Voice of Kibera

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Voice of Kibera Focus Groups

Handout Introducing Voice of Kibera

First Voice of Kibera Focus group held on 23rd April 2010 with participants from: Vision Africa, Kibera Community Youth Programme, Kibera Mpira Mtaani, Global Giving, Hot Sun Foundation/Kibera Film School, KCODA/Kibera Journal, Map Kibera, SIT Study Abroad Program, and Mchanganyiko Women's Group

Workshop Agenda

Introductions
Overview of Map Kibera
Overview of Voice of Kibera
Demonstration of Voice of Kibera
Small group site testing and discussion
Reconvene for feedback in large group
Closing

Presentation availabe on slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/mapkibera/voice-of-kibera-focus-group-presentation

Feedback

Feedback from Demonstration of Voice of Kibera:

How is SMS currently being used?

KCODA governance project, reporting on corruption using SMS
Think about how you would use SMS in Kibera?
Website demonstration
Twitter demonstration – description of Twitter and discussion about what twitter is
Question from participant: How do you set up a Twitter account?
Showing recent reports
Showing website Tabs: “Contact us”, “About us”
Showing admin side – demo of Brian's text message to 3002 – demonstration of how to create and approve reports, editing spelling, capitalization, adding categories, geolocating Mchanginyiko women's hall as the location, verifying
Can reply to SMS or call to gather more information
Question: how would you call back? Using personal phone?
Yes, site admin could call back b/c would likely be given credit. When short code 3002
What about Pamoja FM? Would have information by accessing the website or email alerts
What if SMS taken long to approve and add to site? - what about a way to send them directly to pamoja directly right after the SMS is approved on email shouldn't usually sit for more than a few hours because should have a dedicated site administrator; someone at Pamoja could be a site administrator, a way for Pamoja to deal with the site directly or could get email alerts

Pamoja FM could have verification over radio, ask listeners
anonymity of reporting ppl, would have to have a strict agreement and policy about identiy of ppl sending in sensitive information
Participant: as a person who works with the media, we know that reporters are responsible to verify a story before reporting, journalism ethics, could be implicated as a Media House if you report on something that is not verified
Better way of doing it would be if you get a message about an incident, call somebody who is a correpsondant to confirm what is happening, from the confirmation you can go ahead and be confident to publish – have ppl on the ground
Ppl doing admin would have to do their best to verify the stories before approving if it's sensitive information
Crowdsourcing technology
People will likely send information that is impt to them b/c they are paying for it
Could be hate messages? hate messages – how to deal with this type of information?
would never post hate messages, have to develop the policy about dealing with hate messages or other sensitive information
Saving messages and forwarding them to responding agencies (ie. Police, Child protection workers, CBOs, etc.)
Technology is neutral but uses are not
Participant: Idea, sit down and start small with members, groups sit with us and have key correspondants from organizations who are partners, worried about anybody sending information
Can pre-approve trusted sources, and build up trusted sources over time if ppl are always sending in good reports (crowdsourcing)
Roots of Ushahidi – post-election violence, verified and unverified information, verify using network, different view than what was being reported by media, near real-time reporting, allows you to collect information from all different sources
To what extent are ppl's opinions valuable in and of themselves? Over time the opinions will give you a better picture about what's happening, but need fair ethical administrators and community members to decide when to follow up with a report
People looking at the information should take into account there are other sources of information coming in (news, video, photos) – SMS allows for interaction- disagreeing, discussing, to get a more balanced view of what is happening
Participant: what you are saying is right. When information is not, you might be in a position to get back to the person and get it right. Need admins of sound mind, intelligent, who are understanding what is happening in Kibera. Must have a healthy network.
Question: sms at the normal rate? Sometime back sent an SMS at 10 bob? What happens?
System is new. Changed something but Safaricom was charging for a reply back, Safaricom are meeting with our partnersto make sure it's the price of a normal SMS. What's the ideal price? If it's free we might get a lot spam

Feedback from small group discussions:

Josh’s group

Groups that use video already: How will they give it out to the community?
Posting to the site will take a long time to upload because of bandwidth
Radio is very important
Time between reporting and broadcasting has to be short
Time and cost factors
Setting up video houses to distribute information
Information and video that come to VoK can be shown and distributed through community screenings
SMS- very cheap and convenient, and can reach everyone
Question of cost; if it’s too high then nobody will come, but if it’s cheap it will be better because people will engage with the platform
Go to cybers and ask them to put Voice of Kibera as homepage so that people will see it right away
Introducing site to organisations and youth groups in Kibera so it will spread quickly through word of mouth
Social media tools: using facebook to post the link and to create profile of Voice of Kibera to “friend” people and build network

Jamie’s group

People don’t understand Twitter very well, but understand Facebook more
Incorporating Facebook into the site because it is used and known
Kibera is not an island but when you look at the site you just see Kibera not the rest of Nairobi (context for Kibera. People from Kibera hold events outside Kibera, so need the wider Nairobi as well.
Content: forming an editorial board with members that are well versed in different fields and knowledgeable so that they can look at the information—can improve credibility
Get material on the web about Kibera so that lots is known about the community
Embracing technology because pen and paper may become obsolete
Incorporating strong networks; need to continue to connect with people from other fields to improve content
SMS: normal rate or lower, but not free
Job unemployment: a way to introduce employment opportunities; posting job listings and notices and advertisements
At first glance, they didn't understand the idea of submitting a report until it was explained. Now it's easy to understand but worried for the people who didn't get the training
People in Kibera have been doing things, but they go unnoticed, so this site provides a platform to make it known.
If an administrator approves an SMS, they should provide a feedback or acknowledgement through reply SMS.

Erica’s group

Homepage is very good
It has concepts that we can easily grasp
Still questions about Twitter
Kibera is heavily populated with many activities
Improving the map icons and information on the map to more accurately represent Kibera
Getting key groups on board with the project
SMS- good communication channel which can be used for sending out reports and keeping site interactive as possible
A lot of people use SMS so it will be very useful for updates
Important to get the cost situation settled
Promoting the site and making it effective
Using group leaders from various organisations
Harnessing the central journalism groups (Pamoja and Kibera Journal), but realizing that e-world allows anyone to be a journalist
SMS, Facebook- let’s use them!
Media houses to spread info about the site and how to access it
Posters for publicity
Spread the site around
Working with local groups, especially through forums in the community

Establishing an Editorial Board

Attendees at the focus group suggested forming a Voice of Kibera advisory board to handle the site administration. We're planning to hold a meeting in the coming weeks to discuss this issue further with participants from the focus group and others from local organizations. Ideally, the editorial board will be responsible for managing the site, which involves creating reports from SMS and approving reports submitted via the web form.

Voice of Kibera Editorial Board

As of May 12th, We've had two meetings of the Editorial Board and have established site administrators, responsible for approving and creating reports, as well as SMS Reporters, responsible for sending in reports via SMS.

Over the past month we've established a regular meeting schedule for the Editorial Board and we're planning the way forward in terms of promotion of the short code (3002) and partnerships.

Voice of Kibera Basic Admin Manual

File:Vok approval.pdf

Voice of Kibera Meeting Notes

First Conceptual Meeting, May 7, 2010

What would they report? And what would you go to the site to look for?

Needs Job posting Opportunities As a general bulletin board

Editorial Board

Terms of Reference
Technical training
KCYP, Kibera Mpira Mtaani, Hot Sun Foundation, KCODA/Kibera Journal, Pamoja, Kibera Worldwide, Mchanganyiko, Map Kibera (Need reps from Pamoja and KW?)
Set up meeting with interested people for backend training and another conceptual meeting

May 11, 2010 Meeting (notes from email to group)

Schedule for who is responsible for approving reports on which days:

Monday- Josphat
Tuesday- Sande
Wednesday- Douglas/Josphat
Thursday- Douglas/Sande
Friday- Josphat
Saturday- Sande
Sunday- Melissa/Erica

When you're doing approvals, if the map is messed up, use this Latitude/Longitude to get you started:

-1.313738 (lat) 36.78798 (long)

Remember that if you hit save after imputing the lat/long it will load the map properly and you can complete the report.

For the "SMS Reporters" Fredrick and Jeremiah, we can add you as site administrators to so that you can access the admin side but at this stage your main task is sending in SMS reports. We are working out a plan to reimburse you for the reports you send in through Sambaza. I will follow up on this shortly, but the main idea is that at the end of each week, we can send you credit for the reports you have sent.

At the next meeting, we need to discuss possible changes to the site, the job postings, publicity, and how to act on reports that require follow up. In the meantime, Erica and I will work to get the technical issues sorted out.

May 24, 2010 Meeting

May 31, 2010 Meeting

Using VoK to promote Kibera tourism/organizing tours where people donate money to different organizations
Josh: GG postcards example- incorporating something like this on Voice
Linking outside people with an interest in Kibera organizations/projects with the actual projects
Erica: NGO directory and linking to Sande’s idea
KCODA’s tours as another example
More global outreach through organizational pages, perhaps

Kibera Good Gov Festival

-What’s the event all about?

-What can we tell people at this event?

-We need fliers to distribute

-Important to start linking media houses with site

-Promoting the site at the GG and offering a prize for best SMS related to good governance in Kibera (contest open until Friday); prize = 500KSH

GBV and short code (Josh)

Community monitors- trying to collaborate

Other networks that can be partners for VoK

To Do:

Editing About Us to represent the partners

Editing site to include short code, proper partners/collaborators?

Editorial Board page isn’t working—just showing the About Us page when you click on the Tab [Technical Issue]

Cyber cafes and getting the Voice of Kibera as homepage

Recruiting a VoK intern and programmer

Business directory and job postings

TASKS for the week: Contact folks from different networks to see if they’re interested in collaborating with Voice of Kibera

-Douglas: education

-Jeremiah: theatre/economic empowerment

-Fredrick: health

-Sande: peace

-Vincent: sports

June 7, 2010 Meeting (notes from email to group)

Summary of key points from meeting:

1) Erica is in the process of contacting Pamoja FM. We're hoping to set a meeting with them for Thursday afternoon. Vincent and Sande have agreed to attend. We will confirm once the meeting has been set.

2) After Pamoja, we need to think about other media to contact. Some of you mentioned contacts that you have so we should think about a strategy for approaching these organisations.

3) Everyone is tasked with talking about Voice of Kibera with their various networks so we can figure out the best way forward with potential partners. Each of you mentioned organisations and networks that you are in touch with so please by our next meeting, make sure to discuss with them. Erica will provide some fliers for distribution to these people and groups. If you were not at the meeting, please think about who you could contact about working with Voice of Kibera.

4) Continue sending in reports and approving them for the site! Everyone has done a great job with this. Like we said yesterday, we want to be up-to-date so that others see the value in coming to the site, particularly a group like Pamoja FM.

Technical Issues

upgrade instance to latest codebase
videos are not showing on the homepage. The last two reports with videos (Kibera Mpira Mtaani and one I just created about the TS film screening) have youtube videos so I put the link in the videos link box and they're not showing up.
site is loading funny on reports page.
sms reply and subscription
Instead of whole article on Kibera Journal feed, it's only partial then ... (needs to show full report)
Links don't show up anywhere in report, even when entered
Map when creating report is not always appearing on Kibera (then after you hit Save it appears)
Can video link appear automatically when feeding in from YouTube? (in the bar for video)
quotation marks and apostrophes turn to gibberish text in feeds turned to reports.
When looking at report page map is too zoomed out and clusters too many related incidents around chosen one
Can we include mainstream news on kibera (anything from KTN Nation etc) as a feed somewhere too? Already posting some of their videos
On report submission form the map sometimes is not even Kibera, general map shows instead
initial map view shows only some reports. clicking category to reload reports shows them all.
sms subscription to keywords. or manually generated synopsis

Older Technical Issues

These may be solved

http://kibera.ushahidi.com/

the dots are again not appearing on my map kibera.ush with the www (in case you tried to fix already?) - also even w/o www i had to reload a few times
source of each report (ie, news media org)
type of report (video, audio, written)
timeline doesn't look like anything?

Design

- Add timeline back onto map on front page.

Ideas

- Add a business directory. - Add job announcement bulletin board. - Have roaming mobile reporters on issue areas, representing networks.

Questions

1) Familiarity with platform for their own use (alerts, access to site?)

2) Mobile access: can people find it online? Application to develop – what should come up on there? Maybe database, not map, something simple – where do you live? What’s going on there? Alerts via mobile. Most important info is the data not map. Reach more people by offering info this way. Could compile based on where they live.

3) Info board – LCD or some kind of display. Latest news. Integrate with Kibera Journal – sidebar.

4) Pamoja: aspiring journalists may approach us – to what extent to promote? Can we advertise the shortcode? Interview from Kenyans is more effective – get the guys to do most of the talking on Pamoja.

5) Breakfast show on Citizen – many viewers, not too hard to get on.

6) Keep message simple and not prepared (not read off a sheet)

7) Don’t assume they can access the website: radio, print, etc – link from website to radio. Dedicate a Pamoja bulletin each day – what’s new today?

8) What is newsworthy, how to collaborate with mainstream news sources? Buy in from different parties - like Nation, bloggers. Also are there microblogging possibilities?

9) Preparation for any crisis – how will this be useful?

10) Safeguarding the objective nature of the site – also ethnic balance and perception. Also that it’s for the community and not “taking”. Might want to stress that – it’s for you, not actually from Americans or anything. Non-extractive.

11) Need ambassadors – what can it do for you? Or what has it done, how can it be early warning, something to combat outside perception, etc? Also as a public service.

12) Photography? Many people take photos and may want to upload. How can they add?

13) Approach people personally in an event, take their number, and then even get their message and type in yourself – they can then get a reply thanks for your message.This has worked when general announcements don't.

14) Be specific in what to send – even if different in each event or circumstance – and what will result from the sent message.

15) Acknowledge their message was received (how specific to be on this?)