this work as a career (Zack is standing to the right of US Ambassador to Kenya Ranneberger in this picture). The conference was going to be an opportunity for him to network, especially with UK universities, and take part in our panel focused on citizen mapping and media projects. He was to be joined by fellow mapper, Douglas Namale. For Zack, this would be his first time traveling outside Kenya, and I’m sure a life changing experience for a highly intelligent young man from Kibera.

As required, Zack submitted an application for a business visa (ref NAIROBI\323731), and took great care to fill out the application honestly and comprehensively. Yesterday, he received noticed that he was refused entry, with no opportunity to appeal. The decision gives no weight to our organization, the Map Kibera Trust, and draws attention to Zack’s economic situation as the primary evidence for the decision that, in the view of the UK Border Agency, Zack is not genuinely seeking to attend this conference.

To me, this is a deep systematic failure, based on probabilities. Zack is impoverished, it’s true. But he is working very hard to improve himself and situation, partly through participating in our programs. Despite having very little financial ties, or having family with a bank account, he is in fact very tied to his family, church and community. I’m not sure how you are supposed to show evidence of strong relationships to your family in a visa application. Zack is volunteering with a program, that among other things, has been featured on the BBC, is the subject of a DFID funded and UK university led research program, and he’s been invited to a prestigious conference organized by UNESCO and the University of London, that focuses on social and economic development through technology. Yet he is denied entry by the UK Border Agency. This is a terrible contradiction.

Frankly, if being poor is a barrier to taking part in these kind of activities, then the intentions of the entire conference, the work of DFID, etc, are completely negated.

We understand that an incorrect decision could have been made. However, Zack has been denied the right of appeal, the right to an interview, and the right for his supporters to speak on his behalf. Therefore, I ask, if there’s anything you can see we can do in this situation that could lead to a change of decision, we’d greatly appreciate the advice and action.

The 2009 Kenyan census puts Kibera’s population at 170,070, very far from the usual 1 million plus figure thrown around. The scale of the change has rightly shocked people.

When we first prepared to come to Kibera last year, we looked for a source for this one million number. It was widely quoted in all the major media and even the UN, but never with a source, and we found this very suspicious. With caution, we always qualified the population number in writing and presentations with a question mark or the clause “widely quoted number”. With a little more investigation, we found some quality work on this question. The Map Kibera Project (different project, similar in spirit, unintentional namespace clash) undertook a door to door survey in Kianda village, and based on the population density there, extrapolated to all of Kibera for a figure of 235000-270000. The KeyObs RESPOND project derived an estimate of the number of built structures in Kibera from satellite imagery, and then conducted a sample to estimate population per structure, and came up with a number in the range from 199,959 to 205,108. Both efforts clearly published their methodology and seemed like reasonable efforts.

Despite this, when Jill Biden visited Kibera in June, the White House reported the number jumping to 1.5 million! What motivations are there inflating Kibera’s population numbers? The cynical claim is that NGOs and CBOs use the 1 million number to benefit themselves. I don’t see much evidence that people are getting rich from NGOs, but then there’s not much evidence at all of how much money has flowed through Kibera ineffectively. Certainly Kibera has had more attention than other places equally deserving of help, and of course it is the place we started in Kenya. Kenyan’s understandably want to change the perception of informal areas. The large number of retweets I think reflects the desire of well-off Kenyans to put Kibera behind them. Despite the 1 million number falling, Kibera is still a place underserved by government, and one of many informal settlements in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya. The truth is that Kibera is still there.

In our work, somehow Kibera never felt like “1 million”, and but much closer to the MKP and KeyObs number. We had been talking about replicating the KeyObs work with satellite imagery, and also counting daily out and in flux as Kiberians going to work in the industrial area and surrounding estates.

We’re glad to see that light has finally fallen on Kibera’s population in a big way. Certainly a revision is needed. But we’re concerned with the way these new numbers from the Kenyan Census are seized on without question. The number 170,000 is at least on the same scale as previous counts, but it is relatively lower. There are no doubt issues with doing any sort of census anywhere, but especially in a place like Kibera. Definitely the Kenyan census was undertaken professionally, but part of that professional work would be openly discussing methodology and difficulties encountered. Collecting data in an informal settlement is challenging … what special measures were taken by the Kenyan census in Kibera?

The truth is that we still don’t know how many people live in Kibera. It’s a different number today than yesterday. The definition of “living” in Kibera varies, it’s quite a transient place. Whether it’s 170000 or 1.5 million, the truth of that number is intertwined with the understanding of where it’s coming from. And questioning authority in Kenya doesn’t come easy. One chink in the armor is exploited to cast doubt on the entire enterprise. Authority means knowing all.

We’ve come to Kibera fully admitting we don’t know everything. Not only is OpenStreetMap always wrong, every map is always wrong, a representation of a reality which always changes. When we think about how the map and technology will be used in Kibera, we fully admit we don’t have answers but are ready to engage with everyone to perhaps discuss the questions. Understanding that precision and authority is relative, that we don’t understand everything, and understanding the motivations and methodology of how data is collected … all is vitally important in open data, in addition to the “precise” number or position.

… and only now noticing Brian Ekdale’s excellent analysis.