Ushahidi & Small Progress on Humanitarian Efforts

By Gary Berg-Cross

It’s peak hurricane season again and we’ve already experienced a range of natural disasters from earthquake to tropical floods. Around the anniversary of Katrina and 9/11 it is natural to think of recent mega-disasters including the Asian tsunami, the Haitian and the Japanese earthquakes along with various mega droughts in African compounded by social unrest. But sometimes it brings out the best humanitarian instincts in people and leads to real improvement in how we deal with problems.

I ran across one of these humanitarian projects recently. It grew from simple blogging to a crowd sourcing system to help disaster victims. The effort was started in 2007 by Ory Okolloh, a prominent native Kenyan lawyer who blogged about post 2005 election violence in Kenya. Early in January 2007, UN agencies and other humanitarian bodies were getting general reports that tens of thousands of people had been displaced and dozens killed across the country (sort of like the reports coming out of Syria now). But in this part of the world details on the extent, location, and chronology of the violence are hard to establish. As a result humanitarian agencies had difficulties planning effective response. But Kenya turns out to have a tech savvy cadre of people and Ory’s blogs triggered responses to her reports and the possibility of war in Kenya. This was a virtual crowd of friends but also strangers, of technology experts and neophytes. They all volunteered their services to create and support developing a mashup – a Web 2.0 applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated experience. The mashup/system was called Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili. A Ushahidi mashup site was created in 2 days. It could gather incident reports from people who observed violence (e.g. Riots, Deaths, Property Damage, Government Forces, Civilians, Looting, Rape and displaced people) and create maps that documented cases of violence & political repression.

Back in 2008 Ushahidi allowed Kenyans and relief organizations to keep current on information needed for informed decisions. Ushahidi illustrates the use of crowd sourcing, which is the idea of using open calls to an undefined group of people to complete a (usually large-scale) task that is difficult for a person or small group to handle. Wikipedia content, for example, is crowd sourced. Crowd sourcing has now been widely and successfully applied based on the assumption that an open call can draw a crowd that is fitted for the task. The internet and mobile phones facilitates communication and creates a virtual source of information. In the Ushahidi application citizens volunteered geographic-based information on violent incidents in order to aid workers in emergency response situations. It’s success relies upon:

1. a self-established user community in which the citizens are not only willing to volunteer information, which may be as simple as looking out of the window to report what you see and also
2. to actively search and respond to calls for updates within their ability.

Some of the recent disaster scene video we see on Youtube reflects this type of effort.

Since 2008 Ushahidi has grown into a large project impacting a number of communities around the world. The open-source program now provides a way for volunteers to collect information from a range of sources including text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, & pictures. These can then be placed on an integrated in near real time.

An uplifting story is how Ushahidi was used during the Haitian earthquake. Two years after it started in Kenya, Haiti was devastated on January 12 by a colossal earthquake. 1.5 million people were left homeless. In response special Haiti Ushahidi application was set up just two hours after the earthquake by Tufts University volunteers. Following that a short mission code (4636) was created for incoming text messages reports. Word on this code was passed on via local & national radio stations. The code allowed Haiti based observers to text information about what they were seeing or experiencing. For messages that were immediately actionable, e.g.: "there are 5 people trapped in a building located near the intersection of Rouge & Deltier," then a Haiti Ushahidi volunteer would map the GPS coordinates and provide the information to rescue teams on the ground.

The work in Haiti was amazing but Ushahidi has also been deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo to monitor unrest, by Al Jazeera to track and provide transparency into Israeli-Palestian violence in Gaza, and to help monitor the 2009 Indian Elections. It has even been used to help gather reports globally about recent Swine Flu outbreaks.

And such grassroots, shoestring efforts have inspired others. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) Crisis Mapping and Early Warning program has built on such efforts and has set out to develop an evidence base to evaluate information technologies role to enable humanitarian efforts. They have:

“ convened the humanitarian and technical communities, to facilitate dialogue among humanitarian actors, and to provide new sources of data to improve understanding of conflict dynamics.”

Ushahidi is one of those global, grass-root humanitarian advances that modern technology and an innovative spirit afford. It’s a small piece of evidence that humanitarian instincts and the search for a more peaceful world are not Utopian. It’s a small, concrete example of people helping people in trouble spots across the world. But it also contributes to the idea of a viable global citizenship through the best kind of globalization that transcends the barriers of place, race, religion, gender, sexuality, politics, and language.

“Ushahidi is testimony to a universal generosity of spirit that will ultimately triumph over preconceived structures and static ideologies.”

A Tale of Two Progressive Women

By Gary Berg-Cross

Like many recent events have reminded me enough of the Great Depression. You don’t have to be economist Paul Krugman to know that the economy of the last 4-5 years bears a resemblance to the late 20s and some of the 30s. They differ in degree but less in kind with a Stock market prices crash, failing banks, stalling manufacturing, large and persistent unemployment, people losing houses and markets stalled. The dismal scene confronting Obama was a bit like what faced FDR with a few wars thrown in early and an opposite that is not apologetic or remorseful about its role in creating and solving the mess. In an open letter to the newly elected President Krugman drew attention to the comparison:

“The last president to face a similar mess was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can learn a lot from his example. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should do everything FDR did. On the contrary, you have to take care to emulate his successes, but avoid repeating his mistakes.”

We’ve had too like of both emulation and error avoidance and as Krugman (and others) have pointed out the “recovery” economic conditions today bear a strong resemblance to the 2^nd economic dip of 1936-37 with slowly growing output, some prices rising, and unemployment still very high. The government cut back its fiscal stimulus before there was a full recovery which locked in high unemployment for years. Krugman, an unabashed supporter of FDR’s New Deal, is good on the history but understand what Krugman was writing about I picked up a library copy of Adam Cohen’s Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Day that Created America. It’s a timely narrative that provides a picture of Roosevelt’s first Hundred Days through the biographic eyes of an inner circle of five men and one woman. I learned something about each of them (e.g. committed liberals Henry Wallace, Harry Hopkins, along with conservative Lewis Douglas) and their relationships but was particularly struck by his female appoint – Elizabeth Warren. Wait it wasn’t Elizabeth Warren it was Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet position – Secretary of Labor. It’s just that Frances reminds me of Elizabeth. As they say Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, but many see her as one of the most influential women of the 20th century if only because of the ways she found to help people through government problems. Cohen provides a vivid portrait of Frances Perkins arriving in Washington in 1932 by train with no one to guide her to the days’ events or means to get there. With gritty determination she pulls a Department together and works to sway the president to back large-scale public work programs. This was difficult since FDR had an anti-dole oriented to the projects. Hopkins, Perkins, and Wallace worked together on the progress idea that government, especially in times of crises, should take an active role in improving the lives of its citizens - workers, the poor,youth, the unemployed, and farmers. A conservative Douglas at Treasury backed a Hoover like approach favoring, low taxes, laissez faire economics, and small government. While Douglas one the early battles the latter part of the 100 days belongs to the progressives. In his introduction, Cohen neatly sums up this up:

"While the public story line of the Hundred Days was about how Roosevelt, through his eloquent public statements and legislative initiatives rallied a desperate nation, behind the scenes his advisers were battling over what shape the New Deal would take. Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins worked with members of Congress, farm leaders, union officials, and other progressives to promote their agenda. Douglas worked with business leaders and other conservatives to pull Roosevelt in the opposite direction. In the first month of the Hundred Days, through the passage of the Economy Act, Douglas’s side prevailed. For the rest of the Hundred Days, Perkins’s side did. While Douglas won the early battles, Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins won the war."

Perkins and the Progressive team were able to win FDR’s support for progressive legislation that launched massive public works projects. Over time these created millions of jobs for unemployed workers. As a new type of Secretary of Labor, one not under the thumb of bosses, she advanced work for all workers. But she also invigorating the labor movement. Perhaps her greatest monument was creating Social Security. This and her other successes like unemployment compensation, child labor laws, and the forty-hour work week still provide the basis for a social safety net.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Warren who seems to combine the same degree of pluck, competence number of skills including management and PR along with a vision of what needs to be done. Like Perkins her vision and role is challenged by conservatives. Like Perkins she has crafted ideas and helped with legislation (Dodd-Frank reform law) about how federal agency that can protect people and help in times of crisis, In Warren’s case it is protecting consumers from flawed financial products – the type of thing that got us into our problems such as predatory sub-prime mortgages. Like Perkins she has the ear of the President and some in Congress who she has lobbied to turn her vision into a reality. Like Perkins she can recognize talent and attract it take on hard jobs. She also recognizes non-talent in the merely political and recognizes the damage it can do And now, working inside the Executive Branch she is busy setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which should come to life soon. We can only hope that she like Francis Perkins will be working inside a long time.

For more on Frances Perkins see Kirsten Downey’s biography of Frances Perkins The Woman Behind the New Deal. For more on the similarities between these two women see What Would Frances Perkins Do? Who? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/13/629459/-What-Would-Frances-Perkins-Do-Who

The author notes:

“Both were direct speakers; both fought single-mindedly to protect the American people; both did so without thinking of personal gain or fame. And now we can add one more similarity: both were short-shifted out of positions of leadership in their own creations for political efficacy.”