be global podcast – Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi
Juliana Rotich is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc, a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.
Juliana is a senior TED fellow and writes a blog called Afromusing.
Juliana is originally from Kenya where she spent her early life and schooling. She later moved to the US where she majored in IT and has worked in the industry for over ten years.
She collaborated with the online community and co-founded Ushahidi which is the Swahili word for testimony. Ushahidi is a web based reporting system that utilizes crowdsourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. As a Program Director for Ushahidi she manages projects and aids in the development and testing of the Ushahidi platform.
INTERVIEW WITH JULIANA ROTICH
Q: Tell me first, how and why did Ushahidi get started?
A: So, Ushahidi began as an ad hoc group of bloggers, coming together after the post-election violence in Kenya to gather information about what was going on the ground. The main impetus for this was the fact that the narrative that we saw on T.V., greatly differed from what we were witnessing with our own eyes. So the word Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “witness” or “testimony” that was sort of the beginnings of Ushahidi, the organization that it is right now.
Q: And how did it make the jump from a group of bloggers to a tech platform?
A: That began when, the four of us — myself, Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman and David Kobia, got together, and so first of all, was a prototype that we did for Kenya and then, later when we went back to our regular jobs, we realized that we could continue working together to make it easy for other people to crowdsource information and not have to start from scratch. So about, uhm, five months from the first prototype, we were able to secure funding from Humanity United and Omidyar Network and also MacArthur Foundation to create a 501 (c) 3organization that would create open source software. They continue to be key partners and supporters today.
So when you go from prototype to an open source software community, that’s sort of been the journey that Ushahidi has taken. And then a key point where we saw a lot more adoption was on 2010 when we created the cloud-based version of the software that meant people – it used to take about thirty days to get going … now, it took about work reduced to three days and then now, with crowdmap.com, we reduced the amount of time it takes to set up a deployment to three minutes.
Q: That’s really amazing.
A: Yes. So, the process – yeah, the process has been very iterative, yeah, it’s been really iterative, and it’s really a testament to what it means to do innovation in the open-source from the very beginning.
Q: What are the some of the most inventive ways that you’ve seen it used?
A: The uses are quite varied. The most common use case is crowdsourcing crisis information. The information about Syria which you can find at syriatracker.crowdmap.com, to information about Libya which we did in partnership with UNOCHA [UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], and that can be found at libyacrisismap.net. So that accounts for a lot of the deployments where a collection of maps can be seen at our Wiki at wiki.ushahidi.com. There is more information available at http://blog.ushahidi.com (just search for Syria). We have more information about the kind of deployment. It’s really quite varied because the platform has now been tried out in more than a 120 countries.
Q: Once upon a time, we would expect experts to be getting data like this and we would presumably turn to so-called experts who knew how to interpret it to tell us about that data. But crowdsourcing data is vastly different. Why should we trust the process of crowdsourcing data? Why should we believe this data?
A: That’s a very good question because I think in the last couple of years you’ve seen the explosion of social networks, right? And you’ve also seen differences in the media industry. You could also see in the last few years the global explosion of self-expression through blogs and then in 2007, continuing up to 2012, you’ve seen the explosion of micro-blogging through Twitter. And in countries like China, there are similar platforms like Weibo.
So, what that says is the information flow has changed, it’s no longer top-down with a distinct expert on media organizations telling us what is going on, citizens, and regular people listening in on events are also part of direct signals which are not coming from one beacon. The signal is coming from different sources.
And with that, it comes the issue of how do you trust that information? It introduces a verification problem. It also presents an opportunity because if you check out the project we did with Al Jazeera, where we were gathering, it’s called, Somalia Speaks. And the point of the product is to get a lead on how the conflict in Somalia has affected people. When you look at that map, you’re able to get a diverse look of all of Somalia, even the areas which are very difficult to get to. Now if information flow has changed, then we really need to look into all the different signals, and sifting through that information and trying to use technology to only analyse people’s voices to direct them, to engage them on the different issues that they care about.
Q: Why is it good to democratize information? How can transparency help? I imagine that seeing a map of power shortages in India would be useful to people and we hear a lot of talk about ‘big data’ and how corporations are using ‘big data’ to sell us things with a greater degree of accuracy. How is what you do with data differ from that approach? You’re taking people stories and funnelling them in the other direction in a way, is that right?
A: What we do is providing technology that allows you, as an individual, to reach out to others who care about the same issues that you care about and to build a community, and to make partnerships to, one, gather information about the topics you are trying to address; two, after you’ve collected the data, you are able to contextualize, you are able to get a visualization of what’s going on; third part, which is really, really difficult but possible, is closing the feedback loop after the data has been collected. Different deployments have different goals. That to completely finish the feedback loop it’s important to figure out the partnerships or who else can join the community to act upon the data that has been collected.
Q: That’s interesting. That clarifies for me the information flow and the value of getting information to flow in two directions and letting people tell their stories.
Well, thanks so much. The URL to look for is crowdmap.com and ushahidi.com. And I wanted to thank you so much for joining the beglobal podcast all the way from Nairobi.
A: Thank you.
