Scrappy Tandale

Last week, Gary Gale and I chatted about Tandale, Dar es Salaam. I reached out to Gary after he posted about his visit, (also see the Tandale group’s blog post about it). I saw that he was really affected by the challenge of life there, but also inspired by the small hopes that mapping has opened up, and the voracious enthusiasm of the Dar tech community. I feel the same; a deep responsibility, especially to the individuals in this community that are truly dedicated to change, and have taken the chance to believe in the vision of openness. Despite it being 1.5 years after the initial Tandale pilot, with no sure follow up in sight, we haven’t let go. We support Msilikale Msilanga, former Ardhi student, and he in turn supports the community members to keep up with reporting. We have left sets of equipment on loan there.

I recounted my perspective on the whole odyssey, complementing what he’d heard from Mark. Basically, Tandale started as a successful pilot, with lots of promise and excitement from the community, the students, the local government, and the World Bank. And that excitement continues to this day — Tandale is often highlighted as a symbol of the potential of community mapping. But for whatever systemic and accidental reasons, the elements haven’t come together to fully continue the project in the way it deserves, to deepen and expand across Dar. There’ve been a lot of meetings, several different plans. It’s frustrating, but understandable. GroundTruth took it on ourselves to draw up the project details to build up the tech and program, especially connecting the voices of the community to mainstream media, and sought support from the Africa News Innovation Challenge. We got very close, all the way to the finals, but not to the finish line; perhaps we didn’t hit all the right phrases on the bingo cards. We still believe the concept is very sound and substantial, rooted in real experience and need, and we are still looking to make it happen. Let’s talk if you have ideas.

In the mean time, we all do whatever we can. We’re scrappy. All of the original equipment was destroyed in flooding in late 2011, tragic, but typical of the risk of the high water table and unplanned development of Dar es Salaam. Last June, we were able to bring a little more equipment to Tandale. And due to the ongoing, amazing, inspiring dedication of folks like Msilikale and the residents of Tandale, we managed to help start an ongoing blogging group there, as well as to support CCI’s expansion of mapping to another settlement, Keko Machungwa.

They results are absolutely impressive. The Tandale Blog fully covers the events and issues of Tandale. It is sustained purely with the motivation of community members and their interest in making known the challenges they face in the hopes that they can be more visible and guide government resources to the area. This keeps me going.

Talking with Gary, he in interested to help out, however he can, as a remote mapping geek. I thought I’d just share publicly the top simple tech tasks. Basically we have the Tandale blog, and an empty and waiting Keko blog. Both of these could use some design attention, and perhaps integration of translation. They’re both missing maps; though almost every post is associated with a place in the community. There are lots of ways that could happen. We’ve set up Ushahidi for Tandale before, but there are technical issues with using it in low bandwidth environments (a strange “Error -1”), and I’m not sure how well coupled it is with the blog. And perhaps, Ushahidi should be set up to cover all of Dar, incorporating numerous feeds, to provide a mapped overview of all the conversations happening Dar-wide.

This could be a great chance for young techies to gain experience in a real practical project. There are enthusiastic young people gathering in places like TanzICT and KINU. Gary could start building mentor relationships with these folks, and that could go far. Mobile phones and ICT of all kinds are mushrooming in Dar, and home-grown spatial applications, especially building on high quality OpenStreetMap data, could open new markets. On the other hand, mentoring takes twice as much time as just doing it yourself, so we’ll need to figure out what will really work for Tandale.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, or you have any scrappy or long term ideas for supporting motivated, grassroots communities, please get in touch.