day forty-eight: CRMA vs Ushahidi!

It would seem that the compound is running out of space, but at $15000 per month, who can afford to expand?  For all my wanderings, the thought of working and sleeping in the same room may seem nightmarish but it’s been nothing shy of delightful.  Tired of waiting around for the UN to bring their ideas about crisis database management systems to me, I thought I’d get started on my own.  Although for anyone who’s a fan of open source software and crisis mapping, the Ushahidi platform would have been the first thing to come to their mind too!

The birthplace of GeoGeo Solutions' 1st working platform?

The idea behind a South Sudanese Ushahidi Tension Tracker is simple; radios already report in incidents from a community level to the county to the state; I train government staff to verify, code and enter that data online via their new laptops and ISP sticks, my baby does the rest.  With a laptop on either side, I’ve been on it a week.  Soon, confirmed reports of tension will be catalogued by its location, conflict categories and reliability.  Throw in a few extra boundary layers, charts, and cluster mapping techniques and she’ll look no half bad.  “Open and free” has been the motto of CEWERS from day one so here you go… my first GeoGeo Solution?

Having spent most of my mapping time pointing out what X and Y was, using HTML, Java and KML has been refreshing…I think even Bruce would be proud.

This weekend was my chance to become familiarised with the UN’s database system for crisis mapping, the CRMA tool.  A two week training squeezed into two days was surprisingly painless…though the feeling that the system had been created way before the nature of conflict had been considered is unsurprisingly apparent.  The idea that one incident can often fall into several boxes of causes was never considered… I shouldn’t be too harsh here…but if you can’t catalogue a conflict incident into more than one category, how are you supposed to show that it’s all related?  So after a three week delay, it was less than joyous to see that, as well as being inadequate for showing the relationships between indicators (lack of service provision, food insecurity, small arms, etc), it could barely be mapped.  Not so good if you want to visualise and bring awareness of crisis situations to people and government… CRMA said it needed a few months to iron out the creases, I told him the referendum’s in less than two…Ushahidi 1, CRMA 0…?

Outside of work there hasn’t been too much to dance around to.  During the week, the roof of our compound does make a nice late night place to jam to the stars whilst the weekends can sometimes bring a BBQ or two my way.  If I take a break during the day, I can enjoy my roof top views of our everlasting road works that shake the very ground our containers sit on.

Layer number three hundred and sixty one being laid down.

With only a few nights left in my office bedroom before heading back to the Bonnieland, time seems to have been speeding up.  I still can’t tell if that’s the approaching deadlines or my excitement in returning.