Crowd Sourcing: Reporting and Mapping Incidents

Crowd sourc­ing tools and appli­ca­tions that are used to report inci­dents and map them: they can be used in dis­as­ter response and relief, elec­tion mon­i­tor­ing, report­ing human right vio­la­tion inci­dents, cre­at­ing a detailed visu­al report of an orga­ni­za­tion’s projects, etc.

Fol­low­ing tools and appli­ca­tions are inte­grat­ed for the above men­tioned tasks:
Front­li­neSMS: to col­lect raw data and inci­dent reports
Face­book, Twit­ter, E‑mail, phone calls, a GPS for exact loca­tions and oth­er means can be used to col­lect data as well.
Ushahi­di or Crowdmap are used as the final report sites.

I trained Shuha­da Orga­ni­za­tion (an aid and relief orga­ni­za­tion in cen­tral Afghanistan) staff to cre­ate a map of their projects in the region. Shuha­da Orga­ni­za­tion Map on Crowdmap

My team helped cre­ate a visu­al map of Afghan Elec­tion 2010.
Togeth­er with the pub­lic health hos­pi­tal we used it for report­ing dis­ease inci­dents in East­ern Afghanistan in 2011.

A T‑shirt in Kabul and a T‑shirt in Islamabad

An Afghan in Kab­ul, Afghanistan wear­ing this T‑shirt that says, “ONLY A DEAD TALIBAN IS A GOOD TALIBAN”. And in the bot­tom it says, “Repub­lic of Afghanistan” in Pashto.

A store in Islam­abad, Pak­istan sell­ing these T‑shirts that have a pho­to of Osama bin Laden and under the pho­to it says, “Well-known” in Eng­lish and in Arabic.

Signs in Islamabad International Airport

Trans­la­tion: All pil­grims are kind­ly request­ed to pray for the bet­ter­ment of their peo­ple and their nation (Pak­istan).

Pak­istani pil­grims wait­ing on a line for their flight to Sau­di Arabia

Trans­la­tion: “Warn­ing: Smug­gling drugs into Sau­di Ara­bia is death penalty.”

U.S. Prepares for a Curtailed Relationship With Pakistan

“Mushahid Hus­sain Sayed, the sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Pak­istan Mus­lim League‑Q, an oppo­si­tion polit­i­cal par­ty, summed up the anger that he said many har­bored: “We feel like the U.S. treats Pak­istan like a rainy-day girlfriend.””: this is a quote from the New York Times arti­cle. It’s fun­ny that he thinks that the U.S. treats Pak­istan like “a rainy-day girl­friend”. Nobody spends bil­lions of dol­lars on “a rainy-day girlfriend”.
Pak­istan, Afghanistan and the U.S. are three coun­tries that have been affect­ed by ter­ror­ism the most. I think it’s extreme­ly impor­tant for the three nations to have strong, true and hon­est rela­tion­ship with each oth­er. And to pre­vent ter­ror­ists from spread­ing, oth­er nations’ con­tri­bu­tion in this war is vital.

U.S. Pre­pares for a Cur­tailed Rela­tion­ship with Pakistan.

Nangarhar Media Office: Collecting and Disseminating Information

Nan­garhar Gov­er­nor’s Media Office uses sim­ple tech­nol­o­gy to gath­er infor­ma­tion and secu­ri­ty updates and to dis­sem­i­nate that, if/when need­ed. Nan­garhar province in the east­ern Afghanistan has 22 dis­tricts and every morn­ing, the media office calls the dis­trict gov­er­nors and get updates on secu­ri­ty sit­u­a­tion in their dis­tricts. They use a notepad to jot down any notes dur­ing their tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with the dis­trict gov­er­nors. They always check with the provin­cial direc­tor of Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Direc­torate (NDS) to make sure that the infor­ma­tion and fig­ures are accurate.
The office emails their dai­ly provin­cial reports to every­one in the gov­er­nor’s office but since a lot of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries don’t have access to the Inter­net they have to print the reports and give every employ­ee a hard copy. In addi­tion to that, they also call the local and inter­na­tion­al jour­nal­ists in the area and brief them with any new inci­dents reports. So that the jour­nal­ists can then fol­low up on those sto­ries. There is a lit­tle phone book that has the phone num­bers of jour­nal­ists in it and they car­ry it with them around.
Also they call them when there before inau­gu­ra­tion cer­e­monies or oth­er spe­cial events if the jour­nal­ists would want to cov­er the event and report. The media office call them, usu­al­ly a day or so ahead of the event.
Nan­garhar media office has a con­fer­ence hall that they use for press con­fer­ences and it also serves as a room for jour­nal­ists to drink tea and work on their reports. There are one or two com­put­ers for the media office use only. Most jour­nal­ists come here with their note­books to write and edit reports and then they dig­i­tize that some­where else later.

My team is help­ing Nan­garhar Media Office with a spe­cial SMS sys­tem that will make their work much eas­i­er. We’re work­ing togeth­er with Pay­wast, which is a SMS social and busi­ness net­work­ing com­pa­ny in Afghanistan to make SMS groups for the media office. There will be dif­fer­ent groups (for exam­ple, journos’ group or dis­trict gov­er­nors’ group) and each group will have mem­bers and an admin/owner. If the media office, which is the admin of the group send a mes­sage to the jour­nal­ists group, every­one will receive it. Then if the jour­nal­ists want to send a mes­sage back only the admin receives it. So it’s an inter­ac­tive group that takes them one text mes­sage to get a report to every­one in a cer­tain group. The own­er of the group (the media office in this case) can add/remove mem­bers from the group. Once the group is up and work­ing they no longer have to car­ry that phone book with them. They can send/receive mes­sages from their web inter­face or right from mobile phone.
Inno­va­tion and Sup­port to Emer­gen­cies, Dis­eases and Dis­as­ters (InSTEDD) uses a sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy called GeoChat for real-time group com­mu­ni­ca­tion. GeoChat is an open source group com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy that lets team mem­bers inter­act and main­tain shared geospa­tial aware­ness of who is doing what where — over any device, on any plat­form, over any network.

From Afghanistan to Cambodia

Today, I met with a spe­cial group of young cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists and blog­gers in Phnom Penh, Cam­bo­dia. At this 4 hours event we dis­cussed Online Free­dom of Expres­sion in Cam­bo­di­an. I shared my expe­ri­ences about blog­ging and the use of social media in Afghanistan and the prob­lems and obsta­cles that we are fac­ing in this area. Dig­i­tal media col­lec­tive forum fea­tures my talk.

More details about the event here.