Map Kibera

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.

Congrats to Ahmed Mohamed Maawy and Jamila Amin for submitting two awesome apps to Apps 4 Africa.

They both worked with Map Kibera to develop apps, driven by needs from the community.

Kenya Constituency Development Fund: Community Tracking and Mapping enables Kenyans to easily view all official and on-the-ground details on CDF funded projects in Kibera. KCODA (Kibera Community Development Agenda) monitors submit detailed reports on the real status of projects, and contrasts with officially reported government status,the amount allocated, the contractor involved, photographs, and geographic location.

Kibera Open Directory and Repository: An Accessible WhoWhatWhere for Kibera is an organization directory and report repository, seeded from existing offline directories of organizations and available reports, based on Crabgrass. Information is accessible by web; and by mobile phone, which are increasingly and inexpensively connected to the Internet in Kenya. There are literally hundreds of NGOs, CBOs, faith-based, and other even more exotic species of organizations, operating in Kibera, with budgets from pennies to millions, involved in all aspects of life. As with most informal settlements, Kibera is under-served by government and that gap is particularly filled by civil society organizations. These actors are not directly accountable to the community, and it is difficult to get the bigger picture and small details of their work. Newcomers wishing to start working in Kibera, or existing organizations looking to partner, reduce duplication of work, and collaborate, face a daunting task of finding the information they need. Reports and data collected in Kibera is plentiful, but hard to access, particularly from Kibera itself. Individuals from Kibera have repeatedly asked Map Kibera for a solution to this problem, leading to this App.

We’re excited to see all the submissions. Good luck to all!

August has been awesome. Busy and intense, in a transitional sort of way. We’ve been putting a wrap on mapping in Kibera (for now) and planning the first replication to Mathare. And along the way, getting out, doing stuff, meeting people. Here’s a shotgun of August.

Getting Out

TedX

Regynnah has been speaking on Map Kibera, and Sande on Voice of Kibera, and TedX tours four informal settlements throughout Nairobi. It’s a great idea to make connections between these areas, they have more in common than not, and can learn and build with each other.

Maker Faire Africa

Kibera News Network came out in force to contribute to the fun house that is Maker Faire Africa. Gratifying to see lots of existing knowledge and interest in Map Kibera and OpenStreetMap.

Mukuru

Primoz helped Millicent and Kevin lead a 2 day mapping party (plus 2 day follow up) with mappers in Mukuru. These guys have been working with Partnership for an HIV-free Generation and Emory University, and had previously done some paper based mapping. Super enthusiastic group, opens the door to more work there.

Getting Recognized

Youth Fund

Map Kibera was awarded a grant by the UN Habitat Youth Fund! The group now has support to directly and independently replicate in another Nairobi informal settlement, sometime next year. We’ll have more to say on this later on.

Ars Electronica

And we were awarded Distinction by the Ars Electronica Festival, in Digital Communities category! Should be even more wild than Maker Faire.

Robert Chambers and Mark Hamnolan

Kibera News Network has been going strong, producing high quality reporting, during the Referendum and otherwise. This weekend, they had a visit from Professor Robert Chambers, a pioneer in participatory approaches to development. And Mark Hamnolan is here, working with KNN to interview Kiberians about crisis for a Red Cross project, and generally share some skills.

Wrapping Up

Water/Sanitation is wrap

We finally finished editing on the final theme of “phase 2″ of Map Kibera, Water and Sanitation. We held a community map drawing meeting at the offices of KWAHO, attended by many professionals from the watsan network of Kibera. The discussion was extremely interesting, and opened up many possibilities for application of maps and other tools for their work.

We’ll continue to engage in Kibera, to figure out how the map can live and benefit this and other core issues.

Put a bow on it

With help from Meghana, we’re redesigning the Map Kibera site to present everything we’ve learned over the past 6 months. Luckily we’re in good hands.

On the mapping side itself, Eric Brelsford has been rationalizing the crazy tags that evolved out of mapping the kind of place completely new to OpenStreetMap. He’s looking at improving the rendering for each theme, in seperate layers, and may be getting some help from a certain large company that’s recently taken a big interest in OSM.

On the printing side, we’re nearly through the design process for the posters and atlas. Primoz and Emma have been working hard translating the mass of digital information to paper. These will be printed up in the hundreds and distributed to organizations, schools, etc throughout Kibera.

Apps4Africa

I’m mentoring two projects in Apps4Africa. I’ll have more to say on those soon.

Making Plans

Mathare, Rebel Film Board, PLAN CLTS

In Mathare, we’ve been greeted with lots of enthusiasm when presenting to the Rebel Film Board, and the Community Total Led Sanitation network. There’s many more groups and people who are welcoming us to Mathare. The ground work is being set for our next steps there. PLAN International is also coming on board to support.

Strategic Thinking

In the rest of our free time, we’ve been taking a look to the long term. How do we carefully build on the successes in Kibera, and bring the benefit of these tools to new communities? Will be interesting for sure.

With the much appreciated help of crowd-sorcerer Henry Addo, we have upgraded Voice of Kibera to Ushahidi 2.0, and the plugin system.

The first plugin we installed immediately was the mobile plugin, which sure, gave us iphone and ipad support but what really excited us was support for any phone, really any phone, with any kind of internet access, via a web browser. In Kenya, mobile internet is booming and it is not uncommon for Kibera people to have internet enabled phones, mostly accessing Facebook. The cheapest internet enabled phone on the market is only 2000 KSH ($25). Phones and data are only going to get cheaper. For many people, the phone will be the first real chance to access the internet, and I reckon WAP is going to really take off. 10 years ago in the EU, WAP was over-hyped and crashed because people were used to a full internet experience, and didn’t really get interested in mobile internet until the iPhone. Here in Kenya, WAP is the right technology, right now. I’m incredibly excited to see what happens now that Voice of Kibera is available on the phone.

An Alert on Alerts

With 2.0 finally out of the way, I had a chance to examine our bugs and features against what’s in 2.0. One long standing issue for VoK, and I’m told other instances, were that Alerts didn’t work correctly. Sometimes they didn’t get sent out at all, or got sent out in huge numbers, almost spamming subscribers (this happened with Uchaguzi, I’m told). I had never investigated or confirmed this, but after a quick test yesterday with VoK, yes, alerts weren’t working!

I examined the code and the database, and discovered the problem. Reports are marked for alerting when approved via “admin/reports/index”, but not via “admin/reports/edit”. This means that if someone marks a report as approved while applying or reviewing location and category, it’s never sent out for alerting. At least with Voice of Kibera, this is the common usage pattern, and I suspect the majority of instances … the same person who creates and geocodes the report, approves it. The approver is often going to check out the map, rather than just read a summary. It’s only in specific circumstances that index would be used on Ushahidi instances, and I can’t say how often that the report listing would be used. This inconsistency made it a troublesome bug to figure out.

Anyhow, I submitted a bug on this, and David Kobia quickly submitted this fix. I was a little concerned that such a core feature had a major bug, but very glad that Ushahidi quickly responded to my report.

If you’ve noticed any problem with Alerts in your Ushahidi instance, I suggest at least applying David’s fix, if not upgrading to the latest codebase completely.

SMS Wishlist

Along with WAP, we see SMS Alerts as a major way Voice of Kibera will be accessible in Kibera. We’ve examined how things work, and have come up with a number of improvements.

• Should be able to sign up for Alerts to specific category, rather than everything. I believe the Haiti instance had this, but that hasn’t been integrating to 2.0
• Should be able to sign up for alerts via SMS. For example, someone interested in sporting events could text in “Kibera subscribe sports” and be signed up. That will text them back information on how to unsubscribe via SMS, etc.
• Admins should be able to toggle whether a specific message is sent out for alerts. Looking at the code around the bug above, I see this would be straightforward.
• Admins should be able to mark a report for sending only via SMS, and not on the site. These could be special communications, or take the form of a daily/weekly digest of information.
• Finally, it would be helpful to assign a name to SMS reporters and subscribers. Reports should be linked to messages that come in via SMS, so that you can see the original message and reporter when approving.

Geo and Other Stuff

Naturally being a mapping guy, I have lots of ideas! One thing that happened in Uchaguzi, and in Haiti and Chile, was a choice of base map layers, so that both OpenStreetMap and Goog were available. These were done by hacking in a little OpenLayers javascript. It would actually be pretty simple to offer a choice of several base map layers in core Ushahidi. Also helpful would be a little design work to make base map choice more obvious.

That could lead to more custom base map layers. During Uchaguzi, there was an unfulfilled need to overlay polling place districts on the map. Since that’s a fairly large KML, a more efficient method on the browser side would be to build up semi-transparent tiles.

Another place to look is geocoding. Currently only Google geocoding is offered, while there are other good, and free, services like Nominatim (based on OSM data) and Geonames. Which geocoder is in use should be somewhat invisible to the reporting interface, and done in an efficient cascade. Also, need to present choices of results to user, rather than just the first.

There may be circumstances where you want to build your own custom geocoder. Again, Uchaguzi could have benefited from geocoding on polling place locations; that database was available, but not with a license shareable with OpenStreetMap (it’s a looong story). What could be done is build up a geocoder using the open source geocommons geocoder, and integrate it with Ushahidi via its RESTful interface.

Anyhow, just a few ideas, which we’ll be processing into specific bug reports and feature requests, and yes, finding time to work on … it’s open source after all!

Millicent, Kevin, Jamie and Primoz rocked it at PLAN’s ICT4D workshops in Kwale, Kenya.

Super thanks to Linda Raftree and PLAN for inviting us.

Linda has great write ups on her blog.

Youth mappers: from Kibera to Kinango

A positively brilliant ICT4D workshop in Kwale, Kenya

Our colleagues at UNICEF HQ had a chance to present Map Kibera and Voice of Kibera at the last meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This was a very high level venue, connecting decision makers with the efforts on the ground in Kibera. The voice of people of Kibera, heard directly in the halls of UN HQ … hope this had some kind of small impact! Part of the set up included a local SMS number connected to Voice of Kibera, so that attendees there could contribute their thoughts on the site, placed over UN headquarters.

Cherif Zouein organized the team in NYC, including production of some lovely posters by Meghana. Cherif tells us that the Executive Director of UNICEF came by on the first day, the ex-president of the ECOSOC council came by also that day (she’s a
Luxembourg minister), as well as people and delegations from Cape Verde, Rwanda, Mozambique, Brazil, Bangladesh, Ghana… about 150 visitors all together. Thanks to UNICEF NYC for putting it together.

Map Kibera recently had some exciting (and very hard!) work to do in the Mt Elgon district, collecting the locations of over a hundred schools. Those schools double as polling places, and were needed for NDI’s election monitoring work; Primoz will post details soon on the why and what of the week he and Mildred spent in the Mt Elgon hills.

What I want to write about now is a geeky post describing the process of producing OpenStreetMap extracts. NDI needs the data in a different form from OSM’s XML format, namely Shapefiles or CSV matching the schemas of their postgres database, for easy import.

This is something which has become almost routine for Map Kibera, as we’ve been producing extracts for download of our data, filtered by theme (health, security, education, watsan), and in a number of formats. It’s become so routine that I can see a clear way to automate and build non-technical interfaces around the process. An easy interface to get data out of OpenStreetMap, in the format and with the data that you want, shouldn’t require grappling with our tools and would benefit GIS people and others greatly. That’s part of the motivation behind the Humanitarian Data Model.

For now, a dive into the steps and underlying tools, by skipping through the process-mtelgon.sh script. This, and many other bits and pieces of Map Kibera code are up on mapkibera github.


# GET fresh Mt Elgon extract from OSM
wget http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map?bbox=34.40356,0.74961,34.83117,0.95577 -O /home/mikel/mtelgon/mtelgon.osm


First, simply download a chunk of OSM xml from the API, around the Mt Elgon district.


/home/mikel/src/osmosis-0.34/bin/osmosis --read-xml file="/home/mikel/mtelgon/mtelgon.osm" --tf accept-nodes "education:type=*" --tf reject-ways --tf reject-relations --write-xml file="/home/mikel/mtelgon/mtelgon.polling.osm"


osmosis is a powerful command line tool for processing OpenStreetMap data in many ways. Here, osmosis is used to take the Mount Elgon data, and extract only nodes that have a tag with key “education:type=*”. That corresponds to all the polling places/schools Primoz and Mildred collected.


cd /home/mikel/mtelgon/shapefile; rm polling.*; osmexport ./shp-polling.oxr /home/mikel/mtelgon/mtelgon.polling.osm .; zip polling-shapefile.zip polling.*; rm polling.*


osmexport is a command line utility packaged with osmlib, a ruby library for handling OSM data. osmexport reads rule files which is a format specifying how to match osm tags into various output formats (Shapefile, CSV, KML). Rule files provide a quite simple way to describe this mapping, but can also incorporate any arbitrary ruby code, so more complicated processing is possible.

The example above is uses a rule file to output polling places shapefiles.

setup :Shp do
    point :polling do
        string :id, 20
        string :name, 100
        string :pollstat, 16
        string :type, 32
    end
end

nodes do
    if tags['education:type']
        :polling << {:id => id, :name => name, :pollstat => tags['polling_station'], :type => tags['education:type']}
    end
end

The first part “setup” describes the schema of the shapefile. The second part, “nodes”, iterates through every node in the given OSM file, and builds up an array in polling, which it output into the defined shapefile.

There are plenty of other examples in github.

On Monday, I attended a Nike Foundation event to discuss innovative use of technology to assist young girls. This is something Map Kibera has focused on through our association with Unicef, and the Nike team were very interested to learn and listen, kudos. One point during the presentation touched on Pamoja Mtaani a video game developed by Time Warner that conveys messages about HIV/AIDS prevention. As chance would have it, I got to see Pamoja Mtaani in action directly in Mukuru.

I was in Mukuru to discuss introducing our mapping/communication techniques to their ongoing community work. Before our meeting started yesterday in Mukuru , I was given a tour of one of two centers built in Mukuru to “host the game”. My jaw dropped as we entered a spacious room, with 20 gleaming computers showing Pamoja Mtaani. The game looks pretty well designed and fun, definitely innovative and not overly didactic … the game starts with a matatu robbery, includes graffiti and MC games, runs through a virtual Nairobi … a kinda slum version of Oregon Trail.

What struck me cold was that most of the computers were unused, and were completely locked down to only run this game. Here was a resource that any school anywhere in the world could use well, and Time Warner only permits their game, a game that you also can not download and run freely. Frankly, an idiotic implementation of a good initiative, and somehow emblematic of many things wrong with the inappropriateness of technology in development. I can understand the desire to make sure the game is actually played, rather than just giving away computers for kids to check Facebook (of course that would happen) … but you do that through a well designed program and continual involvement rather than locking away all the other potentials of this computing resource.

Now we could make pretty good use of those computers for mapping in Mukuru. As it is they are useless for anything else.

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons I’ve been learning is the limits of innovation. Map Kibera is innovative, and it’s much hyped, but is it in danger of being another project that only looks good from afar? To really make an impact with technology, is requires far more than simply doing something new. It takes a lot of work which you might think is boring, lots of discussion, lots of program design, lots of failure and revision, lots of reality. There are limits beyond simply getting computers and internet into marginal places, limits beyond training, that have to do with the dense interconnection of all issues facing our increasingly urban and marginal world. The shiny glean of technology starts things off, but after that the work may be the same as ever … learning from each other, respecting different points of view, long negotiations of how things can change for the better.

cross-posted from Brain Off

Map Kibera’s focus is online, but net access and technical knowledge is Kibera is still a big challenge. This is why our plan has always been to print up large number of maps (or an atlas) and distribute to all the schools, organizations, clinics, churches, whatever in Kibera, so the work of Map Kibera has maximum exposure and impact.

We’ve also been holding community meetings that feature paper maps. This is very much like what’s called Public Participatory GIS. That decade-old-plus methodology intends to bring mapping to a wide audience, through discussion and map drawing, or sometimes using some lightweight digital technology. The idea is not to capture precise information, but more subjective experience and ideas around place. But now with web mapping, and particularly OpenStreetMap, the public is simply participating, and the line between precise and subjective information is blurring.

Still, paper and hand drawing is a powerful tool. Walking Papers is the prime example of that. As we have moved into the community meetings, we wanted to capture this hybrid … subjective, familiar experience, but in a toolset that leads to easy digitization, reuse and sharing of results. I would’ve previously critiqued PPQIS for the lack of re-use … the results often disappeared to a desktop or report. What we came up with here was much inspired by Local Ground (pdf), which used modifications of Walking Papers to bring paper drawing in Bay Area high schools online.

All the dirty details on our organizational process for this is in the wiki. Here I wanted to document the technical process, and highlight a couple areas for improvement.

But if you're simply curious to see the early results, take a look.

We start off by printing maps by generating a A1 sized pdf map, using an extract of OSM data on whatever theme. Those get printed down in Nairobi’s industrial area, small run of 5 prints, costs about $10 each (we could probably do better if we had time to bargain). We buy good quality tracing paper from the stationary store in >Westgate. We have sets of colored markers; each marker is associated with a kind of question during the session.

At the meeting we tape down tracing paper on top of the map print, and draw a line over the border of the map and the north arrow. Discussions are led by mappers and us coordinators, a writer is chosen, and the mapping commences. The quality and revelations of the meetings have been amazing, Besides the written map, everything is documented by video, photos, audio, and write ups. We’re still compiling everything, but this page on security shows a preview.

We roll up all the maps for transport home. Unroll, and each tracing paper is affixed to the wall, backed by the blank opposite side of one of the paper maps. The map is photographed with a Digital SLR on a tripod, with flash, at a distance that reduces parallax as much as possible. Once a suitable image is captured, that’s copied to the computer. The image is clipped to the drawn boundary (this is sometimes a little bit of an art), and uploaded to the server. Also placed on the server is a “bounds” file, which simply contains the west,south,east,north bounding box of the map.

On the server, this ruby script is run. It goes over all images in the directory, and creates a world file, then uses gdal to convert the image to a GeoTIFF. The script outputs configuration for TileCache and some javascript to configure the OpenLayers maps.

The result is pretty decent, and very close to the mark. It certainly could be improved, if we had a large scanner, but that’s not available. Alignment, lighting and parallax introduces distortion. Could automatically extract the writing, like Local Ground does with PIL, but for now simply allow for altering transparency of the entire image in the display. The background tiles should be customized to the theme. Some of the text lies outside the clipping area, which could be solved by simply recording registration marks of the four corners. Perhaps with Walking Papers properly integrated, this would be easy. Finally, we’ll be integrated the drawn maps into pages included narratives and media, with links that highlight OSM features in browser.

Erica recently published an analysis of Phase One of Map Kibera on the IKM Emergent program wiki, giving a detailed account on the The Story of Map Kibera. This is probably the most straightforward and comprehensive review of what we’ve done, and the challenges we’ve faced.

The IKM Emergent wiki is a project of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex knowledge management program. Tremendous resource here, including similar reports from some of our friends.

And if you happen to be in Brighton in a couple weeks, Erica and myself will be there to present Map Kibera at IDS.