At the end of IODC16, Roderick Besseling of Cordaid asked me a simple question: hurricane Matthew has hit Haiti, with well over 800 casualties reported already. Can we see in the IATI data which humanitarian responses have been started? Can we make that data available on HDX, the Humanitarian Data Exchange?
Sure, I thought, with the data stores and interfaces available, that should be possible, right? It turns out to be “more complicated”.
I’m some two months into exploring traceability in IATI data, spending free hours (days…) on developing tools to do more. In April, the Strategic Partnerships funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs are expected to publish their first data, so that’s a good chance to see how well they managed to tie all their activities together.
One of the side-events of the Open Government Data Camp, last week, was an Organisational Identifiers Workshop put together by Tim Davies and Chris Taggart. The meeting discussed the various challenges in linking information about organisations held in separate data sets. Although participants were careful to avoid the word “ ontology “, one of the break-out groups did look at describing relations between organisations. Since I graduated on research into “part-of” relations in an ontology, and what you can infer from them, I joined that discussion. Here’s what we came up with.
The workshop was a good chance to catch up with where things are right now, with several organisations at the table and participating online that have to deal with information about organisations:
How to create identifiers for organisations across the world, which might not be registered anywhere, and which relate to each other and to more generic concepts, in such a way that we can capture all the meaningful relations and data we want to capture?
How to make sure it works with the schemas already in use in big organisations? And that it works with data stores that are not open? Without introducing another naming authority?
We split up in a couple of groups, one looking at identifying public bodies, another at the technical architecture that might be needed, and a third at common terms to describe relations between organisational entities. I joined that third group.
We spent some time discussing various types of relations, and I also looked around to find possible candidate schemes, but without much luck. I couldn’t find an obvious example, like the FOAF standard for personal relations. A few standards, like OrgPedia, or the Organizational Ontology, seem likely candidates, but don’t cover this area (yet?).
We looked at some use cases:
We acknowledged additional cases, like finding influential relations between corporate or organisational entities based on board membership or roles of individuals, but decided not to take that on in this discussion.
We came up with a first-version typology of relations. The naming and exact semantics will need further review.
These are relations between entities that have a “permanent” and “structural” character. Of course, all these relations are bound in time, but the beginning and end points may not be known.
We distinguished two sub categories.
(This typology still fails to capture something like a brand as abstract entity.)
These are relations that express a change in the structure or responsibilities of some entities, often the beginning or the end of particular entities. We identified four basic types:
More work is needed to mold this into a useful standard (relations are currently described from the perspective of one end, there is still plenty of room for interpretation, things have not been tested on real-life examples described as use cases, and so on).
And, of course, we’d need those organisational identifiers to refer to other entities, and find ways to delegate resolving identifiers to services that can provide additional information on those identities. See the whole report of the workshop on the OGDCamp wiki for the results in the other discussions as well.
But thinking about and discussing relations between those entities brought back memories of all the fun in making machines infer and report unknown relations 🙂
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.
I haven’t been able to go to the Web2ForDev meetings so far, but have encountered the typical problems of ICT and knowledge sharing in rural areas around the world. So when Christian Kreutz approached me to contribute to a publication by GTZ, the Deutsche Gesellschaft for Technische Zusammenarbeit (German Technical Cooperation), on how NABUUR offered a new way of connecting people and letting knowledge flow, I got in touch with Raul Caceres, who has done amazing work as a NABUUR volunteer, resulting in a United Nations Volunteer of the Year Award, and an invitation to speak at the Nobel Summit on Public Services. Together, we wrote one of the seven articles in “The Participatory Web – New Potentials of ICT in Rural Areas”.
Christian offers a great overview of the publication on his blog, and reminds us: “Obvious challenges are low connectivity particularly in rural areas, low literacy rate, lack of media competence to use the web and well function models to provide and target information.” But when glancing over some of the other excellent contributions, and reflecting on our own, I felt we mainly write about the functional, but somehow don’t get across that one aspect that really makes it tick: people’s passion.
In working with NABUUR over a last few years now, meeting volunteers, and reading, seeing, and hearing the stories, there is one crucial aspect that makes it so different: passion. Especially when people connect one-to-one, peer-to-peer. The one big challenge that’s not in Christian’s list, and often overseen: organisation. Organisations are important, do wonderful work too, but from within an organisation, it’s often hard to take an outside perspective, and ask the question: what if we try to do this without an organisation? What do organisations do to people’s passion?
Connecting people with passion makes challenges more like steps on the way: you don’t look at the challenge, you look at what’s behind it. And overcoming the challenge makes you feel even more connected than you already did. Life won’t be instantly easier, but life will be fueled with an energy that transforms you. And thereby it transforms a little bit of society.
These are just two examples around NABUUR. They give me energy and inspiration to do what I do. It’s organising, and all the way across the “mission, vision, strategy” paradigm. But not based on functional interactions with a motivational coat of paint. Rather than looking at Return On Investment (or Return On Insight), look at Return On Passion. Then look at these tools again, and at the way you can organise around them.
Recently, a couple of events allowed me to look again at how groups of people “do things together online”.
I’ve had a chance to meet up a few times in a short period with Aldo de Moor, and that helped us reflect on where things have come since we first drafted the contours of our “social context model”, nearly ten years ago now.
Add a few potential projects in the pipeline that deal with global networks of people who should produce something together. And the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into the NABUUR concept, to see how it is still pretty unique.
Aldo and I quickly concluded that although a lot is happening, and happening fast, there actually has been little progress in what we see as the hardest part of (online) collaboration: supporting work flows. Sure enough, people find ways to use the techno-centric tools that emerge, and services like Basecamp are making inroads into this. But most platforms still have some way to go.
With the rise of general-purpose social networking platforms, more and more organisations look at ways to also have such a platform. Let’s first distinguish two aspects:
General-purpose platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Hyves are great tools for the social media marketing. With technologies like OpenSocial and Facebook Apps, you might even be able to structure your meeting points inside such a platform. Or you just build a “store-front” like a group or fan page that tries to draw people into your own platform of meeting points.
Many platforms seem to stop at this “gathering phase” around a more or less single step: sign a petition, raise funds, pass on some viral video, feel solidarity around your idea. To me, it often feels “evangelic”, people take turns and “come out”, talk publicly about their deep-felt passion and ideas. However, there is no support or follow-up to actually help you through implementing your ideas, and often even little opportunity to actually have a real group conversation. It’s more like a flash mob, depending heavily on the social marketing to go viral.
Some platforms make it a bit more sticky, and do offer tools to develop a group identity, essential for group members to build stronger commitment, and a level of (individual) accountability. This usually happens with tools like discussion forums, blogs, document and file sharing, and perhaps an agenda or wiki. Since the first BBSs of the 1980s, the technology has become easier to use (task-level improvements), but has not developed a lot of workflow support yet (group process improvements). The execution happens “outsite”, with progress reports online, and few tools to track progress or results.
And then there are a few initiatives that actually try to help a group translate their goals into individual tasks and phases, closer towards a work breakdown structure, and then offer tools to let group members keep track of tasks and results. The main example of successful communities collaborating together online are open source projects, where group process patterns have emerged, and tools like issue trackers, road maps, and revision control actually support group members. Attempts in other fields seem to be still exploring how to make such group process patterns understandable for “everyone”.
The “group gathering” initiatives build mainly on personal motivations of members, offering a story-telling environment to strenthen and sustain such motivations and connect individual members. The “work process” initiatives are pretty results-oriented, with very implicit reference to motivations of members.
Bringing these approaches together is a first step. They cover different parts of the sociality model, and address different levels in the social context model. But then there still will be gaps.
Next week, Aldo and I will be on a work-retreat, something we do more often, to mix day-time work with night-time deep reflections. We’re both stoked to dust off and develop our social context model, and I hope to have another look at the sociality angle as well.
A while ago I was asked to help answer an interesting question. Imagine: you want your website (and organisatuon) to become “truly web 2.0”, and a donor is considering a sizeable grant to help you do that, under the condition that you define yourself how you will measure your “web 2.0”-ness, set your own targets for the next half year, and have reached those targets by then. What would you measure and what targets would you set?
I tapped into the wealth of wisdom in the Web of Change crowd. Marty Avery send me an interesting link to “Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0”, an essay by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path. “Quite old” by web 2.0 standards (written December 2005), but very relevant to help guide our thinking and provide a bit of authority. Brandon distinguishes two sets of attributes, that together make up “web 2.0 DNA”:
A quick analysis showed that the focus should indeed be on these experience attributes: the foundations were there, the basic system and processes work, things are happening. But they need to accelerate, explode, go viral. It still wasn’t hard to distinguish supplier, vendor, and customer in the current setup. We all could see new ways to offer new types of value to all stakeholders, but it was time to deliver, and the experience attributes nicely mapped onto dreams, visions, and ideas to move forward.
So with all the technical development just starting, and only some five months left to show concrete, measurable results, targets were mainly defined in terms of those experience attributes:
Ambitious goals, but more important: not just hoping on technical wizz-bang to solve things. Developing partnerships and compelling stories is far more a process and collaboration issue (and by far not easy to accomplish in half a year either, but work was already further on the way here). And if nothing else, burning some cash on advertising will provide a reasonably predictable growth of page views if needed — although I’m not supposed to take such a cynical view on these things (yet).
Nabuur has been pioneering online volunteering since 2001, and is currently redesigning their organisation: how to put "web 2.0" into the DNA of everything that’s happening? And how to engineer that, rather than try and hope it works?
So I spent the day with Nabuur team members, who invited René Jansen to facilitate drilling down to the core of their activities. René is one of the authors of "The Realm of Sociality: Notes on the design of social software", a paper which won the Best Paper Award 2007 at the “International Conference on Information Systems” in Montreal, last December, and (to me, at least) introduces the concept of "sociality" as the centre of the design process.
The model uses theories of "Practice", "Identity", "Social Structure" and "Situated Experience" to define four realms of design areas to focus on. I’ve just downloaded the paper to read a more indepth explanation (and be able to explain it myself). It was a good framework to guide the discussions to a few crucial dilemmas and hard choices.
Nabuur offers opportunities to volunteer for villages and communities in developing countries: a local representative describes a project that would help improve circumstances for people in his or her community, and people anywhere on the world can contribute research, knowledge, connections, and organise resources from behind their computers. It works, and leads to wonderful results. But Nabuur needs to, and definitely wants to grow far beyond the 150 villages and 10,000 volunteers it has.
The focus used to be on the villages themselves. Last year I was already involved in a redesign that would speak more to the various personas that would use the site. The resulting website was orientated first towards "doing a task" and getting more results from the efforts of volunteers (basically focusing on Dave, a persona who wanted concrete tasks and outcomes).
But the reaction of existing neighbours was mostly negative: they felt the site was broken and "stolen" from them, and needed to be fixed (ASAP please). Incrementally improving the interface for other personas was stalled, and the team reflected on the question "what went wrong?".
In terms of the model of René and his colleagues, the heart of the sociality around which the design revolved was shifting from village to project, and now maybe moving to the local representative or to the experience of contributing to improvement in people’s lives. A choice had to be made, and the way to do it was by determining the core social practice of Nabuur.
A social practice is "a way people do something together" (the paper probably has a real definition), and we identified and discussed four candidates:
Listening to the neighbours, who experienced a gap between "them in the office", and "us who do the work", the Nabuur team wants to focus on a truly social approach, positioning themselves and the whole Nabuur development among the neighbours as well. And the practice that is furthest from sterile transactions, and leads to the warmest social ties is sharing stories (around the work in villages and communities, of course, but also around Nabuur as a whole.)
The practice of "writing our experience together" can encapsulate actual projects being completed and results being delivered, but puts celebrating those achievements on the foreground (right now, the successes are still mainly hidden gems). It will lead to some difficult choices and self-restraint in reviewing the functional specifications: let’s really not build a knowledge repository or community of practice, but really first try to connect with existing initiatives. Only if it doesn’t exist anywhere on the ‘net, yet is crucial to work being done, and maybe even then on a site separate from the Nabuur.com site.
I’m pleased with the outcome: it aligns with many take-aways from NetSquared in May last year, and it opens many ways to improve engagement of the neighbours, and also exposed a lot more of the groundbreaking changes in how international development is done here. And looking forward to working with James and Pelle to translate this into a new site!