Map Kibera

News From This Week

–  Map tracing exercises are proving to be a fascinating tool for bringing community knowledge into the commons.  We held five 2-hour map tracing community meetings this week. With printed maps (featuring security data collected last week by our mappers), tracing paper and pens, we met with different aged girls from Binti Pamoja (ages 10-18 and 18-24) as well as security providers such as community police and elders.

The girls revealed behavioral norms while the service providers gave the big picture.  Early versions of the scanned, rectified, tiled and displayed maps are here. You can see pictures from these meetings here.

Just a few of the things we learned:

Girls are often at risk when they go to nightly funeral parties to dance, and when they go out in town, they often stay out until 5AM to avoid returning to Kibera in the dark. We have also learned that while much violence is tied to drug and alcohol abuse, a single drug rehab center (SEPTA) serves Kibera, and does not provide outreach into the informal areas. Most carjacking takes place at the Anany Bridge, and  rape and abduction often takes place either near Jamhuri Park or in Silanga near the Nairobi Dam.

– Using our Flip Cams, we launched the Kibera News Network, a youth-run Youtube channel that provide narratives about the mapping data and general news about Kibera.

On April 23, 2010, along with the Map Kibera team, I organized a focus group on the Voice of Kibera (VoK) platform, which is designed to be a place for Kibera residents to post reports and information relevant to them and their community. VoK is a recent initiative of Map Kibera. The main goal of the focus group was to get feedback from people who live and work in Kibera with various NGOs and CBOs. We had a great group of participants who openly shared their ideas about the usefulness of the platform, especially in regards to the SMS reporting mechanism and how to publicize the site in Kibera. Participants were excited about using the site to post reports about their community work and suggested that it could be used to post job and other opportunities. VoK has a short code (3002), provided to them by their partners at the Social Development Network (SODNET), and the site uses a customized Ushahidi platform featuring videos, photos, a Twitter stream and a separate SMS Reports box. The SMS can be used to send information about Kibera-based organizations, opinions on local businesses and services, problems encountered in the community, and things that are happening in the community (both good and bad).

Erica Hagen introducing VoK

After introducing Map Kibera and the Voice of Kibera site, we broke into small groups to test the site, enter new reports, and discuss SMS reporting.

Small group discussion and website testing

When we reconvened in the large group, we heard great suggestions from each group including asking cyber cafe operators to put VoK as the homepage on the computers as a way of publicizing the site and making it more readily available to Kiberans, harnessing the networks that each participant has, building relationships with local media, including Kibera Journal and Pamoja FM, and starting an Editorial Board to make key decisions regarding how the site will run. The first Editorial Board meeting will be held this Friday, May 7th, to begin moving forward with the project. If the enthusiasm from the workshop carries over to the next meeting, VoK will be off to a great start.

More information of the workshop and updates on VoK can be found on the Map Kibera Wiki.

cross-posted from The Ushahidi Blog

I recently attended the World Bank Innovation Fair in Cape Town, South Africa. It was an interesting assemblage of people working around the world on projects ranging from conflict mapping to social issue reality TV shows. Many involved technology, but a fair amount did not – innovation can come in many forms.

The conference was meant to last only two days, but due to a certain volcanic ash cloud, the informal after-conference lasted up to a week for some. In fact, I’m not even sure if everyone is home yet. Getting to know your colleagues off-Twitter from a variety of sectors is invaluable, and this crowd wasn’t made up of the usual conference-goers since 30 of the project leaders (including us) had won an online contest in order to be chosen. In fact, due to an abundance of strictly timed elevator-style presentations, much of the conference felt like cross between American Idol and an industry trade show, with everyone hawking their newest invention to age-old problems. Even when some of them seemed to fall apart upon closer inspection, I was impressed by the spirit of invention  – dare I say, a DIY mentality? (Innovation is a nice word, but why not invention? The inventor conjures a half-mad genius in the lab, an Einstein, an Edison, who, fueled by the mad drive to create, finally produces a light bulb). Many of the attendees had obviously come with the hope of convincing the judges (er…World Bank) to finance their experiments. It was a long shot.

I had a moment of recognition that this is the best place to be in what has become the mega-industrial aid and development complex. I’d rather be around 30 creative inventors pitching their ideas with vigor (even if 29 of them never succeed) than 3000 executives at the next Global Conference on a Big Issue. It is those who take a chance on an idea and run with it who command my greatest respect. This is not coincidentally thanks to my experience of the difficulty of actually bringing an idea to fruition! That would be my only caviat: ideas are great, but talk to me after you have actually tried it out with real people.

So – here are just a few of the cool things I learned of, with great people to match (there were others I wanted to include BUT could not find online – if your project doesn’t even have a basic website how can it inspire others around the world? And if it’s not public, even worse.):

-       Reconstructed Living Labs: – Using social media to reform lives; plus they use MXit to do counseling and they all blog on their phones. They’re highlighted in this video: (otherwise: warning, very cheesy conference video).

-       Hibr: – Lebanese youth newspaper and online independent citizen media. They also want to create a traveling media lab out of an old bus.

-       Armed Conflict and Location Event Dataset: Mapping armed conflict, including ground research to determine who is doing what.

-       Voices Beyond Walls – Palestinian youth media and mapping project.

-       Voices of Africa: Nairobi-based project of solar-powered rural internet kiosks.

–      UNDP Threat and Risk Mapping: Makes use of participatory mapping to determine local needs, and plan for village development in Sudan. Not sure if this is shared, public information though.