humanitarian.info

From Katrin Verclas at MobileActive.org:

SANGONeT and MobileActive.org invite you to contribute your expertise to MobileActive08 to take place from 13-15 October 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Do you have expertise in the field of mobile technologies for social development?
• Are you a researcher working on mobile technology for social impact?
• Are you a mobile service provider with specific products to exhibit that benefit the social market?

If so, we invite you to submit your ideas to be part of MobileActive08, the largest event to date focused on mobile technology for social development. This global gathering brings together practitioners, researchers, technologists, and donors interested in the use and application of mobile technology for social impact. At MobileActive08 participants will explore how mobile phones are effectively used to advance civil society work, assess the current state of knowledge in the use of mobile technology to advance social development, and investigate trends, needs and investment opportunities.

We invite you to submit proposals for:

• Workshops and Skill-share Sessions (for 90 minutes) for in-depth exploration of a topic about unlocking the potential of mobile technology for social impact.
• Short (15-min) Rotating Mini-Talks for research and project overviews.
• A space in the SIMplace to showcase your product.
• A space in the SIMlab where participants can test-drive your mobile application and explore it in depth.

If you have an idea, please review the detailed Call for Expertise and then submit. We look forward to your expertise, enthusiasm, and creativity! The deadline for submissions is 30 June 2008. More information is at MobileActive08.

Now that I’ve got my snark out of the way regarding Twitter’s role in breaking the news about the earthquake in China, it’s time for some more positive. One of the projects going on behind the Burma cyclone is the development of Geochat – basically a spatially-enabled Twitter – as a disaster response tool. Given that I’ve just snapped at the likes of Robert Scoble for cheerleading about Twitter as a news source, why do I think that something like Twitter has a role to play?

I’m not saying that Twitter (and others like it) is useless – far from it. It’s a tool and, like many tools, it has many uses. The example from the earthquake today shows that Twitter can provide a wealth of details on current events – but that wealth of details is difficult to filter and has no quality control. If you know of a particular Twitterer who is a reliable source, then you can follow them – but for the casual reader, most of the flood of detail won’t rise above the level of gossip. Essentially, the Twitter stream isn’t targeted enough to be particularly useful to me.

As both of the regular readers of this blog will know, I’m interested in how these tools can be used in humanitarian operations. In this case, we want to see how microblogging via sms can be harnessed for reporting – for logistics updates, for example, or reporting security incidents. We want to see how co-ordination activities might benefit from having sms notifications as an extra stream of communications, on top of email and telephone. We want to see how beneficiaries might be able to use these channels to build their own picture of their situation and to increase accountability (that one’s a bit optimistic, I admit).

If the technology community really wants to show that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with, that’s where we need to be headed. It’s fine to gloat about beating the mainstream media to the news story, but that doesn’t actually help anybody. Let’s see where this Geochat development takes us – it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid – we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it?

There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological Survey to the punch with news of the Chengdu Earthquake. Twitterer dtan felt the earth move under his feet in Beijing, and his twitter was picked up by Robert Scoble, one of the world’s best-known technology writers and a man with about 23,000 people following his Twitter stream. On his blog, Scoble explains:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News. How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!! Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

The result has been a whole discussion about how this shows that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The Online Journalism Blog goes link crazy on crowdsourcing without managers, so start reading there and follow the trail. The key indicator for the Twitterers (ironically) is a post on the BBC News dot.life blog:

I was beginning to think Twitter – the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati – was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning. When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China… Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Many of the comments on these posts express their skepticism, particularly about the claim about having the news before the USGS – it’s more likely that the USGS was cross-checking their data before releasing it. This relates back to something I wrote a few weeks ago – there’s no accountability on Twitter, so there’s no requirement for people to check facts.

When the World Trade Centre fell, the reason I knew about it was that my Dad phoned me and told me to turn on the television. This Twitter coverage operates in the same way – as gossip, rather than news. Check out the direction of the conversation on Twitter after the initial news breaks – it falls into three categories:

1. This earthquake is terrible, isn’t it?
2. Here’s a link to a news source with some actual detail about the earthquake.
3. Isn’t Twitter great for breaking this news first?

That doesn’t mean that it’s not valid, useful or interesting – but it does mean that you’re not going to find it that useful as a news source. If you think I’m harshing Twitter’s buzz, then you should try Better Living through Software:

It’s silly in the extreme to act like twitter is somehow breaking news, though. Masses of people within China found out about the earthquake as it was happening via messages from friends on QQ (which is massively more popular than twitter), and CCTV carried the news almost instantly. I suppose it’s cute that some English-speaking expats using echo-chamber technology were able to *also* report the event on twitter, but even the tweetscan example seems a bit lame to me. When I search for tweets with the word “地震”, tweetscan gives me nothing — apparently tweetscan doesn’t care about Chinese.

Ouch, but a fair ouch.

UPDATE: As always, Global Voices Online is the solid antidote to Anglocentrism, while the Frontline Club is much more positive about the whole Twitter ride.

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps. UPDATE: MapAction have also deployed in support of OCHA and have maps available on their website.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet). Microsoft are focused on supporting the HIC, and are ready to respond to other requests from the humanitarian community.
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that – with regards to early warning – IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

The ConnectivIT lab at the University of Colorado has done some fascinating research in the last couple of years, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but never quite got round to. Such are the workings of the web that these things always come around if you wait long enough. So I’ll preface this blog entry by saying that their work is well worth reading, and that my beef is not with them but with media coverage of technology.

Their latest research, published in New Scientist magazine under Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you, suggests that Facebook “is more effective than the emergency services“. This is the sort of headline that makes newspapers and blogs in Magic Future Kingdom soil themselves with excitement, so it’s received wide coverage, which is good – more people interested in these issues means more visibility, more activity, more resources. Unfortunately the coverage in the Daily Telegraph shows the problem with this coverage:

Within just 90 minutes of the first deaths, however, a web page accurately describing the events appeared on web encyclopedia Wikipedia. Twenty minutes after that, Facebook users had set up a group called ‘I’m OK at VT’, which allowed students and staff to reassure the wider world that they were safe. A Facebook discussion was also begun which authoritatively listed the victims and whether people were feared dead rather than confirmed dead.

I’m fascinated to know how we judge the “accuracy” of the Wikipedia entry. Since Wikipedia policy is that nothing should be posted without a citation from a reliable external source, the “accuracy” of that entry must have been wholly dependent on – guess what? That’s right, reports from the media or emergency services. Check the wikipedia page if you want to see for yourself – and if there weren’t any citations, then how on earth can you tell if it’s accurate or not?

We can chalk these statements on journalistic shorthand. The real problem with this is that there is absolutely no accountability for Wikipedia, Facebook or other social media. If those reports weren’t accurate – if you went to Facebook, read that your son was dead and later found he was alive, for example – then that’s a lot of trauma that nobody will ever take responsibility for. For the emergency services, it’s a bit more serious than that – if they get it wrong, they get sued to oblivion, people lose their jobs and their credibility goes out of the window.

How do you know when somebody is dead in a situation like Virginia Tech? When they’re officially declared dead. Who officially declares them dead? A medical professional, a member of the emergency services. The idea that in Magic Future Kingdom we’ll just automatically know when somebody is dead is ludicrous – maybe their Twitter stream will stop or something?

The article does make good points, more rooted in the research. People on the ground are the source of a lot of information, and technology makes it easier for them to get that information out. It’s also likely that the more people you aggregate, the more accurate the information will be, which I think is Leysia Palen’s point about how these events show “socially produced accuracy”, i.e. a version of the wisdom of crowds. Yet there are limits to that accuracy, and there is a question about how useful that information in terms of actually dealing with the emergency – of which notifying relatives is only one small part. The need for a central authority that can route all this information is a foundational point of effective disaster management – so what are the implications of these developments for effective disaster management?

Sanjana also makes a point which I’d agree with entirely:

Of course, what it means is that Facebook, in the US, with reliable broadband wired and wireless coverage, with a ubiquity of PCs, where everyone speaks, reads and comprehends English, where Universities are well connected, where everyone has laptops and where everyone and their pet Chihuahua have a Facebook account, the platform can on occasion get more information out quicker than emergency services.

Time for us to shell out a few bucks for a New Scientist subscription and read the actual research article, rather than the press coverage. Plus, I need to get back on Medication 2.0 or something.

• Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about it at the MobileActive website.
• The National Library of Medicine have published Information Seeking Behavior and Viewpoints of Emergency Preparedness and management professionals concerned with Health and Medicine (snappy title, guys). Murray Turoff has the entire text online there, or you can dowload the complete report [pdf]. “The emphasis of the study was on determining the current information seeking behavior, existing preferred sources of information, and unmet information needs of professionals involved with the medical and public health aspects of emergency planning, preparedness, and response.”
• A CSM article on Patrick Ball of Benetech. No great insights into human rights documentation and analysis, but a couple of nice stories about Ball’s experiences (HT: Flowing Data).
• NetHope have opened their West Africa Chapter - very gratifying for me to see these Chapters spreading ever wider. The ICT Skills Building Program is also going from strength to strength this year, with trainings announced for Nairobi, Johannesburg and West Africa.
• LINGOS have their new community website up and running [Warning: SharePoint alert!], with the invitation to register with them. The community is very active, and LINGOS offer a lot of resources on the website. Oh, and I’m sorry we never managed to organise that Webinar, Linda!
• The Economist realises that mobile phones are being used for election monitoring, public health, and advocacy – only a couple of years late, guys! – with the article A world of witnesses (HT: Katrin at MobileActive).

As everybody realises by now, technology is neutral when it comes to issues of war and peace. A lot of the positive stories around the use of sms to mobilise activists need to be balanced out by a recognition that in many cases, the government and private sector are in a position to challenge that use – and of course to use the same technology to promote their own messages. The Eldis community board picks up the story in Kenya:

As tensions and violence began to spill into the streets in Kenya in late 2007, the government decided to ban local live broadcast. Whilst this is obviously controversial, there were fears that radio, in particular, could be used, as it had done in Rwanda, to incite violence. The ban of live reporting meant that SMS began to be utilised as an update method and thus ‘mobile reporters’ were born.

The Government realised that they couldn’t control the internet or the text messages which were being sent to incite hostility, so they countered them with their own blanket text messages stating that the violence was illegal and that Kenyans should be concentrating on peace.

The role of radio broadcasts in supporting the genocide in Rwanda is well-documented (see the Nahimana and Barayagwiza cases at ICTR) and is a valuable cautionary tale. However few people have stopped to think much about how SMS could be an even more powerful tool for those inclined to mass violence. Radio broadcasts can incite the mob, but they are a weak tool for co-ordinating the mob; SMS, on the other hand, has the capability to be much more dangerous in the wrong hands. But when I say “the wrong hands”, what do I mean?

The Kenyan government were acting benevolently in attempting to curtail the bloodshed but others could use it for their own means… It demonstrates how the same information can be used for very different ends and poses questions about safeguards: can and should they be put in place to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes?

The Kenyan government may have been acting benevolently – although it’s worth pointing out that it was in their interests to prevent violence simply because they hold the monopoly of violence. In most countries in the world, if not all, governments are not naturally inclined to empower their citizens. Communications technology should be available as widely as possible, and I don’t want anybody – least of all the government – legislating about who should have access to it on the basis of their ideology.

I think it’s dangerous to talk about “safeguards” to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes; there’s no such thing as the wrong hands. The short version: technology can be used for good or ill, and preventing people using it for ill can only be achieved if you also prevent people using it for good. I’m happy to be challenged on this one – are there cases where I might be wrong?

There’s been frequent discussion here – and blogs like MobileActive, of course – about how cellphones can be used in humanitarian responses. It’s worth remembering, however, that technology is neutral – both “good guys” and “bad guys” use it (if you can be bothered with that way of looking at the world) – and that, in conflict situations, communications technology is seen as a legitimate target. So for all the talk of how empowering mobile technology is, we haven’t had much discussion about the other side of the coin.

This bring us neatly to an amazingly interesting post by Barnett Rubin on Informed Comment, entitled Taliban and Telecoms — Secret Negotiations Just Got Easier, and at a Price You Can Afford! Rubin is interested mainly in high-level policy issues – the post was sparked by a conference discussing political solutions in Afghanistan – but has some interesting stories about the role of mobile telecommunications in state-building. There are some interesting anecdotes about how reliant on cellphones people have become, as in the case of

a friend of mine who negotiated the release of two of his Afghan staff who had been taken hostage by Taliban in Wardak (just next to Kabul) said that it was always difficult to reach the kidnappers at night, because they moved away from the road up into the mountains where the reception was poor. Finally they had to explain to the Taliban that they needed to stay within the coverage range to reach a deal.

Coverage is not great but, according to the Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority, mobile phone penetration is targeted at 10% for 2008, forecast to rise to 3% by 2013. That’s not bad, although a glance at the fixed line and internet penetration targets is quite depressing. In 2002 I had a couple of meetings with the Minister for Communications, Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, and it doesn’t look as if the plans that we discussed back then have come very far.

Rubin publishes a letter from a Taliban military group to one of the mobile phone companies (apparently the Taliban prefer Areeba, because they have the cheapest top-up cards – good to see that they’re keeping an eye on their budget). As Rubin explains

I have been told that Taliban (or people claiming to represent them) sometimes call up mobile phone companies and claim that they are right at a tower with explosives, which they will detonate unless money is immediately transferred to their mobile phone. This is a new technology that enables migrant workers to send cash home without going through either a hawala or Western Union.

The hawala system has operated on mobile phones for quite a long time – in fact, hawaladars adopted mobile phones almost as soon as they were introduced – but it’s fascinating to see a technology which undermines the hawala grip making extortion so much easier. However it’s clear that the notewriters aren’t that worried about law enforcement catching up with them – because they provide a mobile phone number where they can be contacted.

Rubin’s concern is what the prevalence of these threats tell us about the level of Taliban control (or lack of it) across the country, and he also notes that this demonstrates that the Taliban are trying to work within the existing structures of the nascent Afghan state. However I find more interesting the way in which a new technology is being used in an entirely unexpected way. The Taliban are holding the cellphone network hostage – while at the same time requesting that their protection money be transferred through the same network.

Any lessons for the humanitarian or human rights community? Not really. We already know that cellphone networks are vulnerable in unstable environments, and we already know that technology gets used in unexpected ways by overlooked groups. However there is a significant positive in these developments. Rubin points out that in the 1990s satellite comms contributed to avoiding some conflicts (although they undoubtedly helped to co-ordinate many, many more). Cellphones are cheaper to use and easier to access, creating lines of communication did not exist before – or at least, were the monopoly of a powerful few.

Essentially, the increased penetration of cellphones creates more opportunity for dialogue and negotiation at more levels in Afghan society – even if that’s only whether they can get discount on top-up cards if they buy in bulk.

• Following the collapse of the political process in Kenya, bloggers White African and Kenyan Pundit – both of whom are worth reading, by the way – have developed a Google Maps mash-up which deals with electoral violence in the country.  Called Ushaidi (’witness’ in Swahili, I think?), it enables people to report events either online or via SMS.  It’s not the first time something like this has been tried, but this an interesting organic attempt to pin down exactly what’s happening in the country.  As anybody working in human rights knows, gathering this sort of information is extremely difficult – particularly later on when it might be needed.  More explanation from White African in this blog post, coverage at Global Voices (with an interesting article on cyber activism in Africa) and the BBC.

• There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how the media and responders can work more effectively together in the last couple of years, and of course a whole heap of blogs and similar about how the new technology is going to change the face of disaster response, etc, etc.  So far, not much has happened, but TVE Asia and the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok have just published a free resource called Communicating Disasters.  It’s an interesting but disjointed read – I’m not exactly sure who it’s targeted at, to be honest…

• There was a brief flurry of blogging around Nathan Eagle’s article, The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World – and what we can do about it, mainly because it burst the bubble of optimism around bringing the internet to the poorest through the Miracle of Mobile Telephony (TM).  Of course, Nathan’s position is not that it isn’t possible, just that we’re not doing it right at the moment.  Personally, I’m still waiting for some hard evidence that these efforts benefit the poor rather than the relatively well-off – but that might just be splitting hairs.

• Witness have launched The Hub, their online platform for human rights-related videos and media, after a long incubation period. Cutting through the bumf, it’s intended to connect individuals and organizations who are working on human rights around the world. It’s an interesting lunge at building global connectivity in a sector (human rights) that is notoriously factional, and the focus on media is potentially powerful – particularly new media forms, such as mobile phone content, which are incredibly powerful tools for mobilizing support. You can register at http://hub.witness.org/login.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m not convinced that cellphones are secure and stable enough to rely on in an emergency. Yesterday, a bomb went off just down the road from Sanjana’s home, killing 17 people and injuring 30. Sure enough, the mobile network went down immediately after the explosion:

However, for around two hours after the bomb went off in Nugegoda, not a single SMS went out from my phone. Also from 6pm to 8pm, not a single call (to mobile as well as land lines) I tried was patched through. While I was able to sporadically get messages, incoming and outgoing voice and outgoing SMS communications were completely off the air.