Ushahidi and Conflict Early Response

Ushahidi’s approach to conflict early warning/response is refreshingly different from mainstream conventional approaches.

Conflict early warning systems like CEWARN in the Horn of Africa, ECOWARN in West Africa and the African Union’s CEWS are all top-down, centralized and hierarchical. Some argue that these systems actually take both a top-down and bottom-up approach since field monitors (at the bottom) document early signs of conflict escalation for policy makers (at the top). True, but as we know all too well, policy makers rarely close the feedback loop by responding early  and effectively to conflict warnings.

To paraphrase Erik Hersman at Ushahidi, this lack of response is perhaps like the “pothole theory”: you generally don’t care about the pothole on a street, unless it’s yours. This helps to explain why we don’t respond to problems further down the street. Ushahidi therefore takes a different approach; one that I like to call the “bottom-bottom” approach.

Just how different is Ushahidi’s approach to that of other NGOs? Take for example Swisspeace’s  conflict early warning system, FAST, one of the early pioneers in the field of conflict early warning. The architects of FAST understood that early warning information needs to be actionable and customized to meet the demands of the end users. They described this using the analogy of planning food for a dinner party.

“We not only need to know how many people are coming but who is coming, the time of the day, and the season. Without such knowledge, we may prepare the perfect dinner for the wrong set of people” (Krummenacher and Schmeidl 2001, PDF).

The rhetoric of conventional early warning systems labels local at-risk communities as the intended beneficiaries; but they are rarely included as end users of early warning activities.  To be sure, FAST never invited at-risk communities to the “dinner party” since the organizational challenges and financial costs of preparing the “perfect dinner” for the bottom billion are too bewildering. As a result, the invitee list quickly gets reduced to VIPs.

FAST’s use of the dinner party as an analogy clearly reveals the command-and-control mindset of conventional conflict early warning systems, also known as first-generation systems. Organizing the dinner is described as a centralized, almost egocentric activity: “we need to know,” so “we may prepare”. How about making it a pot-luck and use evite?

This, in essence, is the philosophy behind Ushahidi.

Ushahidi seeks to develop a more decentralized yet customized approach to throwing a dinner party. In conventional conflict early warning systems, blanket alerts are disseminated to an unknown guest list. Because the latter are never invited to dinner, there’s no way of telling whether the alerts were useful let alone received. (The field of advertising faces similar challenges, incidentally).

So why not let the end users decide for themselves what types of alerts to subscribe to? As Erik Hersman recently wrote in relation to early warning alerts,

“I don’t want to just get updates from random strangers in my locale. I want to only receive the ones that are “important” to me. I want to be notified when there is an emergency, major traffic jam or something else pertinent to me.”

Ushahidi is therefore developing a customized SMS/e-mail service alert option. Users will be able to specify what types of alerts they are interested in receiving and/or the particular location they want to receive alerts about.

This mindset is what makes Ushahidi different and why I call theirs a “bottom-bottom” approach. Needless to say, I’d rather attend Ushahidi’s dinner party over FAST’s.

DARPA’s New Approach to Situational Awareness

Making sense of multiple flows of information is a continuing challenge in conflict early warning and early response; particularly vis-a-vis decision making. How can we make overall sense of conflict data originating from different sources? DARPA’s new approach is to turn warzone data into simple stories.

From Wired:

Drone feeds, informant tips, news reports, captured phone calls — sometimes, a battlefield commander gets so much information, it’s hard to make sense of it all. So the Pentagon’s far out research arm, Darpa, is looking to distill all that data into “a form that is more suitable for human consumption.” Namely, a story.

Making sense of a complex situation is like understanding a story; one must construct, impose and extract an interpretation. This interpretation weaves a commonly understood narrative into the information in a way that captures the basic interactions of characters and the dynamics of their motivations while filling in details not explicitly mentioned in the input stream. It uses story lines with which we all have experience as analogies, and it simplifies the detail in order to communicate the crucial aspects of a situation. The story lines it uses are those the decision maker should be reminded of, because they are similar to the current situation based upon what the decision maker is trying to do.

These stories, however, would be authored by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms courtesy of Darpa’s Information Processing Technology Office. I’m sceptical of purely AI-driven solutions for obvious reasons. What caught my interest, rather, was the idea of story telling, i.e., a qualitative, narrative approach to conflict analysis and situational awareness that may overcome some of the cognitive biases that surface during decision-making processes.

Conflict Early Warning of Mumbai Attacks (Updated)

Update: Us Warned India Before Mumbai Attack

I’ve been spending the past few days talking to fellow colleagues in the conflict early warning community about the recent carnage in Mumbai. Were there any credible early warnings of the terrorist attacks? Macro-level conflict early warning models forecast specific “events of interest” but rather assess structural risk over longer time spans. So these models did not forecast the attacks. Any likely warning would have to originate from intelligence sources, just as occurred in Kenya.

News is now just coming in that warnings had been communicated to The Taj Mahal Hotel. The chairman of the company that owns the hotel noted how ironic it was that “we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures” but he did not elaborate on the warnings or what security measures were enacted (1). While I recognize that the warnings may not have been particularly specific, what surprises me is why the residents of Mumbai themselves were not alerted about the increased security risk?

Given that 75% of Mumbai’s residents have mobile phones, it would have been feasible to set up a dedicated phone number for residents to send text messages in case they saw something suspicious. The intelligence community tends to be highly hierarchical and centralized, which limits the number of “sensors” or “feelers” it has access to. We’ve been talking about crowdsourcing conflict information, why not crowdsource intelligence since 96% of all intelligence information is open source to be begin with? Especially since the first news of the attack was disseminated on Twitter?