Development Seed

A host of civil society organizations gathered today in Abuja, Nigeria to share strategies and discuss tools for better monitoring the upcoming presidential elections (currently scheduled or January 2011). Against the backdrop of heavy irregularities in the 2007 election, there is a good opportunity during this election cycle for both domestic and international election monitors to better use technology to help communicate the data they are collecting and speed up data collection time.

Today I presented on the latest mapping work we are doing with NDI's team in Afghanistan, explaining how mapping and visualizing results can help tell better stories and make information more concrete. We also discussed how these tools should be used not just for elections, but during then entire run up to the elections, from mapping voter registration to redistricting. A lot of the side conversations today are focusing on analyzing the 2007 data, mapping past polling centers' locations, showing what stations opened late or never opened, running comparisons between population data and numbers of registered voters, etc.

Our goal from this two day meeting is to show that open source tools, from MapBox to Managing News, can effectively be leveraged by the CSO's. We also showed off an early preview of version 2 of Maps on a Stick. Tom is doing some fierce refactoring of Maps on a Stick for v2. All of this work is in partnership with NDI's Afghanistan team. (We are working on an early August delivery of 30+ sticks for NDI's team and doing on-the-ground training in Kabul the first week of August.) In short, version 2 is focused on making it easy to add maps and KML to a USB drive and making the maps pluggable, allowing people to just download new maps and drop them on the stick. In this latest version we are moving all our tile storage into SQlite. Maps on a Stick has tremendous potential here in Nigeria, where there are problems with traditional online map tools based on poor internet access and chronic power shortages.

This event is organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the National Democratic Institute, the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Digital Bridge Institute here in Nigeria, and is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.