[Note: This is the third of five posts related to Nam-Ho Park’s talk and blog post on Mobile Storytelling. Links to my other posts are at the bottom of the page.]
I’ve long been a fan of Ushahidi and was pleased to see Nam-ho discuss it in his talk and write-up:
Usahidi, an interactive map-based information collection tool was born out of a need to capture and report post-election violence during Kenya’s 2008 presidential elections. Usahidi means testimony. Since then it has been used widely to crowdsource data through mobile devices and present them dynamically on a map: from neighborhood snow removal updates to crime reporting. Most noteably it was deployed in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti to crowdsource unsafe conditions and aid relief coordination.
Out of all the many articles I’ve read about this open-source platform, Patrick Meier’s post on peace mapping has always occupied a special corner of my mind:
Rachel was inspired by the story of Solo 7, a Kenyan graffiti artist in Kibera who drew messages of peace throughout the slum as a way to prevent violence from escalating shortly after the elections. “Imagine,” she said, “if we could identify all the Solo 7’s of Nairobi, all the individuals and local communities engaged in promoting peace.”
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If we only monitor indicators of war and violence, then that’s all we’ll see. Our crisis maps only depict a small part of reality. It is incredibly important that we also map indicators of peace and cooperation. By identifying the positive initiatives that exist before and during a crisis, we automatically identify multiple entry points for intervention and a host of options for conflict prevention. If we only map conflict, then we may well identify where most of the conflict is taking place, but we won’t necessarily know who in the area might be best placed to intervene.
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Just imagine a map covered with hundreds of doves or peace dots representing local peace initiatives? What a powerful image. The Peace Map would be public, so that anyone with Internet access could learn about the hundreds of different peace initiatives in Kenya. Kenyan peace activists themselves could make use of this map to learn about creative approaches to conflict prevention and conflict management. [his emphasis]
Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to read and hear about more and more projects designed to encourage play, optimism and random acts of kindness. #Goodspotting is one recent example. As, Lucy Bernholz sums up, ”#GoodSpotting = getting caught in the act of doing good. Spot Good. Take pic. Win prizes.” See Patrick’s How to crowdsource happiness: “What is blatantly missing is something like Gross National Happiness (GNH) data but disaggregated, user-generated and mapped in real-time.” This quote that Helen Walters tweeted has stayed with me as well: “Focus on projects where you get to inject optimism into the world.” It will be interesting what we figure out about mapping kindess, and creating fun experiences for people to be able to reflect their humanness back to one another.
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Links to the entire five-post series:
7th December 2011
