Intro

In the fall of 2011, I was in Cairo, Egypt and Nairobi, Kenya to investigate how local activist groups use an online platform called Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a tool that makes it possible for people to report in real time, for example via their mobile phones, what they experience and witness. People’s reports are then made ​​visual as dots on an interactive geographic map.

The platform was created during violent episodes in Kenya following the presidential election in 2007, and has since been used during natural disasters, as election monitoring and for advocacy. I focus on projects driven by interest groups or informal groups that wish to create social change.

Dots on a Map

Ushahidi is an open source software that can be downloaded and used for free by anyone, but it isn’t all projects that are successful (success as in: documented accomplishment of a goal). Some projects remain well-intentioned ideas, and reports end up as nothing more than dots on a map.

At first I was frustrated with the ‘waste’ of good projects that didn’t seem to change anything, but then I realized that it was the feeling of having changed some thing rather than documented change that mattered to many of my interviewees. In some projects the very purpose was doing something and hoping for change. As hope may create drive and resourcefulness, the feeling of change may also.

Giving Hope

I talked to my interviewees about the motivation behind and hope for their projects, and the responses sounded: “A contribution to peace”, “doing something positive”, “a way to have a little dignity”, “curiosity, hope, anger”.

Most of my interviewees are private persons that have taken the matters into their own hands, and it seems that the Ushahidi platform made the step from idea to action less intimidating for them. More interviewees talked about situations of helplessness, where they had used Ushahidi as a way of:

“doing something instead of complaining (…) doing actions of meaning, giving hope.”

A Hippie Song?

To some this post might seem like a fluffy hippie song about hope. Nevertheless, it is based on the words of my interviewees. Of course I’d wish that all their efforts would result in actual change on a broader level, but if this is not feasible, then let’s recognize the empowering feeling it did create.

“By a click people change something,”

a young man from Cairo explained to me last summer. At that point I thought ‘but how?’, but in this post I’ll put that question on hold. Those clicks may not have changed something we can measure today, but it may have changed something for those who clicked. It may have given them hope.

Read the full post on Global Voices Online 

“Are you sure you want to take out money here?”

This question was posted across ATMs of the big banks in Denmark back in September. It was the warm-up for the ‘Bank Transfer Day’ that kicked off on October 1, 2012 (…) Read the full post on Global Voices online 

In this episode we talk through some of the ideas and issues surrounding the global Occupy movement and protests, as we listen to recordings from our team in different parts of the world.

Thomas of Occupy Denmark talked to Maria Grabowski Kjær about the movement

Listen to the Global Voices Podcast February Edition: Occupy This!

Occupy Denmark

Global Voices in Danish co-editor, Maria Grabowski Kjær in Denmark, visits the Occupation there to find out what their methods

and messages are. Though many seem to think the protesters are hippies, Thomas, who helped organise the movement in Denmark, aims to prove that this stereotype is not true at all.

Read the rest of the post on Global Voices Online

In this edition of the podcast we take a look back over the year 2011, consider the similarities and differences between mainstream and new media journalism, learn about an inspiring Rising Voices meeting in Bolivia to support the development of an ethnically and socially diverse blogosphere.

We also set off on a two-wheeled journey around the internet!

Listen to the Global Voices Podcast January Edition: Brave New Year 2012

Celebrating new biking lanes at Nørrebrogade. Photo by Maria Grabowski Kjær

Get on your bike with us!

You may think that we are separated by distance and only connected by the internet, but it seems that we also have some healthy habits in common. Ever prepared with her recording device, Solana Larsen discussed the wonders of getting around by bicycle with Global Voices executive director Ivan Sigal. As Ivan explains, the online cycling community is a vibrant one.

Naturally this meant that I had to ask our stunt-cyclist-audio-contributors to share with us their thoughts on two wheels.

Cyrus Farivar an American journalist currently living in Germany, and the author of “The Internet of Elsewhere” chatted with us about cycling – directly from the seat of a bicycle. In Denmark,Maria Grabowski Kjaer shared the sounds of the city where cycling is celebrated. Cycling for Maria is not just a mode of transport but a way of life.

Well, that wraps it up for our first podcast of the new year. We’ll be chasing audio and chatting about the world’s news and habits online throughout 2012, so do stay tuned and always let us know what you’d like to hear. For now, inspired by our two wheeled wonders, I’m off to try and learn how to ride my bike without being a danger to myself and others!

Read the rest of the post on Global Voices Online

Published on Global Voices, 4 December 2011

This post is part of our special coverage SlutWalks 2011.

Global Voices’ author, Maria Grabowski, interviews Heather Jarvis, the co-founder of the first SlutWalk initiative based in Toronto, Canada. Here, they talk about the background of the movement and its quick spread to the rest of the world. [See Jarvis' Toronto SlutWalk speech here].

Heather Jarvis came up with the SlutWalk idea as a direct response to a Toronto police officer’s advice that female students avoid “avoid dressing like sluts”:

We threw it right back. Let’s talk about sluts then, victim-blaming and slut-shaming. […] We had had enough – it had been a harsh year against women’s rights.

She tells the story about a rapist in a local area that wasn’t convicted, as the judge concluded that the victim [had] “put sex in the air”, referring to her tube top and make-up.

Hitting a nerve

Heather Jarvis, used with permission

Heather believes that the SlutWalk concept hit a nerve in many people:

Everybody knows how it feels like to be called a dehumanizing word. Maybe SlutWalk is an entry point for people that didn’t know where to go to.

Only six weeks from sparking the idea, the event took place with 3-4,000 people attending. She describes this first walk as unbelievable and inspiring: “It was an amazing multi-layered atmosphere. […] Some were crying, some were yelling.”

Women of all ages attended, together with children, men, sex workers and queer groups. All seemed to be there to back each other up. Heather accounts how everyone around a rape victim is also deeply affected – both family, partners and friends – and that they also need support.

The word spread quickly through Facebook and Twitter for the TorontoWalk and is still rolling throughout the world (see GV coverage on SlutWalks in Costa Rica, Brazil, India, Morocco, Australia).

“We weren’t expecting this,” Heather comments. She tells how many independent SlutWalk groups don’t even contact the Toronto group, but just go ahead with it and find their own form embedded in their local culture. Slutwalk Toronto provides supports to new groups that want it, but Heather’s advice is to do whatever you can, wherever you are, and connect with other organizations to stand stronger.

To the critics of SlutWalk, Heather responds: “We believe in dialogue. It’s absolutely okay that not everyone agrees.”

She emphasizes that the purpose also is to build bridges, and her hope is that critics will contact SlutWalk so they can talk about in a respectful way. “We are all in a learning curve,” she explains.

This post is part of our special coverage SlutWalks 2011.

In this edition of the Global Voices podcast you can hear how women in Egypt are using technology to fight harassment, and what our Global Voices authors and editors got up to at the Mozilla Festival in London.

We also mark World Aids Day by speaking to HIV/AIDS activists in Kenya and Egypt about the special work they do.

Listen to the Global Voices Podcast December Edition: Technology that empowers!

Technology to empower women

First we take a look at harassment of women in the streets of Egypt. Engy Ghozlan in Cairo is a young woman who took matters in her own hands to fight social acceptance of sexual harassment by using mapping technology and the voices of women who speak up about what happens to them on the street. The result is Harassmap. Global Voices author, Maria Grabowski Kjær spoke to Engy about her work in support of women’s safety and comfort in public.

Read the rest of the post on Global Voices Online

I attended as one of the speakers and presented my research – briefly discussing the background of the study, experiences, challenges and next steps. Below is my notes from the presentation and you can also watch the slides from my presentation here

Fieldwork on Ushahidi Deplyments: Maria Grabowski Kjær, M.Sc. Student in Social Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen

The gist of my original curiosity was, how an online platform like Ushahidi creates new ways and premises for people to communicate, organize and mobilize in situations of crisis and political conflicts? I see Ushahidi as an example of a global development in technology that really has gained momentum in recent years. Because of this, I believe that the premises for social activism have changed radically.

To make that idea more tangible I formed this Problem Statement:

(…) how the users of Ushahidi communicate, organize and mobilize as a network online, and how this type of ‘Cyberactivism’ propagates to people on the ground?

This question may look good on paper, but in real life I found it unrealistic for me to investigate: The people that I wished to talk to seemed almost impossible to track down. I knew beforehand that it would be a challenge, because the Ushahidi software is open-source and the users on the ground mostly report anonymously.

I soon realized though that it would take too much time to even try, so I quickly decided to change focus to the ‘deployers’ instead of the users – meaning people that either have founded a deployment or people that are part of a core deployment group. So for now the Problem Statement sounds:

1. How do ‘deployers’ use Ushahidi in a situation of crisis or conflict
2. What are the motivations and hopes behind, and which feelings of agency and change arise?

Now change happens over time and is therefor difficult to measure in the short research time that I have, so instead I am dealing with the feelings of change that people experience.

My fieldwork location is mainly online, but I have also visited two offline locations, Cairo and Nairobi, to make face-to-face and qualitative interviews. I chose these locations because there is a bunch of interesting cases here.

Here are some quotes from my interviews that will show both critical, positive and pragmatic views on Ushahidi.

(Cairo, July-August 2011)

1. “Ushahidi is for action in crisis, but difficult to use for long term strategies”
2. “You throw some dots on a map, some are taken further, some are not (…) It’s not like it is vibrating in social interaction”
3. “people found the project interesting because it gave them a little dignity”
4. “by a click people are changing something”
5. “doing something instead of complaining”

The first two quotes critique Ushahidi to be too short sighted; people share information and then what? It seems that some deployments never go further than that. The last three quotes do not claim that Ushahidi changes anything, but at least they found some dignity in it, and the feeling of doing something was satisfying.

I believe that there are at least two levels to consider in these quotes: The micro level that describes the personal satisfaction of contributing to something, and the macro level that questions where the actual social change is.

Let’s take some more quotes from my Nairobi interviews:

(Nairobi, October-November 2011)

1. “local understanding is crucial”
2. “Need a more critical mass”
3. “the challenge is to end the circle, so that the information is actually used for something”
4. “we’ve had positive responses, because people can act”
5. “I’ve seen it everyday, but without being able to do anything about it (…) it’s very satisfying”

The first three are similar to the critical Cairo quotes. They express the need for more participation and more critical participation to take it further, and to give a valid picture of  a given situation. The last two quotes again describe how this empowering feeling of doing something means a lot for them. I will look further into this dynamics between this personal level and the social/societal level.

Online Fieldwork

To get a sense of the environment and the culture of the Ushahidi deployments – just as in traditional anthropology – I will follow the deployments online. I wish to get an understanding of the huge networks of people and sites that work around each deployment. I will…

Timeline

• July-November 2011 / Fieldwork in Cairo & Nairobi
• January 2012 / Field Report incl. a Best Practice for Ushahidi
• February-June 2012 / Analyzing data + Online monitoring + Monthly blogs on Findings + Case Studies
• August 2012-March 2013 / Turning the whole thing into an beautiful audio montage! (=Master Thesis)

So there’s a lot of work ahead of me, but I look forward to share results with you when I reach that point.

Photos by Maria Grabowski Kjær

Writings on the Wall. Photo by Maria Grabowski Kjær

‘Reporting from the Field’ is a series of posts relating to my fieldwork in the fall of 2011. The fieldwork is a part of my Master in Social Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, and the final thesis will be completed in early 2013. The posts are part of a research- and analyzing process and should not been seen as conclusive.

I went to Cairo as one of my two physical locations, Nairobi being the other one. In Cairo I conducted 15 interviews with people that have either led or been a part of an Ushahidi deployment.

With my focus on global cyberactivism, I see the deployments that I have visited in Cairo and Nairobi as examples of a global development of awareness and empowerment (June Nash 2005). Why did Ushahidi start up in the first place and what happens with the deployments that have grown out of the platform? All the information that they are sharing, what is it used for? My field-location is the world map drawing criss-cross lines, connecting different stories and experiences. I can’t wait to see what I’m concluding from all this in a year!

Two Types of Deployers

1. Organizations that cooperate and make larger initiatives
2. Private person that ‘take the matters into their own hands’

Either way it seems that the participation in an Ushahidi deployment has given the informants some sort of empowerment and maybe made the step from idea to action less intimidating. Many interviewees described situations of helplessness, where they used Ushahidi as a way ‘to at least to something’. Some have tangible goals as producing a report for the authorities based on their map, some have long advocacy processes as the purpose, and others wish to spread awareness. Some deployments remain without a defined goal, which means that a map becomes the last station for valuable data.

Tentative Notes

• Many deployments in Egypt are ‘engineered’ in the sense that the reporters on the ground are mobilized centrally from the deployment.
• Informants generally wished for more spontaneity, meaning a wish for more reporters of type 2 (people that contribute without being a part of the deployment team).
• Good experiences with Twitter as source of reporting.
• Ushahidi seems to be a good tool for getting a picture of a given situation: good for statistics and creating reports.
• Typical Information Flow: reporters collect data > verifiers fact-check data > mappers put data on map (with icons for verified as well as not verified) > core team produce extended report based on data). Core team may have trained activist on each level.
• Groups tend to use Ushahidi as a way to deal with the situation themselves: people ‘on the ground’ wish to affect conflicts and tell what they see.
• It is motivating to do something positive for your own country or neighborhood.
• The feeling of sharing and more tools combined has made political activism grow Egypt. Sharing knowledge + connecting people = give hope and tangible results.
• Crucial for a project to include local actors.
• Each project needs to be customized to get enough participation (local experience and expert knowledge).
• Projects are often dependant on other social medias and networks to spread + traditional media to make promotion. Facebook for mobilizing, Twitter as real time updates and coordination, and YouTube to spread the message.
• More groups are surprised by how much work it takes to run a map succesfully, but mostly people were also surprised by the succes that their project had.
• A 100% clear image of the situation demands 100% participation

Quotes

“Lets tweet the hell out of them” (Cyberconference in Copenhagen)

“There was nothing to do but to write reports”

“People wants to tell whats wrong”

“Political avtivism has grown because of the feeling of sharing”

“What happens in xxx concerns me. It is my country“

“What is good about Ushahidi is also that it is from no Country”

“Ushahidi is for action in crisis, but difficult to use for long term strategies”

“What is the dynamics with NGOs? Maybe not all NGOs are interested in documenting their weaknesses”

“You throw some dots on a map, some are taken further, some are not. It’s not like it is vibrating in social interaction”

“By a click people are changing something”

“Right categorization is important for the map to be effective”

“Doing something instead of complaining”

“Doing actions of meaning, giving hope”

“Facebook is like a megaphone, Twitter many to many communication” and Ushahidi can combine the two with geographical, quantitative and qualitative info”

“People found the project interesting because it gave them a little dignity”

“Doing something positive”

“The online warms up people offline”

 ”Motivation: curiousity, hope, anger”

“Possibility of collecting more places in one situation”

“The purpose is to make a point clear…documenting”

“Small pieces of information that together creates a valid picture”

“Democratizing info – people have the right to know”

“At least we are focusing on the problem”

“The revolution has sparked motivation (…) showed us that things can change”