Windows, since the 1990s, has greatly relied on its huge and unavoidable market share and its network effect to make new users trained and familiar with its metaphors. Windows still has only a rudimentary plan to evolve. These new operating systems, in contrast, take advantage of progressing input technology to discard the original assumptions and draw users closer to the machine. They abstract away the gotchas that can, without training, clutter or interfere with common problem solving; fundamental things like saving, file organization, and mouse coordination. Forgetting to save is mitigated by removing save. A tower of babel of a folder hierarchy is flattened by search and ordered by task or sites. The touch interface deletes the mouse. Only the keyboard really remains unassailed.

If the new OSs’ revolution universally succeeds, then Windows may feel progressively less and less attractive as more and more of its founding metaphors are tossed off and deprecated. More importantly, computers and their designers are showing a new kind of egalitarianism that can accommodate new societies and groups adopting computers for increased productivity in ways that don’t presume an essentially top-down training model of adoption–more like mobile phones and Facebook. The best software has always been intuitively discoverable, now maybe the basic concepts can be too.

Related links

• How the iPad 2 will revolutionize classroom Education, Fast Company.
• Why I don’t care very much about tablets, Ars Technica
• From Filing Cabinets to Digital Thought, The Atlantic Tech

(excuse the title change and back again, WordPress client for iOS is quirky.)

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)

• There is now an Ushahidi Election Violence, Issue and Rioting Reporting Map instance up for the Tanzanian elections taking place next Sunday. You can also apply as an ushahidi voluntia translator and verifier at this Google Form. As of last week, one of four polls suggests opposition may have an edge. I do not take a position for any party in the elections but I do hope that they are carried out peacefully. I especially hope that my friends in country, Watanzania and Wamerikani alike, are safe. (As Pernille points out, UCHAGUZI is a collaborative initiative between TACCEO, Tanzania; HIVOS, Netherlands; Haki Elimu , Tanzania; the biggest Tz national ICT community Jamii Forums, Tanzania; Rakesh Rajani’s TWAWEZA , CRECO, Kenya in association with USHAHIDI and SODNET, Kenya as technology & strategy partners. Wengi wameunga kuhifadhi taifa, Jamani! vz)
• Beyond the election questions, there are other really bright people: Mtanzania Silicon Valley Diaspora Entrepreneur Mbwana Alliy has an insightful guest article covering no fewer than 5 different promising Tanzanian+Silicon Valley and Tanzanian nzima initiatives. Lete Maendelo! He suggests that the reason you don’t associate Tanzania and the modern tech scene is mostly just a lack of reporting of things south of Lake Victoria. He calls for more coverage.
• One mentioned startup was Envaya, a website to help government offices and NGOs in Tz and East Africa communicate with constituents easily on mobiles and the internet, cofounded by a returned ICT Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Pemba in 2007. Also see Kabissa.org and Maneno. Each site has similar goals but different approaches.
• Word on the ground is that Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (touched on in this post) is looking at leveraging Moodle-based BrainHoney as a part of the software foundation for the initiative. Chisimba (+ one of their rockstar developers on twitter) also seems a good related Africa-oriented e-learning platform to follow.
• Google Baraza African oriented Question and Answer site is doing an initial community launch. You can apply for an invite here. A Ghanaian Blogger’s ideas are here, Peace Corps colleague Jon McLean here, but do not miss Google’s cute video on the service here if your modem can handle the download. Grab and answer your question for Africa as soon as possible! So far it seems to be successfully bridging East and West Africa as I’ve not seen in a website, though there is little South African participation to date. See also Majibu.com, the preexisting East African Q&A startup.
• WhiteAfrican has just posted an up to date Snapshot of mobile data rates across East Africa that follows on my own Snapshot from 2009.

As an administrative note: I have broken out my Peace Corps-relevant posts into a separate category that you can visit using the link along the top. They won’t appear on the front page but will appear in my RSS feeds. I’m gratified that my last post was picked up and republished in the Peace Corps newsletter, I hadn’t thought of that! Thanks Aron. Ultimately though, I don’t want to weaken my main practical themes on the blog.

Related articles

• Facebook Arrives in Tanzania (insidefacebook.com)
• Tanzania approves new highway across Serengeti (gadling.com)

To this end, (whether or not they realize it) it is customary for Peace Corps volunteer bloggers to post packing lists of things so that new Peace Corps invitees to those countries can get an idea of what might be useful in country. The common items on the lists are ridiculously intricate but eminently useful Western inventions like Leathermans and USB keys.

It is also often claimed that moving home to America after a two year experience is just as or more mind-bending as moving into your host country. This is nearly true. Last week was the third year “anniversary” from the date that our training group landed in Tanzania and 9 months since I boarded the plane to finally leave Tanzania. Leaving your PC site is a bittersweet stretch–it involve a lot of hard goodbyes and American life may still seem quite distant. In retrospect, my bag was not necessarily packed with things that would make me happy today. Here are some things that I wish I had brought with me from Tanzania now that I am sitting in the United States with time behind me:

• Favorite dog-eared local language (especially Swahili) dictionary(s) – There are few great Swahili dictionaries. One of the best is Baba Malaika’s Friendly Swahili Dictionary (refreshed in 2008, published for 20+ years). Unfortunately it is hard to find internationally. Forget quick-cheap Amazon purchase–It sells on ebay and used book sites for almost a hundred dollars. You may want this for a variety of reasons: 1) nostalgia for quirky sayings and proverbs–you probably know exactly where they are in that book. 2)  You may want to volunteer your translation skills. 3) you may want to communicate warmly with Host Country Nationals and just can’t remember that word.
• Peace Corps Cookbook - charming locally bound book that was oft-consulted in country. Good for your bookshelf’s character or an old favorite recipe still fondly remembered but only in the terms of you friendly jiko (brazier stove). It will give you a chance to rework the recipe for a grill.
• GSM SIM card with Phone numbers (you can read these with T-Mobile or AT&T phones) – Your phone is full of people and memories–its like your social network account for country except you can throw it away or have the sum of those connections lifted from your pocket if you are careless of that fact. (Granted, now it seems like so many of my Host Country friends now have Facebook too?). You will probably want to phone at least one friend or counterpart when you get home. But you probably also want to gift your phone to a worthy friend before you go. There is a good compromise: bring the chip home scotch taped to something rigid that you won’t lose. You can’t use the phone number in the US but with international telecommunications, having the numbers makes it easy to call anyway. T-Mobile outlets sells $20 locked phones which come bundled with some respectable amount of call time and can read these SIM cards.
• “Cultural Artifacts” – This one is personal. For me I wish I would have brought home: My three-legged stool and my cursed-ugly carved statue. Check wood items for termites. I did find travel-friendly versions of mortar & pestle, weathered hand-carved spoons for friends, unique Kanga garments that carry stories of special times or events. Election/political party oriented Kanga’s are excellent story-imbued carry-homes. I had a handkerchief from a wedding that had warm sayings painted in Swahili on it that I hadn’t thought twice about in country but was quite thankful I had packed.
• Picture of you at work. Don’t forget to have a picture of yourself in action at your site. Both of these last two can be key for “third goal” activities back on red-white-and-blue soil to help you bring the whole world that you left behind back home.

Above all, recall that as soon as you land in the impersonal US airport, anything you got in country is of a infinitely higher personal value than any Western items you carried into country. It is very easy here to go on Amazon and pick up a new backpack or even a laptop. As impossible to fathom as it may be, you can also probably drink most water after getting on the plane, so that closely held Nalgene need not be so anymore.

Related articles and links

• Congress approves Peace Corps, Sept. 22, 1961 (politico.com)
• Kevin Quigley: The Third Goal Is Our First Goal (huffingtonpost.com)
• Recently Returned RPCV mentoring (rpcvmentoring.org)

@Leila C Janah of Samasource hosted an insight-filled Q&A session at Tech4Africa last month and the video is finally online. I hope she is not offended, but to me, the intro-video candid shot of her might have captured a beginning of her as a figure of African Mama scale-responsibility and stature in the Africa social entrepreneurship community. Just look into her face! In the video itself, she reflects honestly on her struggles and the details of starting a business working in Africa from a fresh Silicon Valley perspective.

For me, the presentation fondly recalls the December 2008 Appfrica‘s Facebook Developer Garage that I attended in Kampala when she had just begun her first collaborations. It was a frenetic co-demonstration with Charlie Cheever of the Facebook App Platform. The senior developer showed a hundred techie Ugandan university students how to start coding on Facebook apps in Makerere’s new technology hub building. Today, Leila is thinking about a much wider scale of social impact and has some real lessons to share. Charlie now heads Quora, a social questions startup and Facebook is a prime force in East Africa with mobile Facebook Zero (0.facebook.com) free through many carriers, substantial market penetration, and one of the very top internet brand standings.

Related articles

• Tech For (And By) Africa (techcrunch.com)
• How Quora Is Trying to Build an Ideal Society (gigaom.com)
• How Samasource Helps The World, And A Secret Tattoo Unveiled (Video) (techcrunch.com)
• Tech4Africa: Building for a Global Technology Market in Africa (downtheavenue.com)