Unpacking Bangalore’s Tech Activist Scene
Posted: March 30th, 2012 | Author: mikel | Filed under: India | Leave a comment »Erica Geeked Up in Bangalore, and give a talk “From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation”.
Nice to follow in the footsteps of Hapee’s GeekUp on OpenData.
The talk surveyed our work with GroundTruth, in community mapping and media, in Kibera and elsewhere. Got a nice write up in The Hindu. And a reprise with the warm and progressive parents of the Earth School Montessori school.
In between, Erica attempted to sweep through and catch up with as many of the interesting movers in Bangalore. Finally got to meet in person with IT For Change, who were among our collaborators on the IDS research project Mediating Voices, Communicating Realities, and are particularly interested to see how participatory mapping and media can apply in rural settings.
Sridhar Pabbisetty, from the Center for Public Policy at IIM Bangalore, welcomed Erica for a talk and time with his students. And also, facilitated a visit with CHF’s slum improvement projects in Bangalore.
Another highlight was meeting with Jaanagraha, the group behind the amazing I Paid a Bribe. A key component of the strong anti-corruption movement in India, and now inspiring similar efforts worldwide, was very instructive to hear how this campaign took hold.
An intense few days … felt deep, and yet just scratching the surface. So much more to loop together next time in the Bangalore tech activist scene!
Cartonama, Open Mapping in Bangalore
Posted: March 29th, 2012 | Author: mikel | Filed under: events, India, talks, tech | Leave a comment »The keystone to GroundTruth’s trip to India was the Cartonama workshop in Bangalore.
My comrade in maps was the amazing Schuyler Erle, in a reprise of our epic 2008 Free Map India tour. India, Banalore, and its OpenStreetMap have transformed (as you can see in this heart-filled animation of OSM Bangalore). This time, rather than visit 7 cities in 4 weeks, we crammed even more information into two days. As ever, I learned a ton from Schuyler. Perhaps the choicest bit being, “Canada is often projected as if the Earth was wearing a dunce cap”.
This was an intense two day workshop, covering everything needed to make an open web mapping application: from data collection in OpenStreetMap, to data juggling with OGR/PostGIS etc, making tiles with TileMill, and finally building an Ajax Web app with Leaflet and the OSM API. Oh, and also a survey of basic geographic concepts (geodesy, projections, etc), and the intricacies of the operation of GPS satellites. Really it was four workshops in one. Or maybe 10. Possibly a semesters worth. I think it’s a format worth replicating.
The end result was a modification to the amazing POSM POSM by Yuvi Panda. He built this HTML5 web app for first collecting bus stops in Mumbai. There were wonderful audible gasps when we integrated our home baked MapBox tiles into the locally running POSM app (even if we discovered lingering problems with handling of Indic fonts in Mapnik).
You can see all the presentation materials on GitHub. We collaborated on the slides in Markdown with Landslide, best way to make a presentation.
Cartonama was an Editor’s Pick in TimeOut!
Another great moment, during the ice breaker we stole from Gunner: “What’s your first memory of a computer?” “We had to take our shoes off before going in the lab because computers are holy, right?”
It seemed to go well. Was great to enthusiastic, creative participants from Servelots, TacticalTech, IT For Change, Transparent Chennai, and many others.
HasGeek did a wonderful job bringing bringing the workshop together, and are lighting up the geek event space in India. They’re really fostering community in the best way, and I’m excited to see what happens with all the mappers from our workshop, and the upcoming full Cartonama conference. So big thanks to HasGeek, and the Centre for Internet and Society for hosting and sponsoring the workshop.
Journalism and Mapping, Presenting to Armenia
Posted: March 26th, 2012 | Author: mikel | Filed under: talks | Leave a comment »
Today was my second opportunity to present to Public Journalism Club in Yereven, at the invitation of Seda Muradyan. This a group of journalists, working with new technologies and approaches, especially for the upcoming election. It’s excellent to present GroundTruth’s experiences, particularly Map Kibera’s 2010 Referundum monitoring, which shows how maps and journalism can really connect for a powerful story.
That’s a very small video of me, talking to a patient audience through a translator. I’m still amazed that anything like this is possible on our planet.
The group has set up an Ushahidi instance, with OpenStreetMap base map, to monitor elections: http://iditord.org/. Look forward to seeing how the Armenian election develops.
The slides:
Instrumentalism vs Empowerment; or how to think like an artist
Posted: December 16th, 2011 | Author: Erica Hagen | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »JR, the now-famous artist recently recognized with the 2011 TED prize, once plastered the rooftops of Kibera with close-up images of womens’ faces. The striking images often featured in our presentations about Map Kibera, because without knowing anything about the artist or the intent, shack rooftops covered in human visages resonated with what we hoped to do with our work: make the “invisible†visible, and humanize the apparently inhuman slum. A recent New Yorker article provides interesting insight into JR’s work.
JR is now undertaking a massive project of printing out other people’s self-portraits on jumbo poster paper so that their own images can be plastered like graffiti around their communities, or elsewhere.
He is, in a sense, taking the concept he started out with in Kibera and other marginalized neighborhoods and taking it to its logical conclusion: creating an army of graffiti-artist self-portraitists. Though he tried to practice his art in secret by hiding his identity and using renegade graffiti methods, it still earned him personal fame and fortune – turning the world’s attention back on him. It seems he’s again tried to push the lens back to the people he photographs, by serving as their printer. Whether it will succeed is not yet clear; to me the images start to look like a giant paper Facebook. But the example led me to consider further the meaning behind self-representation in a slum.
While building the various tools of representation in Map Kibera – creating a map, video, or blog post about oneself – the main thing everyone wanted to know was, but what changed in Kibera because of it? Even just a few months – or weeks – into the project. Representing oneself visually, online, on video, or on a map was considered a means to a specific end. Rightly so, I thought.
But, in fact, might it be considered disempowering to require that because self-representation is happening in a setting like an African slum, it must achieve measurable development “outcomes� Is pushing the development agenda along standard pathways minimizing other reasons for expression, ignoring the need for local ownership of information and news, or forcing a process of open-ended exploration by participants of what they hope to achieve to end too soon? There is a subtle difference between standard urban development or activism and the way that new media allows for what’s been called networked organizing. I’ve thought about these questions a lot while going between the world of development and the world of art, a rare border-crossing I’ve made at venues like Ars Electronica and Picnic.
Did people challenge JR the same way? It’s possible that they did, but because he’s positioned as an “artist†rather than a technologist or a development worker, the expectation isn’t there. The impact is in the change of perception, in the laying of claim to ones environment, in the increasingly common ability to declare, this place is “me”, or “us.” It’s not the same as ownership, but a form of it nonetheless. Again, it’s a way of asking, whose reality counts? Who does this place belong to? Perhaps along the lines of Occupy Wall Street, there’s a calling to witness, a reckoning, a question long before the hard work of hammering out answers can occur. The mental shift before the physical.
Maybe coming from the development paradigm, we didn’t consider this a viable option.
The core business of development has generally been to either impose, inspire, or create change (depending on your point of view) in circumstances, structures, and environments where conditions are intolerable on one level or another (that is, most of the planet).
The core business of art, well, that’s up for debate but its often seen as an end in itself- the change effected by art is subtle in the mind of the observer and artist, even when the art itself is strongly polemic. It’s not supposed that direct action need be taken but that a collective mental shift occurs.
In the article, JR mentions that people in places like urban slums are more and more sensitive to the way they are portrayed in the media. They are increasingly aware – and angry – about misperceptions. We have found that everywhere we’ve gone people are extremely motivated to control that image – and in so doing, control their environment. Once they’ve begun to take charge of their image, and become engaged citizens – yes, there’s a call for change, a call for results. And I still believe it’s useful to create information with a purpose – to map and write about specific topics while linked up with community groups that are active, in order to call for certain changes and guide planning. But I’ve also seen that there is a thrill of discovery – of engagement – that naturally comes with turning a camera or GPS on your own backyard, which needs to be valued. It’s a matter of saying, as with JR’s work: Here We Are. Repeatedly. And only once heard, to ask Now What?
Now, if you dig a bit deeper, you do find that even JR seems to have gotten caught up in this murky area. He’s started a foundation of some kind (the New Yorker doesn’t bother to explain, as though this is the simplest of things – to give some money to a slum) to help the places that he’s photographed in some way other than through his art. I can only imagine what happened in Kibera – where people are hyper-aware of the money to be made off their images, and those of their children. Any foreign photographer is not accused of getting rich off “art†(the concept being blatantly inconceivable there) but getting rich off selling someone’s image – possibly caught in a less than proud moment – to NGOs who then are seen to profit.
Nothing done in such a setting comes without moral strings attached, often pulling in different directions. This is the heart of the matter.
I’d like to suggest that we outsiders working in development (especially in new media) think a bit more like artists, giving those who make representations of themselves the freedom to decide what their stories “mean†– even more so when new open tools are being employed and certainly the world at large has not figured out everything they are capable of. Our job, perhaps, is to protect the internet from control and censorship, and promote access, continue to work to open and flatten this arena.
That’s not to let the artist off the hook. I wondered what was the real story behind JR’s posters. Did people balk at his camera? Did he have to explain, pay, or at least befriend them first? What’s the story of that encounter? And what do they think of him now? In Kibera, we found that he had to buy – and may continue to buy – his roof space from the residents who live beneath it. Art, like journalism, about a place that is not one’s home is always a matter of negotiation and examination of audience and purpose.
There is not one interaction in image-making – perhaps, in all of development – that isn’t morally fraught. But isn’t it more interesting to let that be the starting point for real discussion of the meaning and goal of self-representation?
Revealing Transparency and its relation to Community Empowerment
Posted: November 29th, 2011 | Author: mikel | Filed under: events | 1 Comment »Writing this on the bus ride up to Long Island for the Transparency and Accountability Initiative “Bridging Session”. Some of my favorite geeks will be there, pressure cooking over three days with groups doing hard work on transparency in the field of natural resources. This intensive workshop format is my favorite way to break new ground. The OPEN PLAN in Nottingham in 2005 led to my start with OpenStreetMap, and Infoactivism Camp in 2009 in Bangalore led in a way to Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative, and continues to be a watershed experience for me. Gunner facilitated in Bangalore, and is the ringleader this week, so I have good hopes this event will open up entirely new directions.
Now, I’m pondering what Transparency and Accountability as a movement is actually about, and what it lacks. Ok, mostly about what it lacks.
No doubt, Open Data and Open Government, freely sharing budget information and aid dollar flows, this all is amazing and difficult work. I’ve had my own triumphs and tragedies trying technological interventions in large organizations, targetted change in how they collaborate and share knowledge. Especially at the UNDP with WaterWiki, to share all sorts of knowledge on water governance across institutional boundaries, and with more thematic generality, and more mixed results, with UNDP workspaces. Yes, great to see the UNDP recently embrace open data (though they have always been particularly transparent on their project financing). In any case, I know this isn’t easy work at all.
However, I see this kind of transparency work, so far, reinforcing traditional power structures, rather than substantially engaging the people and communities that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of all of this cash and projects that open data describes and monitors. The focus is on big aid organizations, and big governments, institutions which by their nature love data, and are equipped to use it. Open Data is in spirit and narrative a close cousin of Open Source, but on examination of practice it operates in a traditional top down way. For instance, Open Data Kenya was a quite exciting development, a developing country with a troubled history of corruption, leading the way to sharing its data holdings. Yet in the nearly half year since its launch, I find a troubling lack of real impactful applications of that data, an active community around that data, or a real vibrancy of new data and discussion on site itself. Was it all hype? I hope not. Now I’m not in Kenya anymore, so maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t get the sense that the hacking and conversation continues. When we look at what Open Data means for OpenStreetMap, yes, all the data is open to contribution and reuse, but everyone deeply involved agrees, the real strength of OSM is the active community that really really cares about the data.
Within this field, there is confusion especially in the word “participatory”. Participatory technology and participatory development share some vocabulary and rhetoric, both are about true engagement in a process, but in practice, there are significant differences in approach. For instance, participtory development stresses a slow pace, building trust, not pushing forward with interventions until there is true ownership in the process from the community. It’s slow, clumsy and messy. Participatory technology inherits the fast pace of Silicon Valley, pushing outputs online as fast and flexibly as possible. They react in all sorts of unanticipated ways, which we know all too well from Map Kibera. Joining the two methodologies is powerful, as people from widely varying backgrounds and different socioeconomic status can find neutral ground in their love of shiny new gadgets and gaining friends on Facebook. But beyond that spark, to really have technology lead to change takes building relationships, 3 years at least for a full arc rather than 3 months.
And there’s confusion in the term “crowd sourcing”. I try to avoid it as much as possible. Any truly functional “crowd sourcing” project has a definite structure. It will no doubt be a flexible and interesting and open structure, but definitely not simply a mob just waiting for a mobile app to land on their phones that changes the world for them by pressing some buttons. A functional open project is going to have the complexity of any human society, but with a few distinguishing core principles of radical inclusiveness.
The danger in this confusion is that excitement over transparency can actually obscure a lack of true engagement.
It’s really helpful to go back to the origin for all these movements, with is Open Source. In a “true” open source effort, the participants maintain an ongoing, flexible relationship. Organizations and initiatives come and go, but the code and the direct personal relationships are always there, able to proceed when ready. Coding can happen when a big company pays for work, or when a hacker is just super psyched about a new feature. The Bazaar is a complex community. Despite sharing this model, there’s a contrast in the world of technology, transparency and accountability. When it comes to actual work, suddenly the technology and especially the relationships in the community, are predominantly the Cathedral old model. Relationships between funders, technologists, and communities are not very much in the open, they are not that flexible, and are beholden to short term funding and project structures. Technology pilots can reinforce the worst of a “brief case NGO”, where the relationships crucial to proper participatory development can’t form.
For an example, I lay open the ups and downs of a small side branch of Map Kibera, in budget tracking at the very local, community level. With the base map of the Kibera slum, the promise was that citizens could monitor government funded projects locally. We were partnering with a Community Based Organization, who’s mission was information collection, sharing, and action. However, this org had very little information management capacity itself … piles of unprocessed papers and surveys, powerpoint presentations abused into functioning as databases. So we built a better, simple web app to collect very local reports on these projects, and map them. And then we worked intensively with the local organization to use the tool, to structure their monitoring, and use in their outreach. They loved it. It even won an honorable mention in Apps4Africa, and Secretary Clinton mentioned it in a speech. Soon after, the CBO presented the tool at a community forum on the local budgets, and hell broke lose. Some of the reports were out of date … the projects had completed (in some fashion, apparently), so distrust was thrown onto the tool itself. And the CBO never really had the time to train fully on the system, and before you knew it, relationships were breaking down over money and ownership issues. The idea is still sound, but it will take time to build the capacity with the right coalition of organizations in Kibera, a lot of slow messy and necessary community work. Despite that reality, the story could easily be “we won Apps4Africa and transformed Kibera”. Who’s doing the real transparency work for these projects in communities?
There’s a role emerging which straddles this participatory technology / development divide, moves the hype towards reality. Maybe it’s a new kind of NGO, or network, or some other configuration, that works very close in the community, with a long term view, in the grassroots, but also very adept at technology. Map Kibera as a project has metamorphasized as the Map Kibera Trust to fill this role. In East Jerusalem, Grassroots Jerusalem fits closely. They work every day in marginalized Palestinian communities, build relationships not with big NGOs, but small community groups which may be nothing more than a prominent person’s living room. And at the same time, they are building their understanding of technology, of mapping in OpenStreetMap, of using Facebook, YouTube and Ushahidi to get stories out, and helping their grassroots colleagues to get involved … slowly. It’s a dual role, very very much in the field, getting dirty, experiencing first hand every day what these technologies actually mean for communities.
For the technologists and organizations coming together this week, I believe we need to focus on how we can help support more organizations to emerge into this role. Does it mean, say, embedding those experienced in these methodologies with Rising Voices grantees, exploring new configurations of actors like in communities, university students, and government in Tandale mapping, or finding ways for locally communities from across to globe to support each other directly?
I do think the Transparency and Accountability Initiative is acknowledging this. In the report Impact case studies from middle income and developing countries, they find
Our third and largest category consists of technological interventions that are tailored to advance the very specific agendas of particular non-governmental or governmental organisations by amplifying their capabilities and strategies. Cidade Democrática, the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool, Uchaguzi and Kiirti all fit this pattern. In this category, success depends upon a successful marriage between particular technologies and the capabilities and efficacy of particular organisations that seek to utilise them. We feel that most of the potential for technology to have an impact on accountability will lie in this third category.
and they recommend
Interventions in the third category are more likely to succeed when those who create the technology are embedded in local NGO networks, so that they understand the motivations and strategies of organised users and can tailor their efforts to fit them.
A promising direction for this week!