This past Saturday we were honored to be a part of “Life in a Day“, a project to create the first user-generated documentary. Presented by Google, Producer Ridley Scott, and Director Kevin McDonald, this project asked people around the world to film their lives on one day, Saturday July 24, 2010. What kind of stories were they looking for? Stories of the everyday, answering questions such as, what makes you happy? What’s in your pocket? What do you fear?

Project partner Against All Odds Productions contacted us to help connect them  to communities that do not have access to the technologies necessary to film their lives. We sent video cameras to staff members, Emma Hulse in Guatemala, Rachel Brown, Cody Valdes and Tegan Bukowski in Nairobi, Gabe Hopkins in Thailand and partner Ketie Danelia in Georgia, enabling them to film the communities they’re living in and working with. In addition, Co-Director Emily Jacobi took video cameras with her to Port Au Prince Haiti, to film with women leaders working there. Importantly these communities are able to keep these cameras that were sent, and continue to film their lives.

Please see some of the pictures from their shoots:

Life in a Day: Georgia

Life in a Day: Kenya

“Saddam tried to use the indictment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal to show how shameful and perverse the United States is. The message that Iraqis heard was that in America, no one is above the law. Not even the President.” ~Anes (trainee)

I recently returned from a trip to Erbil, Iraq, a city in the north stationed in semi-autonomous Kurdistan. I was invited by Small World News to join them as technical trainer in a project they were performing for IREX on new media and technology.  My own question was whether these tools actually matter in a war zone.

Erbil currently exists as an anomaly in an otherwise dangerous country. I saw no major military presence, no hummers, and even found myself bowling one night. However, the trainees had driven by car from other parts of the country not nearly as quiet like Basra, Kirkuk and Baghdad. Reminders of the war mainly took the form of rolling electrical blackouts and foreign investors from China. All said, not much different from a developing world context.

I was paired with Louis Abelman, a web producer at The New York Times. Between his knowing how to innovate within an old hierarchical structure and my technical skills within a closed society developing context, we made for a good pair. He also made a beautiful film, Lumo, on rape as a tool of war in Congo.

Quickly we ran into problems unique to the country. For instance, there are three mobile providers with minimal interoperability. Having several SIM cards and or phones is common. Until a few months ago, Kurdistan was actually a long-distance call from the rest of Iraq, given it’s autonomous standing. A picture of the power lines (below) should give a sense that power is generally unreliable as well, failing often with rolling blackouts. Generators are rare and fuel surprisingly expensive.

Problems with the mobile provider proved to be a good lesson for our training on FrontlineSMS. After installing the system and showing it’s Arabic version, the demonstration failed when messages couldn’t be sent or received. After some head scratching, one of the participants realized that SIM cards get canceled after w certain amount of time, and replaced the SIM in the USB modem with the one in his own phone. Problem solved. The whole group jumped to celebrate an Arabic SMS sent through gateway also translated in Arabic. For me as a trainer, I’m going to purposely make sure the SIM is expired or doesn’t have money to encourage the solution coming from the trainees.

#IraqTech Training

Our Ushahidi training was similarly greeted with intrigue. The simple complexity of a text to map interface captured their imaginations. We first taught the, about GitHub and social coding. I’m a big fan of using this to explain transparency and accountability through code. And it puts the power into the users hand where they can fix problems rather than waiting for the company to release an update. Installing it as a  web app offline using XAMPP demoed this further.  While fairly complicated, everyone got it to work, some after tweaking the MySql database a few times, others after going into the PHP and adjusting a time zone error. While the group was technical, some even with programming experience, none had a good PHP editor. Syn was a good and quick FOSS solution. And of course FileZilla as a free FTP application.

A game to create the best looking and most interesting crisis map held over one half of the group while the others hacked the code to get it to work. After demoing Small World News projects like Alive in Afghanistan and Digital Democracy ones like Handheld Human Rights and Future Now. What they came back with was pretty astounding, from documenting instances of stolen oil and mapping media centers throughout the country, to loading layers showing green zone borders and tracking instances of violence.

An added benefit to installing a web app like Ushahidi means a small learning curve to learning other web app installs like Wordpress and Drupal. To go over the details of blogging, we initially set up techiraq.wordpress.com after talking about the benefited and detractors to some of the other blogging tools. A wide consensus kept coming back to the issue of localization being crucial to adoption. While many trainees were of Kurdish descent, I was surprised that there wasn’t more knowledge of the system since word press actually exists in Kurdish (though they don’t speak the Sorany dialect).

My favorite thing about installing web apps in Iraq was shouting LAMP stack! Explaining the Linux – Apache – MySql – PHP stack that makes up so much of the web these days was particularly fun in the land of  The Book of One Thousand and One Nights because I could keep referencing Aladdin’s magic LAMP. Mnemonic devices are different depending on context and this one certainly makes me smile.

Freedom Fone is an interactive audio programming system that allows for info dissemination beyond the barrier that some groups face: illiteracy. Unfortunately we ran into an additional barrier that prevented us from demoing a full-on install: Windows 7. How does one get to the root or boot from an external drive? I still have no idea.

I can’t stress the importance of having an integrated approach to trainings and explaining the various aspects of these tools, such as security. Handing over these systems without going into protection from the dangers in addition to leveraging the opportunities is irresponsible. We were able to cover the basics of security and anonymity, explaining how internet systems are structured and how to use the knowledge of that system to get to content that matters or hide oneself from being targeted. I was surprised that most had not used Proxies nor VPNs and did not even have a sense of SSL encryption. Their IPs are hopefully a little safer, and those with android phones feel a bit safer knowing about the Guardian Project.

“But there is no censorship.”
“We don’t have security issues.”

Two popular refrains that are unfortunately more lip service than reality. After a bit of prodding, people started to talk about a famous case from the previous year of a Kurdish blogger, Sardasht Osman, who was killed for speaking out. Despite writing under the pseudonym Sardo Zardasht, this didn’t protect him. His final words are a haunting testament to the process of democratization, a place where one can be killed over a poem.  In a transitioning society it is always important to remind people that a relative lack of problems doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. When describing our work in other closed societies and the reasons why open source is important for security, there were many nods of understanding throughout the group.

Low bandwidth is another issue like security that is rarely addressed in contexts where they’re most important. While lecturing and walking around the classroom, I noticed people looking at CNN, YouTube, Al Jazeera. 15 people feeding off one WiFi node in a hotel with one connection. And the IP of that connect was listed in Somalia at that. Needless to say it was crawling. The USB modems that were handed out didn’t help either. Introducing RSS feeds, readers & podcasts are key. Download in the background, overnight when Internet is fastest, and without ads. Plus, RSS can be useful for other sites, such as Ushahidi.

Our Twitter for techies overview included signing everyone up mostly to explain API architecture, how desktop apps function, and interoperability with other systems. One of the nice things about Ushahidi is that it takes and spits out info through the system. But what about a plant with a USB stick in the soil that is connected to Twitter and let’s you know that it needs to be watered. I said this referencing a conversation with John Tolva from IBM who noted in a recent talk that by 2012 we’ll have more censors online than humans. At mention of this, a collective hush fell over the crowd. Something I look for in trainings as a sign that I’m doing something right. How else can it be used? Synapses started firing. We started the hash tag #iraqtech to keep the conversation going

One of the participants, Saad, brought up an interesting challenge.  He has website that has no domain name, just IP address. The reason being a mafia-type system whereby since most Iraqis don’t have access to credit cards, they need to go through go-between who can order an international domain. One of the problems is extra charges but another quickly becomes security and efficiency. Want to create an independent citizen election monitoring site? Good luck explaining that one to a local man running a business. And Iraqi domains (.IQ) are currently tangled in a big web of state controlled bureaucracy (yes I will be buying MyBelinsky.IQ for a hilarious new startup once it changes. Think Myers-Briggs meets tongue-in-cheek).

To demo the social power of Twitter, I sent a message about the domain problem on my own Twitter account:

@mbelinsky: Hosting sites in Iraq: pay a local in cash to use their credit card for Swedish host. Profit by then holding it hostage #iraqtech

The response I received was from a friend doing MapKibera in Kenya:

@mikel: @mbelinsky same ridiculous problem here in Kenya. we’re waiting for mpesa integration for domain registration

The fact that a potential answer to an obstacle came almost instantly from halfway around the world was a powerful (and unplanned) testament to the new ways that the world works. Overall, the #iraqtech conversation that I started was joined by people in Netherlands, Morocco, USA, Egypt, and Italy, and followed by many others.

A key part of our training of trainers program was to push a Do It Yourself (DIY) model. Introducing “Let Me Google That For You” (Arabic version) was a fun way of taking tech support people and showing them that they can be so much more by applying their technical skills to more than just doing search queries for the people in their company. We disseminated some coding cheat sheets to better acquaint them with HTLM & PHP and introduced http://W3schools.com/ for easy web tutorials that the group can use to test themselves.

Overall it was a fantastic start and I’m excited to see what these initial seeds will sprout into. With elections coming in October and the US military (eventually) pulling out, I’m hoping that tech can be one of the factors that leads to increased stability, sustainability and peace for the people of Iraq.

Powerlines in Kurdistan by Steve Flamingo

********

Special Bonus:

I came to learn about Small World News through their amazing Alive in Baghdad project which employed Iraqi journalists to produce video packages each week about a variety of topics on daily life in Iraq during the war. If you haven’t seen it, the short episodes will surely make an impression on you. Some of my personal favorites are:

• Liquor Shops Open for Business
• Fake Pharmacies Plague Iraq
• After Saddam, Building Amarah

But most importantly, I’m meeting with some of the amazing grassroots women’s groups who are working to combat gender-based violence in the camps. Their stories are sometimes harrowing and often inspiring, and I don’t just want to speak with them myself – I want you to speak with them too.

On Wednesday, Digital Democracy is hosting an event at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Come join us for a livestream discussion with Haitian women, music, drinks and more.

Get your ticket today to attend the event and support our work with Haitian women.

Arielle Darr is a rising junior at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, where she’s working on her BA in Global Media and Entertainment. When I met Arielle, I was very impressed by the clear passion she feels for global issues. Synthesizing her interests in global studies, media, technology and entertainment, she created her own major that explores the social, political and cultural impacts of new media and entertainment on society from a global and digital perspective. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she works to apply concepts from many different fields to her research and examine how new media and entertainment mediate social issues and natural disasters worldwide. Currently, Arielle is the Communications Director of her college newspaper, The Occidental Weekly. During the school year, she has a weekly radio show called Free Beats, in which she plays music from various websites that she has legally downloaded for free. After each show, listeners can visit her blog for links to each song played to easily download the music they hear. At Dd, she’s helping with our communications from email and Facebook to event planning and office management.

Ellen Knuti is a global traveler with a passion for photography and social movements. Born and raised in Chicago, she’s a recent New York transplant who is fluent in Spanish, French and Wolof. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a degree in Letters, Ellen relocated to Buenos Aires where she worked as a photographer for The Argentina Independent. She’s currently working on organizing images from the photography workshop during Digital Democracy’s April trip to Haiti. Inspired by the photos taken by the Haitian women, she’s working to create an exhibit and book to showcase them. She also writes for Design Bureau magazine and works as a freelance photographer.

Huge thanks to Ellen & Arielle for all their great work this summer!

Since arriving in Nairobi this week, Rachel and Cody, along with Media Manager Tegan Bukowski, have spent time with the local tech community at iHub Nairobi and met with groups in preparation for the first element of the project: leading digital photography workshops with youth in Kibera later this month. This series of workshops, centered around themes of peace, is based on Digital Democracy’s Project Einstein photography training curriculum, and will allow Kenyan youth to document what they believe represents, promotes, and maintains peace in their communities, and will then share their photographs with their peers and with their communities through public exhibitions. Check out the amazing work they’re up to! Visit their website for frequent updates, photos and more.

Liz Hodes testifies at NYC Council Tech Committee on Open Data

Introduction 029-2010, seeking to establish open data standards for all city agencies. Int. 029-2010 (formerly Intro. 991-2009) aims to increase government transparency and facilitate easier access to public data.

Beyond the ‘good government’ benefits of this legislation, the bill will also unlock City data to enable web developers and entrepreneurs to interact with City government in new and unforeseen ways. Data published under this legislation will be readable by any computer device, including laptops and phones, for innovative developments. This Gov 2.0 inspired transparency legislation targets application developers, startups, small businesses, and academics with the ultimate goal of strengthening the connection between government and the public, while re-energizing the small business-tech sectors and highlighting New York’s digital future.

You can read her entire testimony below. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas as we continue to push for open data as a crucial part of digital literacy in our schools and of democracy in the 21st century. For more information, please visit the New York Council Committee on Technology Blog or watch the video (Liz’s presentation begins at the 1:06:40 minute mark).

Digital Democracy’s NYC City Council Testimony – Council Tech Committee – Open Data / Int. 029-2010

We launched Ethiopia Vote Report with a local partner in Ethiopia knowing that the turnout would be low. The project was entirely a volunteer effort and without the resources to secure the system and train people in how to use it in a dangerous and complicated place like Ethiopia would have been foolish. Nevertheless, we were able to have an application translated in Amharic and a number of first hand reports that otherwise might not have made it to the English language.

Ethiopia Vote Monitor

Our goal is to redefine what democracy can mean to people by facilitating an understanding of civic engagement. In the lead up to election day, this means a campaign to teach people what their relationship is to government and how they themselves can start to make it better. Educating citizens in the use of free tools is key to supporting individual freedoms. Tools such as mapping, blogging, media production, and search creates a powerful infrastructure that supports transparency and accountability, and prevents violence.

While this system only received 15 reports, on election day itself, it was visited 62 times. I’m confident that number is part of an exponential rise in the number of people who actually heard the message contained within those reports.

Without any large-scale deployments of citizen monitoring of elections, it’s impossible to know the true benefit or impact. But I’m confident that as people around the world begin to see these kinds of projects deployed in their own countries and in their own languages, it will begin to redefine the very concept of democracy and help to inspire new forms of citizen engagement.

But here in NYC, my task was to engage the kids in a conversation about what they’d like to see in the year 2020. Future Now is creating NYC’s Digital Storybook – a citywide youth  project about school, community, and  dreams. What better way to explore these themes than a mapping exercise  to literally add and remove items in their communities and on their streets.

Future Now Sponsors

Every 25 minutes, a different set of students filters through, listens to a short presentation and gets their hands on 3 computers, kindly supplied by us and Tekserve. Using a modified Ushahidi mapping tool with data overlayed from the NYC Data Mine, to give a real-life example of how opening government data can impact the lives of everyday New Yorkers and lead to a smarter city. In this case, I overlayed “Bike Racks” and “Low-Bridges”, as some of the only sets available in the Geo Data Catalog, but it proved effective. My example was built from bike racks, stating that in my vision of  the year 2020, gasoline would be expensive, the environment polluted, cars more scarce, and so encouraging the city to place a bike rack in front of my office would enable people to bike to work, making the city more peaceful, healthier and cleaner. Plus, if the government thought a bike rack existed where one didn’t, I could let them know about their error.

To make it personal, I then asked them what they would do if they knew how much money their school was getting compared to the neighboring school. Not only did that set off a flurry of ideas from the students, but the teachers got pretty excited as well. You can visit the website or see it embedded below to see their ideas. Of course their private information remains private.

Digital democracy has engaged with participatory collaborative learning around the world, and each context reveals new insights for culturally-specific programming. Our scavenger hunt model allows for a natural progression to the conversation and working in groups helps to ensnare the attention of more distractable youth.

“OMG kids are on Facebook!” is one of my favorite challenges. Two skateboarders had finished mapping the perfect place for a skatepark in their community ahead of the other students and got distracted, finding themselves wandering the internet. Instead of telling them to go back to our site, I told them that no other students had added a photo to their posting so could they find the best photo to go along with their post, to make it easier for a politician to see exactly what they had in mind. The hunt was on, and they indeed found a great photo, without another distraction. I keep reiterating that this is a key aspect to the model of 21st century education – information management. Can students find information that is going to add value to their post. Do they know whether it’s creative commons and how publicly it can be used. There are still many steps before getting to that point, but this is a start.

A few real problems did pop up. School in a park, Open Road Park to be exact, is beautiful, but makes it hard to work with too much tech. The one good projector was taken by the Google Team, which meant improvising on the fly. The bigger problem though, was spell-check. When students were entering in their main body of information, a line would show up automatically under misspelled words. Every time students would backtrack and try to figure out the right spelling. This happened so often that I estimate it took about twice the time to create each entry as it otherwise would have. In the places where there was no spell-check, like in the titles, the entries are littered with bad spelling.

Solar Flashlight & Kazoo

Our work confronts language problems head on, mainly working with visual media such as maps, photos, videos, etc that can allow people to connect beyond these barriers. It’s important to consider language barriers even with native English speakers as well. And in NYC, it’s even more complicated, with our students on Saturday being from places as varied as Tibet, Thailand, Congo, Madagascar and Brooklyn.

At the end of all the trainings with us World Up, Google, IDEO, friends we love, Toshiba, each student group was part of a performance. step, musical theatre, mapping, graffiti, gardening, accapella, and cheerleading. My favorite (I know I’m not supposed to say that), was the group showing off their solar panel creations. Their English wasn’t very good, as half were newly from Japan, but their tech was amazing. They hack solar panels into all sorts of things, whether a portable charger for the 3rd world, a flashlight, or a musical instrument that sounds like an electronic kazoo. “It’s very efficiency!” exclaimed one of the leaders of the project.

The diversity of skills, backgrounds and ideas reminds me how much I love this city. I just hope that we stop censoring it and start supporting more of these kinds of initiatives for a better future.

Thanks to the Department of Education and everyone who came together to make this possible, to Humanity in Action, Pioneers and Andrew Rasiej for the development of similar project connecting schools in Amsterdam and NYC called Open My City, to DJ Moni for letting us know about Future Now and to Jerri Chou for dropping the LES by to check us out.

]]> http://digital-democracy.org/2010/06/07/future-now-nyc%e2%80%99s-digital-storybook/feed/ 1 http://digital-democracy.org/2010/06/01/ddtv-episode-12-the-dreams-of-stateless-youth/ http://digital-democracy.org/2010/06/01/ddtv-episode-12-the-dreams-of-stateless-youth/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:14:22 +0000 Liz Hodes http://digital-democracy.org/?p=1837

In this episode of DdTv venture back with us to January 2008 to see the origins of Project Einstein. Mark and Emily spend several days working with youth in Kutupalong refugee camp in Southern Bangladesh, home to thousands of Rohingya refugees from Burma. Stateless, the Rohingya, a muslim ethnic group from Western Burma have fled to Bangladesh to escape the human rights violations they’ve suffered in Burma, where they are also denied citizenship.

In the camp, Mark and Emily train a group of youth ages 9-14 in digital photography skills, enabling the kids to explore where in their lives they encounter such universal themes as peace, happiness, the disabled and sadness. See their photographs, listen to them as they reveal their dreams, their hopes for the future, and become the inspiration behind the creation of Project Einstein.

Our coalition is working to ensure that the there continues to be a leading force in pushing for the security and inclusion of Haitian women in recovery processes, especially those still occupying some 1400 camps in and around Port Au Prince. Please see the Press Release and short video on sexual and gender based violence in the camps.

Press Release- Supplemental-SGBV in Haiti