To avoid confusion, let me point out that there were actually two separate instances of Ushahidi being used in the election:

• one CrowdMap set up independently by the good people at Vijana.fm, sourcing from Twitter.
• and the major cooperative, mostly SMS-short-code oriented service at Uchaguzi.or.tz (Uchaguzi means, of course, election) I helped with this one.

The 2010 Tanzanian elections represented an ideal use case in home territory for the project. Tanzania is the world’s premiere speaker of the Swahili language (with some pardon to the Mombasa coast), and so in a sense, the word Ushahidi, Testimony itself. Ushahidi in Tanzania represented the project fulfillment with all parties potentially benefiting from the software’s beam of transparency:

1. the relatively strong civil organizations, including the police in Tanzania were prepared to be trained and take crime reports and prevent major incidents and loss of life,
2. election observers were placated by getting reports from the field (filtered by volunteers like myself)
3. and the public was heard.

According to Erik Hersman‘s updates, the effort involved 2,000 TACCEO-trained Tanzanians and evidently many more who came upon the site and its shortcode. By the end, there were about 5,000 non-spam SMS messages submitted to the software according to the volunteer panel, and some 2,000 reports filed based on those.

I applied through the Google Form that I linked on my blog last week, noting that I was US (and not Tanzania-based) and noting that I could translate TZ-style Swahili to English. I did most of my approving and translating of reports during the morning East Africa Time hours, before the primary teams in Tanzania and at the iHub came fully online. I then continued to watch Uchaguzi from the internal volunteer panel and through the situation room over the following days.

I have been very impressed by Ushahidi’s inspiring conceptual work on the main project and on its offshoot, Swift River. I had never helped with a busy Ushahidi instance before–I didn’t have an insider perspective of the Tanzania Situation room, or a pure outsider view of the report map. As they stayed true to their own transparency, most of my information presented here is actually already exposed in the situation room itself. Still, perhaps it benefits from a third party presentation.

The Ushahidi software instance at Uchaguzi.or.tz, running on Beta 7 version of the PHP code, was fairly bumpy from the start. In the earliest hours of election day, there were some database glitches for volunteers. It was difficult to search messages or reports without getting a backend SQL failure. Later, after I went to bed for the USA morning, Erik reported that a database table had crashed and had to be restored from a backup. Judging from the volunteer panel several hours later when I logged in, the disruption did not seem too bad, most of the messages seemed intact, which is impressive. It seemed that many developers around the world were involved in fixing bugs as the system was stressed. I wonder what features were new that justified the beta version for Uchaguzi TZ to the team.

After things settled down, there was a bit of discussion on the Swahili Street blog about one of the facilitator organizations, Jamii Forum‘s CHADEMA party bias. While internal procedural transparency is very important and was well achieved by this year’s Uchaguzi, in the future more emphasis might be placed around relative organizing biases for full disclosure.

Uganda 2011 in February monitors on Managing News

More generally for East Africa, it will be interesting to see how the Uganda 2011 Presidential Election monitoring develops for that election on February 18th, 2011.  The monitoring website of Uganda-based DEMgroup, ugandawatch2011.org is using a different software package, Managing News from Mountbatton and Development Seed, instead of Ushahidi to accept text messages and document reports. Is there a story there? I wonder why they choose differently. Development Seed seems to be doing good work generally on the Global Development Oriented Drupal-mod OpenAtrium. How does this fit in?

Updates and links since posting (November 24)

Pernille had a reflection post from Nov 2 with some additional comments that I had missed , thanks for linking here too. Pambazuka has a widely cited article on the proceedings of these fourth Tanzania Multiparty elections.  Vijana.fm has a nice Kiswahili article cautioning watanzania about being careful to check media sources and to think about media context.

In other good news, the codebase that was beta tested in the Tanzanian elections for Ushahidi 2.0 is now final and released! So despite the bugs we experienced, the experiences from the Tanzanian elections have probably cleaned up a lot of the rough spots in that great Open Source release. It should now be more stable for the next big election.

Besides Managing News in Uganda and these particular Ushahidi instances in Tanzania, there are even more election transparency software initiative case studies from Russia, Burundi, Poland and elsewhere highlighted over at the Jackfruity blog.

Related articles

• Uchaguzi: Monitoring the Tanzania Elections (ushahidi.com)
• Photos of the elections in Njombe (blog.daraja.org)

OpenMRS Hackathon at Regenstrief Institute

OpenMRS is a powerful electronic medical records (EMR) package used at hundreds of clinics around the world in about 46 developing countries.

The Open Source project was founded in 2006. For US readers, the highest profile user is likely Partners in Health. They apply it very actively as their ICT4D/mHealth solution in most of the countries they serve including Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Rwanda.  They also employ several full time Open Source contributors to the project.

Vibrant Open Source projects often draw from an eclectic variety of contributors. Given this, it is somehow not surprising that this kind of scheme can blossom with good software so effectively. Talent attracts talent. It seemed that each of the participant categories at the hackathon was represented by rockstar programmers that also had their MD’s.

The two-day event kicked off with the weekly developers’ screencast conference call. We had contributors from at least 3 continents represented on the line and another 20 developers in the room. Some 6 major contributors worked at the main Regenstrief Institute office above our venue. Another 3 worked for Partners in Health. There was an assortment of graduate students from nearby universities. On the phone, participants from the just-completed Google Summer of Code joined in (OpenMRS is one of the program’s top largest and longest-running projects).

The conference call itself opened slowly but soon we had contributors demoing slick integrations of SMS + website patient profile up on the large screen. The developer was able load a patient’s full record, including details of their participation in various programs and send them a relevant SMS reminder from the same page seamlessly. Responses from the patient were saved back to the patients record as an instant message log.

I should have more to say about the coding event over the coming days, for now I simply leave these impressions.

Right now, those same high-end knock-off N0kia/B1ackb3rry phones are making their way into the East African dukas. They are generally using obscure operating systems (OS) soldered together using half-hardcoded bitmaps and quirky keyboards made for Chinese. They are utterly “fragmented” and impossible to code for. As a programmer, sometimes I wonder at the question: who were the lucky anonymous code monkey team that was given such a job: make this phone work (mostly). You can just imagine the generation of Chinese OS programmers cutting their teeth, becoming experienced by solving the Operating System problems again and again for every new knock-off phone. But now, consider how easy Android is to use on arbitrary mobile hardware: one coder, in a month or so of bedroom hacking was able to bring it onto the iPhone. Just by that feat, it seems obvious that Android/OPhone is bound for the knock-offs in some substantial form.

The mobile computing revolution is happening already in rural Tanzania, in some sense. Every few days, a new teacher colleague of mine would come in with slick-looking phone with the requisite multiple SIM card support and big touch screen, but their phones didn’t enable anything. There were no apps, no stable browser. No way to make apps for that. I visited AppfricaLabs in late 2008 and talked with Ugandan @VicMiclovich about their work developing locally relevant apps for Nokia, Java midlets, and various other prevalent phone dev targets. Still, at the end of the discussion we had to admit that, for the moment, there was very limited impact opportunity in the market, outside of savvy tech users because of this unprogrammable Fake-OS problem. Maybe the OPhone can be a second chance?

Returning to one of the threads in the original article, though the Google Android App Store might not be relevant to the hundreds of millions of users in China, it may be more useful than the OPhone Store to the unmentioned millions of users of these phones as they trickle out into other Asian and African markets, if the store can be added by vendors without much trouble. The common foundation offers new possibilities.

While we are on the subject, the originally noted article was a follow up to a another Ars Technica report a month ago on Android Fragmentation. It wisely noted there that the catchy term should be used careful, it can refer to any of the panoply of versions, devices, OS repackagings, or device designers of Android.  It has been thrown around a lot and is pretty beat up:

“Because it means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term [fragmentation] is useless,” he wrote in a blog entry. “Stories on ‘fragmentation’ are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. ‘Fragmentation’ is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.”

There are even cleverly fake websites being created around its buzz (I won’t link to it directly but: android fragmentation dot com).

Anyway, I say bring on Android Fragmentation over the status quo, obscure, impossible to develop-for custom OSs in today’s knock-off phones. It is something to code for, a new audience to bring services to.

British Broadband

The Stanford lectures:

Over the past week as I engaged with the course I kept my eyes open for news that related to the fundamentals of the internet. There was no shortage. Stanford has a five-session continuing education course on iTunes U that I’d like to use as the kernel of this entry. The economics that were demonstrated went a long way toward helping me follow the logic of modern industry visionaries such as PBS’s Robert X. Cringely. It is impossible to sum up an 6 and a half hour course in a blog post. Still, I hope to give you the flavor and a bit of value-added reflection using momentous (maybe) current events.

The course is presented by the erudite internet researcher Ramesh Johari. He has published several articles on the counterintuitive network economics that underlay our information-based world. The lecture revolves around five uniquely positioned businesses–AT&T, Google, Akamai, NetFlix and Comcast. Each has a very different role and very different interests. Google and NetFlix are content looking to get bandwidth-heavy things like movies to the “eyes”; Comcast is “eyes”–they’re a major broadband provider; AT&T represents the backbone providers; and Akamai holds the omniscient middleman role of the Content Distribution Network (CDN). Each player has very different values and the question is always ‘who should pay who?’ and ‘what kinds of billing does the technology allow?’.

The phone telephony ‘network’ of copper was different from the protocols underlying the internet. As the linked video featuring one of the founders of the modern network describes, the components on the phone network are almost completely unreliable even with gold plated everything so it required that they have massive redundancy–if any part of the path went down, it was dead. If someone nuked the US, huge swaths of the phone network would be nonfunctional. Internet is different, internet routers know the nearest few connections and which direction will take you closer to your target for the lowest cost. If something breaks, take a different, somewhat more expensive, path.

In the first two sessions of the course, Ramesh covers the background necessary to understand the important protocols: stupid-simple network routing using IP; reliability brokered by TCP; and sheer speed established with UDP. He also hints to economic gotchas for those of us who are already enlightened to enjoy. For me, one of the most interesting concepts he introduced in the first lecture was the Internet Exchange Point. This location, often run by a nonprofit, allows a bazaar of internet traffic where everything is free, given that you’ve strung your own set of the wires into the joint to share. The wikipedia article lists hundreds of these. They are important. Without them developing countries would route all their traffic out to their ISP in the United States and back whenever you wanted to connect with the other ISP in town. Even Tanzania has one.

The course considers Network Neutrality consistently. As recent studies have found no differentiation between services means that to have services that require low-latency you need much more capacity than you might otherwise. Implementing this differentiation however necessarily enables and even requires profit/billing models that largely do not exist today. You can’t allow liers to monopolize a special bracket for high priority network traffic or it gets saturated. Ramesh points out a major niggle though: internet backbone creation funding model is really not stable yet. The last build-out was funded by the dot-com bubble and the hold-harmless bankruptcies that ensued. Over the next year it will largely be at capacity (or at least ‘lit up’).

Finally in the third episode he breaks it all open, He shows how the biggest internet companies (AT&T,Verizon) are actually stuck and will never have full control of the internet. A middleman company called Akamai that is “neutral” actually has more power over the internet than anyone else. Google can make all of their connection fees go away just by getting bigger and giving stuff away. This guy does research on the economic situation and he points out all the shortsighted moves of AT&T (internet backbone) and SBC (broadband) when they merged last year because they didn’t understand their own internet market and economics. They actually sold Cingular and then bought it back.

See Also:

In this Google Lecture Van Jacobson suggests that distributed protocols like BitTorrent and Avalanche are the latest abstraction which like the internet protocol upon phone infrastructure, will become the dominant network perspective for the coming years. He starts with an account of how the internet was invented from the groundwork of ma-bell and works his way to BitTorrent and the revolution in thinking.

Credits:

• Ultra-liberal RSS feed locator (aka RSSfinder) by Mark Pilgrim.
• All-RSS-within-one-click finder by Phillip Pearson

download rsslist2opml.py.
You will also need the RSSfinder script linked above as a dependency. I’ll mirror the version I used.

The outputted OPML has been vetted to work with Yahoo Pipes (quirky, I must say) and validated. I tested it with this OPML feed aggregator and this Fetch OPML as RSS converter.

Caveats

• It does not do any checking for duplicates in the incoming RSS feed. It does prevent the source site with the original RSS feed from being included (there is usually a link from this domain at the header of Dapper RSS).
• It is written (though this could easily be modified) to only export one feed per inputted item even if RSSfinder finds more than that.
• It takes quite a while to run (several minutes if the list is long–it is “ultra-liberal” after all), I might enhance it so with some form of caching so that you can just use it as CGI and not worry about it trying to regenerate the entire OPML every time you load the script.
• First python jab so it is likely messy.

Example

I used Dapper to make a nice RSS feed out of this list of Peace Corps blogs in Tanzania. The script will take the RSS feed as input and output OPML of the linked blog’s feeds. This can be aggregated (slowly) by Yahoo Pipes. I’m playing with other display options.

Update

So when I went back and started working on my little application of this OPML that I’d been working on I noticed Yahoo had made a new release of Pipes. They added a Feed-Autodiscovery pipe. Joy, my work is redundant! Ah well, the joy is in the chase. Maybe someone could use it for something like the freeform, traditional text-based feed pipeline platform, also by a Yahoo Dev, FeedMagik2.

My relatively functional app is live at Peace Corps Feeds.