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In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, Haitian citizens and the use of technology, particularly mobile and GIS technologies and social media, proved critical to response and recovery efforts. Ushahidi, NOULA, OpenStreetMap, and other volunteer-based efforts gathered data from multiple sources, including Haitian citizens, to produce timely information on the ground and around the world. Beyond the crisis, however, the work done by the open source software community and volunteer technologists has begun filling gaps in Haiti's outdated and incomplete spatial data infrastructure (SDI) - providing some of the most accurate and current information about Haiti's human and physical geography.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, I, Alexandra Morgan, believe that Haiti has tremendous assets that can be leveraged to rebuild the country. Among these are the aforementioned data gathered in the wake of the earthquake as well as an expanding technological infrastructure and technology-based services - personal computing devices, broadband networks, mobile telephony, etc. - and the Haitian people, the nearly 10 million of them who possess knowledge critical to making decisions about how to reconstruct the country. Unfortunately, to date, these resources - particularly the latter - remain largely untapped, underutilized, mismatched, or marginalized in reconstruction efforts.

Without question, reconstructing Haiti, in part, means restoring and improving education - which involves building schools. Yet, a host of unknowns exist that negatively impact the capacity of the Ministry of National Education and Professional Training (MENFP), or any domestic or international entity, to effectively improve the educational infrastructure. Mobile and open source GIS technologies and VGI present new opportunities for data collection and can play a key role in supplying needed data for school construction, renovations, and investments.

MENFP and partners, for example, could customize a standard questionnaire for schools to complete and submit via SMS or other electronic service, and engage the public to crowdsource information about schools in their areas, surrounding resources, and other types of information that cannot be captured through automated means (e.g. GPS or remote sensing) or due to resource constraints. As a starting point, this VGI can be combined and mapped with more credible i.e. verified sources, such as the breadth of data collected to map urban to rural migration as well as data related to the ever-changing Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and spontaneous settlements that have reconfigured urban spaces.

Such an approach can at once begin verifying the credibility of the incoming VGI and help the Ministry visually begin to identify types and locations of various educational infrastructure needs. The Ministry and their partners then can use this information, along with other pertinent data, to determine candidate sites for new schools, and use the government's limited human resources, as well as those of their partners, to conduct more manageably in-depth assessments and analyses of sites to determine optimal locations.

The new data gathered and added to the spatial data infrastructure through this process would yield near- and long-term local and national benefits. In a sense, this approach would embed a sort of feedback loop whereby the existing SDI is used to inform the reconstruction process during which more data is created, collected, and added to the SDI, thus broadening it and making it more useful for further reconstruction.

Two years after the January 2010 earthquake, it's time to move beyond the crisis and towards an asset-based approach to reconstruction. GIS and VGI can be used to help establish a research-based framework that guides domestic and international reconstruction decisions and investment.

Excerpt from Volunteer Technology Communities: Open Development

2010 redefined the role of volunteers during humanitarian emergencies and disaster risk management. Traditionally, civil society organizations ranging in size from small community organizations to the international Federation of Red Cross mobilized volunteers to perform a wide range of actions, in order to: manage logistics, provide medical care, and perform community based risk assessments in addition to other forms of direct action.

During 2010, a new form of volunteer emerged from the background: the humanitarian technologist. These experts - who are most often technical professionals with deep expertise in geographic information systems, database management, social media, and/or online campaigns - applied their skills to some of the hardest elements of the disaster risk management process.

Working inside communities like OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi, thousands of technologists responded to earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and flooding in Pakistan. Volunteers processed imagery, created detailed maps, and geolocated posts made by the affected population to a myriad of channels in social media.

Some deployed under the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC), The World Bank, and International Organization of Migration (IOM), trained Haitians how to use simple tools for remapping their communities. Others provided reachback support to the United Nations (UN), the European Union, United States and across the globe, making their supercomputers and large storage arrays available for processing imagery, managing translation workflows, and serving large data sets.

The rise of the Volunteer Technology Communities (VTC) brought a new set of organizational designs to problems that have often become snagged in bureaucracy. Instead of working in hierarchies, VTCs used flattened, decentralized structures with decision-making and conflict resolution mechanisms that were adapted from online communities like Wikipedia and open source software development projects.

“The use of Volunteer Technology Communities (VTCs) made possible by new Web 2.0 technologies present a fundamental shift in how we can support Disaster Risk Management programs and intervene in disaster situations. We are only at the beginning of this story. The seeds planted through initiatives like the Crisis Commons and Random Hacks of Kindness hold great promise for the future.” - Saroj Kumar Jha, GFDRR Manager

As a result, the VTCs moved far faster than larger players in nearly all circumstances - and perhaps faster than established protocols will allow. It is here - in the politics and tempo of this new volunteer capability - that the bottom-up, grassroots structures need protocols to work with the top-down systems within large organizations.

Volunteer Technology Communities: Open Development provides an introduction to some of the Volunteer Technology Communities (VTC) that made their mark during 2010. It is meant to provide a starting point for discussions of how UN agencies, The World Bank and other organizations might better integrate/use the best parts of these VTCs going forward.

Critical to their evolution will be for these communities to move beyond the situation of immediate response and early recovery towards the full disaster risk management cycle including; reconstruction, risk reduction and preparedness.

In May 2010 the Ushahidi blog posted an awesome post fromChris Blow which was highlighting the importance of working through a Ushahidi project by thinking that the tool is only 10% of your project.

I loved that blog post and still think it is a very actual problem not only with Ushahidi deployments around the world, but in general with the increasing use of technology for development or human rights.

Working as New Media consultant for several project in information management based on the use of FOSS I have been encountering this problem several times, and I think that there are several misconception tat lead to the fact that we can see and increasing use in technology but not always this leads to an increase in the efficacy of those projects.

I will highlight here some of those misconceptions:

1. If it is free it is easy.

There is an incredible growing development of free open source software that is free and available for everyone in the net, like FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone etc. The fact that those tools are free makes organizations and individual that wants to use them think that they are easy to use. On one side this is true, but on the other side the fact that the tools is free doesn’t mean that the use of the tool is free, or that the project design based on this tool will be free. You can use volunteer as much as you want, but a project to work needs to be based on professional work and professional approaches. The tools is free, the professionalism behind the project is not.

2. Tech is difficult, non tech is easy.

If you are not a tech person everything that is tech seems very obscure and difficult. I myself cannot get around a Ushahidi installation without swearing a lot, calling friends to help me, getting 100 errors and finally get it done after 8 hours of work. A good developer gets it done in not more than 20 minutes. For this reason I was the first one thinking that the tech part of any technology based project is the most important one. Ones I started working on this I realized that this is really not the case. I don’t want to take out any merit to the awesome job that web developers and programmers do, but their job still is and will be 10% of any project if not less.

An example of this is the Ushahidi platforms done in Egypt for the Parliamentary elections: 5 platforms were set up to monitor the elections. The only one of them that was a huge success in terms of report gathered, quality of information, verification process and structure was the U-Shahid one. Why? I would love to say that this is because I worked on it (conflict of interest?) but the true is that in that project the tech part was really only the 10%: the project was a 5 months projects, with massive trainings, a month of project design, evaluation and monitoring system set up, sustainability study on the systems already present in the country.

The project was a success because of everything that you cannot see in the platform and that was the real difference in that project and the others: the massive investment in terms of time, money and human resources that the project deployed. Tech is not easy but either is the non -tech part of the project.

3. The use of technology is an end in itself.

Lots of people are getting increasingly excited with the use of technology. And with reasons: developing and poor countries as well as repressive regime are witnessing the emergence of new phenomenon of digital activism that are changing the political and social landscape and even if the debate on their efficacy or not is still going on, there is no doubt that those technologies are having an effect. But there is also a decreasing number, in my opinion of understanding of what is success in a technology based project: I am witnessing more and more a quantitative approach to the use of technology and less and less a qualitative approach.

The Ushahidi platform in this is a good example: people mostly look at the number of reports in a platform, or how many time has been used or viewed at, but not at what the reports are saying, who is following up on the reports, what the effect of the use of the platform is. Technology is still most of the time an end in itself and not just a way to develop a project. This can be very problematic because technology is not a panacea, and it cannot be the goal: sometimes thing are better without the use of technology or sometimes it is just not the right tool for that problem.

Not everything will be solved with the use of technology. But if you know when and how to use it, how to integrate with local systems, how to make it meaningful in the context of operations: if you know what your goal is and the technology is only one of the means to achieve it, and you are not afraid to sacrifice the toll for the goal, than you may succeed.

4. If the technology works the project works.

Doing a project based on the use of technology sometimes leads to the fact that ones the tech part is done and the technology is working people think that this will solve all the issues related to that project. In November I was at an Oxfam conference and doing my presentation on the only tech panel of the conference a guy did an intervention highlighting the fact that he couldn’t see how the use of technology for human right monitoring could have prevented or helped during the Sri Lankan conflict, and how technology is not helping in solving political issues. His intervention was the result of the fact that he was expecting technology to be the ultimate solution: if you use digital technology you may achieve more information, more accurate information, you may spread the world and make things more visible, but you will not solve all the problems.

Lets’ take the example of Sudan Sentinel: everyone is really excited about that project, and I think it is a great idea. On the other side, it is really going to change anything? I mean, do we really need that to know that there are mass atrocities happening in Sudan? Don’t the UN Security Council receive monthly reports from the UN mission there on the situation? Don’t all the NGOs and agencies working there spread the voice about what is going on? Didn’t the ICC already issue an arrest order on Bashir because of the mass atrocities? So why the hell to spend 750.000 dollars for a website that will tell us what we already know???

The reason is that the technology may be working perfectly, but what will make this project successful is if the use of this technology will lead to more awareness of the situation, to more people pushing their governments in doing something, to more visibility on the issue in terms of public opinion and the impossibility to say: I didn’t know. Will this be achieved? We will see, but we need to consider the fact that even if the technology is working, the project may be a complete waste of money and time. And also, we want also to consider that fact that maybe those 750.000 dollars would have achieved more if used to sustain local actors and local driven peace-building projects, but those are speculations of course…

As Chris said “Systems like Ushahidi have turned enormous communication barriers into a trivial installation and training process. But there is a whole other 90% of real work”. If you think that hiring and paying lot of money for a developer to install a platform and customize it will make your project works, you are wrong. It will make the technology works, meaning you still have to work on the other 90%.

This post was originally published as Why Technology is 10%

Have you ever wondered about the different mHealth software applications that you hear about in the ICT4D conversations? Would you like to better understand how each works, and which one would work the best for you?

Learn about mHealthcare (photo: Data Dyne)

Well, Datadyne is organizing an online mHealth training session on Wednesday April 20, 2011 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT to help you better understand three, easy to use, mHealth tools: Ushahidi, Medic Mobile, and EpiSurveyor. The software developers behind each application will explain how their tools work and will answer questions about their usage.

1. Ushahidi: "Crowd Sourcing for Community Health Workers" presented by Henry Ado, Programmer
2. Medic Mobile: "Open Source Health Data Management" presented by Dietrich Lawson, Chief Technology Officer
3. EpiSurveyor: "Data Collection for Mobile Phones" presented by Dr. Joel Selanikio, Co-Founder

Interested? Then be sure to register now

If you can't make the webinar on Wednesday, a second mHealth Tools 101 event will be held during the GSM Association and mHealth Alliance Mobile Health Summit taking place June 6-9 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Welcome to the ICTworks bi-weekly ICT4D Retrospective, where we condense the last two weeks of news into a succinct list of links for your perusal. If you want your news to be featured, email them to ritse [at] ritseonline [dot] com. To get these links faster, follow me on Twitter: @RitseOnline

"Concern for [humanity]...must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors" — Albert Einstein

Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan. In light of the events that have occurred over the last few days, we would like to highlight a couple ways the ICT4D community is responding to the ongoing crisis.

1. Learn more about Google's People Finder and Ushahidi's Crises Map
2. Subscribe to CrisisCamp's Twitter Feed to Hear about Volunteer Opportunities
3. Read NetHope's Situational Report
4. Check out the OpenStreetMap Project
5. Respond...Wisely

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