Visualizing Data to Drive Social Change

Colleen Kaman ( Bio  /   Posts )  |  Monday, June 14, 2010 UTC

Several weeks ago, PopTech held a Chicago salon that focused on social mapping, and the ability to leverage networked technologies and old-fashioned communication alike to express local knowledge and perceptions as well as economic data and other figures that are often otherwise practically inaccessible to citizens.

Two of the featured speakers offered ideas about how networked mapping and the innovative application of multiple technologies can more deeply reveal the dynamics of problems as well as drive social change.

Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi, was in attendance to talk about how the open-source mapping project has used the aggregation of information to respond to emergencies in near real-time.


Patrick Meier at the PopTech salon on Social Mapping and Social Change, May 2010.

The Ushahidi platform relies on distributed data collected via text message, email, and web that is then visualized on a map or timeline. The project first began as a way to help track citizen reports of post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. Since then, Meier suggests in his talk, Ushahidi has been used by numerous organizations around the world for a variety of situations. These include tracking elections in a number of countries, enhancing Al Jazeera’s coverage of the January 2009 violence in Gaza, supporting WildLife Direct’s citizen wildlife tracking initiative in Kenya, and identifying clean up efforts in the wake of record snowstorms in the Washington D.C. metro area this past year. Most recently, a nonprofit environmental health group called the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has deployed Ushahidi (in conjunction with a kite camera project that PopTech previously reviewed) to monitor the coastline in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Ushahidi had FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) calling in on day five, saying, folks, whatever you do, don’t stop mapping, you’re saving lives."

Around minute 4:50 in his talk, Meier explains Ushahidi’s role in the Haitian earthquake response and recovery. A number of organizations marshaled the assistance of thousands of individual volunteers, who translated and aggregated text messages as well as United Nations situation reports and news stories onto a Ushahidi platform customized for the Haitian disaster. The distributed response also took advantage of the country’s cellular technology infrastructure, which remained operational, to distribute a mobile “short code” that made it possible for affected Haitians to send text messages at no cost. The use of text messages made it possible for crisis teams to handle individual requests – about 1,000 text messages a day – a level of response normally impossible during crises. The Ushahidi platform also made it possible for disaster responders to filter requests by geographic area or type of need. Meier recalls that these affordances made it possible for near real-time communications in devastated Haitian communities on a scale “completely unprecedented in the history of disaster response.”

“Ushahidi had FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) calling in on day five, saying, folks, whatever you do, don’t stop mapping, you’re saving lives."

PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Erik Hersman and Ory Okolloh are also part of the Ushahidi leadership team. Hersman spoke at PopTech in 2008. For more on Ushahidi’s Haiti response, check out this video.

Laura Kurgan, director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University, also spoke at the Chicago salon. The Lab is a “think- and action-tank” that visualizes complex political and social data, such as incarceration rates and financial expenditures, that help re-envision the relationship between architecture, criminal justice, and community investment.


Laura Kurgan at the PopTech salon on Social Mapping and Social Change, May 2010.

In her talk, Kurgan focuses on the lab’s mapping and visualization efforts in New Orleans.

Reconstruction efforts in response to Hurricane Katrina have helped drive the radical transformation of public infrastructures like education, health, and housing. Yet Kurgan notes that the criminal justice system has largely been ignored. In fact, her maps reveal that in neighborhoods like Central City, which has the highest incarceration rates in New Orleans, per capita spending on prisons has increased since rebuilding began.

Kurgan points out, “the predominant governing institution” in neighborhoods like Central City is prison.

Her maps reveal that money is spent “on the neighborhood, but not in the neighborhood.” In other words, Kurgan points out, “the predominant governing institution” in neighborhoods like Central City is prison.

Here, Kurgan’s lab has also served as an intervention, helping to map the work of local organizations working in Central City in order to strengthen the connections between them.

For more on Kurgan’s work in New Orleans, check out the lab’s recent report on the subject.

Laura Kurgan also spoke at PopTech in 2009, watch her talk here.

Graphic visualizations of the Chicago salon by Peter Durand can be seen here.

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