Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/70379
Sexual Harassment Incidents Reported by Egyptian Women Ushahidi (ushahidi.com) is an open-source platform that enables the deployment of crowdsourced interac- tive mapping applications with Web forms/e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS) and Twitter support (as infor- mation sources for incident reporting). It can be freely downloaded and deployed on a local server by anyone with the appropriate technical expertise or used as a free online service, Crowdmap (crowdmap.com), hosted by the Ushahidi team. Mobile apps are available for access- ing Ushahidi on smartphones and tablets. Ushahidi's intuitive "dynamic timeline" feature helps users visually track crowdsourced reports on a map and filter the data by time. Visitors of Ushahidi-powered crowdmaps can vote for the credibility of individual reports (thumbs up/down), and a crowdmap administra- tor also can tag individual reports as "verified" or leave them with the "unverified" label. Ushahidi has published on its community Web site a "guide to verification" that gives a brief overview of the considerations to use when verifying crowdsourced reports. "For me, what has always been the most important aspect of the work we do has remained simple: build- ing a tool that makes it easy for individuals and groups to tell their stories, and making it easy for these sto- ries to be mapped and visualized," says Ory Okolloh, former executive director of Ushahidi. Ushahidi and Crowdmap have been successfully used to empower local communities by crowdsourcing and mapping real-time information from multiple data streams on all sorts of topics (e.g., monitoring elections in various world countries; pollwatch2011.com) as well as during times of crisis such as earthquakes, tsunamis and floods. One of the most interesting (and unusual) deployments of Ushahidi is HarassMap, a sexual harassment map of incidents reported by Egyptian women (see Figure 4; harassmap.org/?l=en_US). Run by a team of volunteer technical experts and activists knowledgeable about the issue of sexual harassment in Egypt, HarassMap gives Egyptian women a way to anonymously report incidences of sexual harass- ment as soon as they happen, using mobile-phone SMS messaging, e-mail, Twitter (by sending a tweet with the hashtag #harassmap) or filling in a Web form. By mapping these reports online and highlighting the problem's severity and pervasiveness, the entire system is meant to act as an advocacy, response and prevention tool (women can use the map to learn about "problem locations" where incidents tend to happen the most to avoid them, while authorities can Figure 4. HarassMap users can filter sexual-harassment incidents by type (categories) and time (using Ushahidi's "dynamic timeline" feature). intensify their presence in these areas). HarassMap received the 2011 United Nations World Summit Youth Award under the "Power 2 Women" category. Crowdmaps demonstrate the "power of the crowds" and citizen engagement in various distributed sensing and incident-reporting scenarios, where large numbers of sampling points (citizens acting as sensors) and loca- tions are needed to more accurately draw and continu- ously update the complete picture of a given situation. The latter is essential to provide the public and decision makers with better and much-needed "situational aware- ness" of the problem as well as assist in various man- agement and prevention operations. Maged N. Kamel Boulos is associate professor at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom, and founder and editor-in-chief of International Journal of Health Geographics; e-mail: mnkboulos@ieee.org. JUNE 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 25