Text of a short talk I’ll be giving next week:
I want to tell you a story about crowdsourcing, social media, and how the world is changing.
A little while ago, we saw an outbreak of brutal ethnic violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Southern Kyrgyzstan is largely populated by ethnic Uzbeks, and they were being attacked – in really horrible ways – by ethnic Kyrgyz. They had been living together calmly for 20 years. It was an ugly shock.
I have spent a lot of time in both Southern Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and I was pretty upset about what was going on. I was reading about the situation obsessively, and talking to all my Uzbek and Kyrgyz friends about it. I learned that the violence was being driven by rumors. The first Kyrgyz attacks came in response to rumors of Uzbek atrocities, and rumors and distorted stories were still triggering violence.
So I thought, Kyrgyzstan needs Ushahidi, to cut through the rumors.
Ushahidi is an open source software platform that aggregates and maps crowd-sourced information. It receives information via SMS or the web, and then presents it in a user-friendly way that people can view on a computer or a cellphone. It was first used to map post-election violence in Kenya.
Five years ago if I’d thought that, there would have been nothing I could do. I could have told my friends, written a blog post, and worried. This year, I posted about it on Twitter. A couple people on Twitter gave me the contact information for the Ushahidi team. I wrote to them, and they told me that there was an Ushahidi Kyrgyzstan effort going on.
A guy called Altyn Ismailov was working on an Ushahidi platform for Kyrgyzstan. I got in touch with him by email. He told me that by now the violence had mostly stopped, but there was a constitutional referendum coming up in three days that threatened to trigger it all over again. Alytn wanted to have a referendum-specific Ushahidi platform running, to both monitor the voting and track any violence that occurred, but he had hit a wall.
Altyn was out of money, and he was exhausted. He asked if I would help him write a grant application to get funds to finish the Ushahidi platform and educate people about how to use it. I said yes, but I was worried about trying to get DfiD or USAID to mobilize funds in four days. Then Altyn told me he needed 564 dollars.
Now I don’t have a life where I can just write a check for $564, but I do have a bunch of Twitter followers. I told Altyn I thought I could fundraise the money for him, and leave major donors out of it. I put up a ChipIn widget with a project description, and described the effort to my Twitter followers. My goal was to raise $564 in 48 hours.
We raised $610 in 8 hours. It was amazing. Altyn got his money, and the platform was up in time for the referendum. The voting went smoothly, and there was no further violence. Odds are it would have gone smoothly anyway, but we were proud to be part of the insurance.
This isn’t a story about me or Altyn, though. This is a story about change. Ushahidi is an open source platform, developed in the global south. Ten years ago, Africa didn’t have the connectivity to develop and distribute a platform like Ushahidi. And ten years ago, cell phones didn’t have the power or the ubiquity to make Ushahidi a useful tool.
I learned about Ushahidi from the web. I got the contact information for its team via social media. I was in touch with Altyn by email. I raised the money using the ChipIn widget to let people track and donate, and all my fundraising requests were on Twitter. Nothing about the fundraising effort would have been possible without social media and new technology.
This was a small scale effort, and there were a lot of reasons that it got lucky.* But I have a feeling it’s going to be the model for a whole lot of bigger efforts in the future.
*Specifically, Ushahidi is a social media darling, the amount of money needed was small and specific, and Kyrgyzstan was in the news.
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(Photo credit: Robert Thomson)
Chosen because this is a gorgeous picture of Kyrgyzstan and looks just like I think of it.
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A quick summary of the comments on twitter:
from @katrinskaya: “I am going to have to differ on this. This sounds like twitter revolution to me. Composing post”
from @cynan_sez “agree there’s awesomeness there. but it’s instant fundraising for a soc media solution amongst highly soc media sensitized types”
from @tmsruge “What really interests me about the post: You can now call Africa for help. World is not ready for that”
This isn’t just a crowdsourcing revolution, a south-south revolution, a twitter revolution, an SMS/Ushahidi revolution, or an Open Source revolution, though all have rightful claims on this. This is the first waves in a sea change of development and international solidarity.
I did some work with a humanitarian agency a while back. We had grand plans around SMS-based…”solutions”, whatever that means. Ushahidi was one of our case studies. In the end, we decided to not go forward with the plans, but I was certainly impressed by what we had researched.
The really impressive thing about a platform/tool like Ushahidi or other crowdsourced thingies in the global south is just how useful it is. I mean, I can walk outside with my smartphone and have about 80 layers of “meaning” attributed to the events and people around me, but the things that are running on these networks “out there” are big deals – we might be talking life and death in some instances.
Hopefully as American cell technology and penetration reaches the same level as that in the 3rd world, we’ll be able to develop some apps that can make big change more accessible – for everybody.
Inernational and Incognito funding helped me to build equal partnership with NGO’s, Government Structures, Civil Society and Mass Media. Unfortunately, perception of any organization in Kyrgyzstan is based on it’s funding origin especially by civil society. I hope Crowdsourcing platforms will have one day crowdseourcing funding. Thanks Alanna for good start!
While I think the technology is still nascent (and ditto for the clients & supporter base using it) I think this is a fantastic example of the potential held in tension with social media to support, improve and yes, in time, revolutionize aspects of the aid & development sector. Kudos for grabbing hold of the tools and precedents and helping make a difference, and ditto for providing yet another example which is growing into a significant body of evidence showing how social media can be used in emergency contexts. I echo your view and Teddy’s, that one of the most exciting aspects of this specific platform is that it is one developed by the South, for the South.
PS- as a landscape photographer, love the image you’ve chosen 🙂
The world gets smaller and smaller. Just imagine when the rural poor becomes connected to the information grid permanently. The Twitter revolution that disseminated information to dissidents in Iran will hopefully have the same effect on tyrannical dictators who regulate the flow of information to their people. The possibilities are endless.
@Josh… except the really tyrannical regimes, in which category I would not include Iran actually, tend to have a single state supplier of telephony both landline and mobile, can just selectively shut down SMS and/or GPRS and/or 3G functionality and everyone’s vaunted connectivity goes away. Thurayas for everyone!
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[…] media to ease ethnic tension Posted on August 7, 2010 by idasa This is truly a beautiful story about how the world is […]
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