Anne Nelson
Ground Truth from the Grassroots
Discusión de casos de innovación:
Map Kibera
The projects run by Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron, Map Kibera and GroundTruth
Initiative, have been properly lauded as new media projects. But their greater
accomplishment lies in executing media projects in a way that is both modern and
ancient: by working through community.
The history of media development is littered with big, ambitious projects that
are incubated in the United States and delivered “in a box” to developing countries,
ready for assembly without consultation with the recipients and without adjust-
ment to the realities on the ground. American graduate students return from the
field with tales to tell: shipments of computers whose plugs didn’t fit the outlets,
Internet connections that were instantly monopolized by teenage boys looking for
porn, flash-ridden websites that take hours to download for users without broad-
banda.
The commercially driven tech culture in the United States is currently under-
going a reexamination by educators and social critics. Is more, faster media always
mejor? How do we match the powerful new tools to the actual needs of society
without losing sight of our goals?1
Our traditional framework for media technology deserves even closer scrutiny
when extended to developing countries. Information is vital to life, as vital as food.
Each culture uses the same nutrients but in many different forms, depending on
the local culture and environment. The same is true of information: positivo
results can come in many forms, depending on the situation.
En 2009, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron launched their media project in Kibera,
a sprawling, impoverished district of Nairobi, Kenya, that has become a regular
Anne Nelson teaches “New Media and Development Communication” at Columbia’s
School of International and Public Affairs (Erica Hagen studied with her there in
2007). Nelson consults on international media development for a number of founda-
tions and government agencies. Formerly director of the Committee to Protect
Journalists and the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, she
writes on media issues for PBS MediaShift (http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/anne-nel-
son/) and the Center for International Media Assistance. She tweets as anelsona.
© 2011 Anne Nelson
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stop on the international aid itinerary. Maron had already made a contribution to
the field through his work with OpenStreetMap, which enlists local collaborators
to help create and populate digital maps to serve their communities and thus help
advance social and economic development. Hagen (whom I’m proud to claim as a
former student) brought other unique talents to the table. She is a fine writer and,
even more importantly, an excellent listener who brings genuine curiosity to all she
does. I’m particularly fascinated by her work in the Lava Collective, which prac-
tices a dance form called “contact improvisation.”2 There is no fixed choreography
or plot. Dancers launch movements from different parts of the stage and adjust
their steps to each other’s motions. For the audience, the effect is like watching gor-
geous atomic particles moving through a dream.
It occurred to me that creative collaboration shares some qualities with dance,
and with a media project that evolves in partnership with a local community.
Neither can function under a “top-down”
acercarse, both require active listening and
respect for all participants, and both achieve
outcomes that were unimaginable when the
exercise began.
Their greater
accomplishment lies
in executing media
projects in a way that
is both modern and
ancient: by working
through community.
In Kibera, Hagen and Maron set out to
match media tools to the specific needs of the
comunidad, and they trusted the people of
Kibera to understand their own needs better
than anyone else. One of the many beauties of
their projects, Map Kibera and GroundTruth
Initiative, is the way they bring a grand idea
full circle. One of their building blocks is the
Ushahidi mapping platform, which was creat-
ed by developers in Nairobi only three years
ago in response to the need to chart election-
related violence. Since then, this open-source platform has spread around the
world and ignited the imaginations of countless intersecting technological and
advocacy communities. (This winter it popped up on my computer screen as a way
to help New Yorkers dig each other out of a blizzard.)
Nairobi has become a celebrated incubator for digital media. At first glance,
this might seem counterintuitive. As of 2009, cell phone penetration in Kenya
reached 19.3 millón, ranking it 41st in the world, but the country had fewer than
four million Internet users out of a total population of 40 million.3 The CIA World
Factbook has more discouraging words for other aspects of the national commu-
nication system: “The inadequate, fixed-line telephone system is small and ineffi-
cient; trunks are primarily microwave radio relay; business data commonly trans-
ferred by a very small aperture terminal (VSAT) system.”4
So how has Nairobi become an international engine for innovation? El
answer appears to lie in the people and in the unusual openness of Nairobi’s tech
comunidad, which is listening to community efforts to define need and letting
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those efforts serve as the engines of creativity. Mientras tanto, community partnership
seems to be built into the very DNA of the projects.
THE POWER TO MAP
This philosophy was central to the development of Map Kibera and GroundTruth
Initiative. As Hagen points out, maps of Kibera existed before their project, pero
they were charted by outsiders who didn’t always follow the same criteria that res-
idents would choose. Mapmaking is one of those banal subjects that can become
intensely political if examined closely. Under various historical circumstances,
maps have started wars, stolen natural resources, and displaced vast populations
from their homes. For centuries, the ability to make maps has rested in the hands
of those few with the technology to create them and the resources to disseminate
a ellos. Ahora, digital media challenge that informational power structure, much as
they have challenged everything from journalism to medicine. This creates the
possibility for residents of local communities to create maps that help them lever-
age representation in other spheres, such as electoral politics and social services.
Kibera was an audacious setting for a mapping experiment. De hecho, the area
had been “overmapped” by the traditional aid agenda. Like other cities from
Phnom Penh to Chichicastenango, Kibera had become a magnet for international
aid. In Hagen’s words, it is “saturated with international NGOs, community-based
organizaciones, and faith-based groups.” This has locked the local population in the
crosshairs of the objectified foreign gaze, and Kiberans don’t like it. Hagen points
out that residents complain of the negative picture of their community generated
by news organizations, a grievance that is repeated by marginalized societies
around the world. Their homes are used to illustrate what my one-time BBC doc-
umentary team used to call “grinding pov”—a relentless cliché composed of
grabbed video footage and interviews, whose resentful subjects never get to ask a
question in return.
But the founders of Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative understood that
most people love their homes and their communities, even as they share the desire
to improve them. The challenge was to give them the tools to represent themselves,
on their own terms, to the outside world. The enterprise began with literally
“putting Kibera on the map” by locating Kiberans’ own frames of reference.
Hagen and Maron arrived in Kibera with the seed of an idea, but implement-
ing it required constant adaptation to the community and the environment.
Although they had hired a local “fixer” to help with logistics, they had to let him
go within the first week because of his incompetence, leaving them to coordinate
all of the logistics themselves. In reviewing their initial steps, one can see that
building the right local relationships was far more critical than obtaining the most
advanced technology. The team’s first step was to establish partnerships with three
key organizations, two of them local and the third working on a national level to
develop resources to promote transparency and governance.
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The next step was to recruit 13 young people, 5 women and 8 men aged 19 a
34, one person from each village. The selection criteria emphasized having the
motivation to learn and support community development and required only basic
familiarity with computers; de nuevo, they stressed community ties far more than
advanced technical skills. In preparing their teams to begin mapping, Hagen and
Maron avoided imposing templates and menus, instead asking their team to note
“points of interest” without telling them what those points might be. As it turned
afuera, the young Kiberans’ points of interest included clinics, toilets, water points,
NGO offices, electric lights, and some businesses. These were entered into an
OpenStreetMap application.
The next phase involved youth from Nairobi who had professional geographi-
cal information system (GIS) habilidades. They brought Flip cameras to the enterprise to
begin adding multimedia components. Hagen and Maron had to readjust their
expectations again when they learned that Kibera residents were resistant to being
filmed—perhaps worn down by too many BBC crews seeking “grinding pov.” The
documentary function of cameras was then transformed into a participatory
proceso, in which the youth recorded their own teams’ mapping activities.
According to Hagen, “Sustainability and community impact were clearly much
greater challenges than the map production had ever been.” Within the Kibera
comunidad, the Internet was initially perceived not as a participatory tool for
change but as a way to seek top-down information and chat with friends.
“OLD” MEDIA HAS ITS PLACE
One way the team created an inclusive environment was by using hybrid media.
This is an essential point. Many media projects have foundered because those
implementing them are wedded to a new technology, but the people they’re trying
to reach inhabit a different media landscape. Sin embargo, other efforts have paired
legacy media (es decir., pre-digital print and broadcast formats) with digital media and
multiplied the utility of both. One example of this is Zimbabwe’s FreedomFone,
which provides radio programming through cell phone delivery systems at no cost
to recipients.
Hagen and Maron went back to basics by including a very old technology:
paper. The teams made paper printouts of the map to post around the communi-
ty, and members of the community could then participate by drawing and writing
on the maps. Their additions were later integrated into the digital platform—a
perfect hybrid between paper and digital. This approach is particularly interesting
because it addressed the alienating effect that digital media can have on different
generaciones. Young people tend to be early adopters, while less tech-adept elders
can feel both left out of the process and dethroned from positions of authority. Cualquier
community-based information project should take this dynamic into account and
approach it with respect and sensitivity.
As the work continued, the mapping was combined with experiments with cit-
izen journalism to offer a vision of the community’s self-representation. De nuevo, el
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approaches taken were subject to trial and error. The group experimented with
RSS feeds (“really simple syndication,” or email-based notifications) y
Wordpress blogs with some success, but an attempt at using an SMS platform was
less fruitful. A citizen video news project took shape through a new website, kiber-
anewsnetwork.org, with information directed both to other Kenyans and to the
outside world. The local news soon began to serve as an antidote to the Western
media’s “hell-hole” narrative of the past.
The project began to have an impact on the participants’ sense of self. El
identity of the project’s local partners suddenly shifted from poorly educated slum
dwellers to that of the creators and purveyors of something valuable to society.
Mapmaking in particular was regarded as supplying “something missing that is
seen as a basic entitlement: to exist on a map.”
The project participants decided early on that their news products should be
curated. Kenyans had been burned by exploitative news coverage in the past,
notably in the 2007–2008 elections, when traditional media fed the flames of elec-
toral violence. So at the same time the participants were experimenting with new
forms of citizen journalism, they suggested using an old-fashioned but proven
mechanism—having a trustworthy editorial board to validate worthy content.
En este punto, the audience for the Voice of Kibera lies predominantly outside
el pais. The greatest number of visitors are from the United States, seguido
by Great Britain, Kenya, and Germany; it reaches 83 countries in all. It will be
extremely interesting to see how this audience evolves with time.
Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative were initiated by two people who
belong to a broader global community working in media technology and develop-
mento, and their core ideas resonate in its echo chamber. Over the past few years,
top-down “development-think” has been challenged in several arenas, incluido
the international humanitarian community, which brings assistance to victims of
natural and man-made disasters. In the past, this work conformed to traditional
charity models, sometimes with negative results.5 Many aid projects depend on
harvesting data from research “subjects” rather than engaging them in dialogue,
thus consigning local populations to passive roles as victims and aid recipients.
Another problem confronted was the notion among some indigenous peoples that
being photographed steals their souls. This problem was addressed by photogra-
phers who made the commitment to immerse themselves in the communities they
were documenting and to earn the peoples’ trust by living among them, escuchando
to them, and making them partners in the documentation process.6
A recent parallel to this process arose in 2009, when a group of international
humanitarian and development organizations formed a working group called
Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities. When the Haiti earthquake
hit in January 2010, the consortium took measures to engage Haitians as active
partners in the relief effort, especially in the media and communications spheres.
It is no coincidence that many new digital tools—especially the Ushahidi mapping
platform—were prominent in this effort.7 The overall philosophy was based on the
principle that the most effective individuals in rescue and relief efforts are often
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members of the affected population themselves as they reach out to friends, fami-
ly, and neighbors. Therefore they should be recognized as partners in relief efforts
instead of recipients of charity, and their local knowledge should be appreciated as
an invaluable and irreplaceable resource.
De hecho, harnessing local knowledge to guide local policymaking is the core
democratic principle at stake. Erica Hagen has been on the road recently, attend-
ing conferences and collecting ideas for new initiatives, but Map Kibera is off and
running—as Hagen reports, “I’m even finding it hard to follow my own project
from afar!” Map Kibera has taken on its own momentum, and perhaps this is the
greatest single marker of its success.
1. Por ejemplo, el 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study reported that young Americans between
the ages of 8 y 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours a day on digital devices. It noted a close cor-
rection between the heaviest users and poor grades. Ver
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html.
2. See http://lava-dance.blogspot.com/.
3. No es sorprendente, no one had (or has) a proximate sense of Kibera’s population. Hagen’s educated
guess is 250,000, but she reports that other estimates (some with their own agendas) range from
170,070 a 1.5 millón.
4. CIA World Factbook.
5. Por ejemplo, some aid workers have reported that flooding an area with surplus food relief after
a catastrophe can depress local agricultural markets and limit farmers’ ability to regain their liveli-
hoods and sense of self-worth.
6. Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, and Margaret Morton have been practitioners of this approach.
7. See http://www.knightfoundation.org/news/press_room/
knight_press_releases/detail.dot?id=37700.
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