Yesterday I attended the first Accountability Hack in The Netherlands, at the Court of Audit in The Hague. With a bit more than a week to go before the official publication of the government budget of 2017 (already leaked to the press the day before the #AccHack), and an election year coming up, it’s a great time to have a go at using the government’s open data to see if we can find out how the money is actually spent.
Today I had the privilege to present at the “Big and Open Data for International Development Workshop” at the Centre for Development Informatics of the University of Manchester. In my abstract, I anticipated deep research into traceability of activities in IATI data. We’ve certainly made great strides, and, as one participant of our IATI Learning Workshop of last week remarked, the level of discussion on IATI is high, and although there still are things to fix in today’s data, a lot of it is fine-tuning. So I made a pitch for IATI as a possible field of research.
Publishing data in the IATI format can help organisations and their stakeholders get a better grip on the quality of their information and on their impact. Organisations in a Strategic Partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to publish their first data sets before May 1st.
How did the process go, and what insights and learning points did it bring?
Today, Open Development Camp is happening again. I’m part of a panel:
In the last five years much emphasis has been put on the publication of open development data. How useful has this effort been? What have we learned so far? and Which insights did we gain? Theo van de Sande (The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Leonardo Pérez-Aranda (Oxfam Intermón) and Rolf Kleef (Open for Change) will share their insights on this subject and together we will explore what the future has store for open development data.
My contribution to kick off the discussions:
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20120613 i weeks-1-intro from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-2-data from Rolf Kleef
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[slide] http://vimeo.com/21711338 [/slide]
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[slide] http://www.scribd.com/stef_grieken/d/56642060-Presentation-Open-For-Change-Event-may-13th-2011 [/slide]
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20120613 i weeks-3-howtoopen from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-4-bbc from Rolf Kleef
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[slide]data.worldbank.org[/slide]
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After Accra:
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20120613 i weeks-5-iati from Rolf Kleef
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Google Fusion tables http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/
Google Refine
Scraperwiki
Impure
EDUCOEF data http://openforchange.info/oddc
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www.hackdeoverheid.nl
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For a while now, I’ve been wanting to get rid of using presentation software (like Microsoft Powerpoint and LibreOffice Impress). Since I’m mainly presenting stuff on the web, about the web, I want to use a web-based tool. Like my blog. And now I can! Here’s part one of the journey.
Current presentation software sucks…
Obviously, I’m not only one with this itch. I’ve explored a couple of options.
I’ve also tried a few plugins for WordPress. The one I liked the most was (a)SlideShow.
Cool effects and all, but hard to have a post live as a blog post (with texts between the slides), and being able to switch it to presentation mode.
The web standard for style sheets (CSS) provides a mode for presentations: @media:projection. It should be possible to switch to a “projection style”, and use CSS to eliminate all the text in between the slides, provide basic pagination, and so on. But browsers still don’t really support this:
With the Firefox add-on, it wasn’t hard to start working on a style sheet for presentations that works on my own laptop.
But… I’d like to be able to present from another machine as well, and to enable web visitors to my blog to also see how the slides look.
So the search continued for a simple library that would do the trick.
In the end, I mostly liked Zack Grossbart’s simple and clean version in the browser. And it should work well with the style sheet already prepared.
I’ve spent a bit of time integrating it into my web theme, and to strip Zack’s version further: no extra interface, just the same as the F11 key in my own “Firefox+FullerScreen” set-up.
It took a bit of hacking to put it into WordPress.
What the code does now?
It can do pretty cool stuff already. Use standard embed codes (but you’ll have to add the div code with class="slide" yourself).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIa0n8rbUFQ
This is part one. There still is work to be done 🙂
I’ve been invited to talk at the World Congress on IT 2010, in the eGovernment track. Together with Beth Noveck, Ivo Gormley, and Greg Clark, we’ll have a session and panel called “Hey gov, can you hear me?”, moderated by Dom Sagolla. Arnout Ponsioen invited me to present a case from the perspective of civil society, and I chose to illustrate the possibilities of people all over the world working together in a moment of crisis: the Haiti earthquake. Here is what I had to say.
Ivo Gormly showed a summarised version of his film “Us Now”, with many examples of people working together in new ways. I want to add to that with a more in-depth look at one particular case, from the perspective of a “world citizen”.
On January 12, an earth quake destroyed Haiti, killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the lives of many more.
An international emergency response was immediately launched. We know the sort of images that come with that: get people and supplies to Haiti. But the disaster also had a new type of first responders: citizens from around the world helping from their own homes, offices and schools.
The internet and mobile phones have made it possible to contribute to disaster response from anywhere on the world, because, as concerned citizens, we can help in three areas:
Here’s how it worked for Haiti.
Ushahidi is a platform that came into existence after the elections in Kenya, in 2007. Violence broke out, people had to flee their homes, and it was hard to get an overview of what was happening. A couple of programmers set up a system to gather eyewitness reports coming in through SMS, email, twitter, and the web, and place the incident reports on a map 1.
The software for the platform has been made freely available, and has been used numerous times since.
Within hours after the earthquake, a group of people at Tufts university had set up an Ushahidi platform, and worked with a mobile provider to set up a shortcode, 4636. Radio stations then helped to spread that number.
Messages came in from people trapped under buildings, asking for help. And also for instance from a hospital where they had 200 beds free, but no victims coming in yet. Being able to filter the messages in various ways helped people on the ground, and assessing the reports can be done by people around the world, for instance by giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”.
Often the messages were in Kreyol, the local language, which few first responders spoke. And often indicating their location based on landmarks that had disappeared. So Ushahidi reached out the diaspora community to help translate and contextualise reports. For instance, they had a Skype chat channel open, to quickly get translations for urgent-looking messages.
The OpenStreetmap community came together to produce up-to-date maps of the area. OpenStreetmap is a “Wikipedia for maps”, and started in the UK, to make street maps available for free 2.
OpenStreetmap already showed the power of an online community in January 2009, when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip. The maps of Google and Microsoft were not detailed enough, and the OpenStreetmap was actually even worse. After a call-out to help improve the map, it took around 48 hours to make OpenStreetmap the most detailed map.
Al Jazeera set up an Ushahidi system with the OpenStreetmaps, to get information for their reporting.
In the case of Haiti, various companies and organsations such as GeoEye, DigitalGlobe, and Google, quickly made their satellite images available to the OpenStreetmap community. The next day, someone wrote a program to have those images imported into OpenStreetmap automatically.
It took around 6 hours to get the community started, and someone in Germany set up a server the next day, so that the available maps would be updated every 5 minutes, and also made them available to be downloaded on the Garmin GPS devices used by search and rescue teams. Those search and rescue teams also started indicating which areas they were going to move into next, to help the community around the world prioritise work.
UNOCHA asked specifically to look out for new refugee camps appearing on the images. You can just barely see a few camps on the image here. It also posed a new problem: the GPS devices did not understand the tag “earthquake:damage: spontaneous_camp”, so the community quickly decided to also tag them as “tourist campsites”, to have them appear as little tents on those GPS devices.
The result was that in 3 weeks, one of the best maps of Haiti was produced by people who mostly never had been there. Here’s an image of the Situation Room at the World Bank, with a huge printout of that map on the wall.
The World Bank understood the power of such communities, and also did something new for the damage assessment. They normally have a small team look at photos of before and after the disaster, to make a detailed damage report. This time, they worked with various universities around the world, where experts each took on part of that huge task. Normally, such a process takes 6 weeks or 2 months to complete. This time, it was done in a few days. 3
Which shows the potential of the third element.
It has become easy to mobilise and organise.
The owner of the domain name haiti.com quickly made that site available as a starting point for people to find ways to help.
People who had been working on maps before already organised themselves in for instance the Crisis Mappers Network, and a lot of the initiation and coordination of activities happened through their mailing list.
Wikis help to quickly organise information, and, as you can see here, there was a whole ecosystem of communication tools: websites, Google groups, Twitter hashtags, IRC chats, and groups on Ning, Facebook and LinkedIn.
And you can also see so-called CrisisCamps: people gathered for a day or a weekend, in schools, offices, homes, to work together to sift through the information, work on maps, and so on. With name tags, because many of those people had never met before. These happened in at least 25 cities around the world.
The Extraordinaries provide a platform for what they call micro-volunteering: things you can do for the greater good, even if you only have 10 or 20 minutes. So they started pulling in pictures from Flickr, with the tag Haiti, to filter out the ones that may contain useful information about people or places. You just answer a few questions, like “Is this picture related to the Haiti quake?”, and you can even do one or two on your smart phone while waiting for your coffee to be ready.
Another, bigger system is Sahana, a whole suite of disaster management software first developed in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. It helps to create maps, know which organisations are working where, and help match supply and demand between those, for hospitals or for other types of requests, such as aggregators, fuel, transport, and so on.
It helped for instance produce a list of 697 organisations working in Haiti, with contact details and so on, to help coordination.
So hey gov, can you hear me? What can you do to tap into this potential? First and foremost: actively break through the currently dominating view of “us” and “them”, of supplier and client.
Most of all: make legislation that enables the technological innovation that drives this type of citizen engagement. Sometimes legal solutions are easier and more effective than
technical solutions.
In the meantime, citizens will develop new ways to use technology. This picture doesn’t show a blueprint for a bomb, but rather a set of materials put together by the MIT Medialab, and already jokingly called the One Satellite Per Child project. It enables even kids in for instance the slumbs of Lima, Peru, to start making aerial photographs and map their own neighbourhood. The sky is the limit.
1 “Ushahidi,” in Wikipedia, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi.
2 “OpenStreetMap,” in Wikipedia, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Streetmap.
3 Justin Mullins, “How crowdsourcing is helping in Haiti,” New Scientist, January 27, 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527453.600-how-crowdsourcing-is-helping-in-haiti.html?full=true.
First post here after a long silence… maybe too busy with twitter, Nabuur, WebEnq, Ecampaigning Forum, NetSquared. And now preparing my short intro into "open everything" to set the stage for Thursday’s meetup of the E-collaboration group.
Within a smaller group, we had some discussions about "open", and about how choosing technology for your campaign or organisation is also a political, cultural, and ethical choice. Features and price often dominate, and lots of stuff on the internet is for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch: there are many lessons we learned in development aid that equally apply when your organisation gets such "free" web development aid. Lets not spend decades to learn them again.
So while on the one hand, people are trail-blazing the concept of "open everything", there are, on the other hand, many people working in international cooperation who are just starting to look at why all this "open" matters, and how it can help them achieve their mission.
We’ll be trying to bridge that gap on Thursday afternoon:
12.00 – 13.00 Welcome, coffee & tea
13.00 – 13.20 Getting acquainted
Plenary
13.20 – 13.30 Introduction into the "OPEN" field by Rolf Kleef
13.30 – 14.00 Concepts behind Open Standards and Free Software (Open Source) by Anne Sedee
Group workshops
14.00 – 14.45 Two group workshops
Plenary
14.45 – 15.15 "Learning in Freedom: Open Content and Open Educational Resources" by David Jacovkis (Free Knowledge Institute)
15.15 – 15.30 Coffee and tea break
Group workshops
15.30 – 16.30 Two group workshops
- ‘making knowledge open and accessible’, experiences from the development community by Peter Ballantyne (Euforic)
- Debate Game: People bring in a case about an open/ closed dilemma
Evaluation & closing
16.30 – 17.00 Presentations and evaluation.
17.00 – 18.00 Borrel
The meeting will take place on 22nd May 2008 at Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There are still a few places left, so get in touch if you want to join!