Voice of Kibera

From Map Kibera

Revision as of 13:57, 26 April 2010

Voice of Kibera Focus Groups

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 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)
• 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

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
  

Technical Issues

• Map is too zoomed out
• They requested today to have focus on Kibera but have whole Nariobi map show if you scroll around. Possible?
• Related reports are not actually related

• Can we include mainstream news on kibera (anything from KTN Nation etc) as a feed somewhere too? Already posting some of their videos.

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

I think we could use some help determining the best design for the site. We have a couple of photos of Kibera (see Flickr: mapkibera tag, ie http://www.flickr.com/photos/junipermarie/4169730390/; I also have a lot of video and could pull out stills). We also are open to color suggestions.

One of our mappers also came up with some Map Kibera logo ideas based on incorporating the railway into the design. I think this would also be a nice graphic element for our site.

Is this enough to start with or?