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Steps to set up your strategy

Ushahidi is a tool, not a strategy. It can help you achieve a goal, but only if you have first decided what you want to do. The decision to deploy Ushahidi must be preceded by a larger set of questions about what you want to accomplish. This section will take you through a process of building this strategy and the design of your campaign to reach your goals. While each organization will have its own approach to scoping out a project, one way to explore an Ushahidi deployment is through the following steps:

1. Define your Objectives and Goals

Defining what you are trying to accomplish is key to success. Understanding your group or organization’s goals and the individual objectives required to achieve them will help you define your specific activities and how the Ushahidi platform or Crowdmap can help you accomplish them.

 

2. Identify Partners Partnerships are key to the success of your project.

From local CSOs to government ministries and international organizations, partners give access to data, volunteers, local knowledge, and resources (both technical and financial).

3. Understand what data is necessary to achieve your goals

Take the time to think about why you are collecting data in the first place. What kind of data do you need to collect and how will a specific analyst use that data? Will the stories or reports you aggregate be used for evidence in a human rights campaign or election monitoring project, or will they be used to build situational awareness around a crisis? Is the effort a first step to putting health facilities on a map, or is your effort a means of tracking the supply chain signals necessary for keeping those hospitals stocked with a specific drug?

4. Design your approach to Data

Different partners may require data to be in specific formats or to adhere to certain standard. Different use cases will also necessitate different forms of data. Designing your data collection method and data model will be critical to your success. It is here when you will decide if Ushahidi is the tool for your project, or just one of several tools that you will need to reach your goals.

5. Design your Team

Ushahidi can provide the platform for collecting and processing data, but it is not a silver bullet. Staff and participants must be organized and managed to do the work. What kind of staffing is necessary to collect, cluster, deduplicate, translate, geolocate, verify, analyze, and visualize data from an Ushahidi deployment?

6. Secure Resources

No project proceeds without people, funding, and the technical resources to achieve your goals. What resources do you need to make your project a success?

7. Establish Project Management Processes

Timelines, volunteer schedules, technical development work plans, and terms of reference. Scheduling shifts and staff time is a critical path to success. Volunteers need structure, and data needs consistent handling.

Define your goals and objectives

Thinking about the goals and objectives of your Ushahidi project is one of the most important investments you can make to set up your team and organization for success. At Ushahidi, we differentiate goals and objectives from activities. Each activity in your deployment should be a tractable action that contributes to one or more objectives. Each objective should be a phase or thematic area of your overall project, designed to help you meet an overarching goal.

For example, during an election monitoring deployment, the primary goal may be to guarantee transparency around voting. One objective under that goal might be to capture reports of fraud. A common activity in fraud tracking is to enable citizens to report election fraud via SMS. Another activity is to map and categorize all polling stations. Another is the process of verifying reports of fraud and mapping them by polling station. Each contributes to the overall goal.

Stating your Goals

Articulating your goal outside of the technology is a good exercise. You should try to complete the following sentence: we are mobilizing (who) to do (what) so that we can (why)? The Who is your target participants. The What is one or more key objectives. The Why is one or more goals.

For example: we are mobilizing women to document incidents of sexual harrassment so that we can create consciousness of how prevalent the behavior is and create data necessary to obtain donor funding around education in the effects of harrassment.

Building your objectives

You may need to meet one or more objectives to meet a specific goal or goals. Break down the goal into phases so that you can state these objectives to your team. A harassment mapping project might have the following as objectives:

1. Document incidents of sexual harassment in 15 neighborhoods over a period of 6 months.

2. Develop a report for government ministries and local NGOs about harassment based on the data

3. Draft a funding request for donors to support additional education work in sexual harassment’s effects targeted at men in 15 neighborhoods.

Turning Objectives into tangible actions

Each objective will need to have activities set against it. For example, the objective of “documenting incidents of sexual harassment in 15 neighborhoods over a period of 6 months” might break down as follows:

• Recruit 30 neighborhood coordinators to educate women about the initiative and ask them to commit to
• Train neighborhood coordinators in the research methodology
• Deploy the Ushahidi platform in partnership with the local telco
• Collect observations of sexual harassment

What is the difference between goals and objectives?

If a given project has achieved the organization’s clearly stated goal and objectives, then the project is considered successful. To make it clear, consider that the goal is achieved by accomplishing a number of objectives; objectives are achieved by producing a set of outputs; and outputs are produced by implementing a series of activities, which are concrete events or services.”

- Ushahidi Blog

Sometimes, Ushahidi is part of the first steps of a whole new initiative. This is exciting and spending the time to think first about your goals regardless of technology can set you up for success.

Identify partners

Partnerships are key to the success of your project. From local CSOs to government ministries and international organizations, partners give access to data, volunteers, local knowledge, and resources (both technical and financial). The structure of many crowdsourcing efforts are also becoming multi-institutional collaborations, described by the mantra of “small pieces, loosely joined.” One group handles mapping, another translation, and a third performs data analysis.

Whether you will be running an Ushahidi instance solely within one organization or as a mutli-institutional partnership, it is wise to map out the space where other organizations can contribute to your effort.

Choosing your Partners

When choosing partners, consider several factors:

1. Is the organization undertaking work in a similar context?

2. How trusted is the organization in the communities that you would like reach?

3. What contextual knowledge would the partner provide?

4. Can the partner share its resources, including workspaces and local relationships?

5. How open is the partner to working in new ways and facing the challenges of learning in a collaborative dynamic?

In information insecure settings such as conflict-driven complex humanitarian crisis and human rights reporting trusted partnerships are very important; not only for the success of the project, but often for the safety of those involved.

Understanding your partner’s working environment

If you have a partnership with a CSO, community-based organization or partner in a limited digital environment plan ahead with both resources and time to ensure that they are able to join meetings and conference calls. If possible, consider arranging a meeting in their location, especially if they are linked to communities that you intend to crowdsource information with. Experiencing the reality of how a digitally limited environment will connect with your Ushahidi project. This can provide valuable design lessons going forward.

Getting to know each other and building trust

Discovering and shaping how your partners are working together takes time. During the 2010 Uchaguzi referendem, the project drew together 5 major partners. It was essential to bring them together for face-to-face meeting not only for planning, but to help each of the principles to recognize each others’ strengths and how their organizations might complement one other. Face-toface meetings were also the way that partners worked out their expectations of each other and defined (and honed) their respective roles and responsibilities.

Understand what data is necessary to achieve your goals

Because you are planning on using Ushahidi as part of your project, you will be working with information and data. Frequently projects not only collect data in many different ways, but also share data; sometime publicly or with partners. Thinking closely and working with your team members to design how your data will be collected, organized, and shared using Ushahidi or Crowdmap is key.

Take the time to think about why you are collecting data in the first place. What kind of data do you need to collect and how will a specific analyst use that data? Will the stories or reports you aggregate be used for evidence in a human rights campaign or election monitoring project, or will they be used to build situational awareness around a crisis? Is the effort a first step to putting health facilities on a map, or is your effort a means of tracking the supply chain signals necessary for keeping those hospitals stocked with a specific drug?

Understanding how the data will be used will help you define the structure of the collection, the methods of curation and verification, and your approach to sharing the data.