National Democratic Institute’s conference on Citizen Technology and Election Accountability here in Nairobi just wrapped up. The two days brought together election experts and technologists from all over the region. Much of our discussions focused on how to move away from relying on impressionistic and anecdotal data and start properly integrating technology into on the ground operations to provide more real time, representational data that will help teams better communicate about complex situations.

I got to talk about real time election observations and mobile data collection (specifically our recent integration of Slingshot SMS into Managing News) and led a session on publishing data for “Results Management and Visualizing Election Information” where I discussed our Afghanistan Election work. In addition to walking through the communications strategy behind our Afghanistan election data project from last fall, I showed the first public example of “Maps on a Stick”, a client-side mapping tool that we will be releasing later this week. Maps on a Stick makes it easy to carry around custom map tilesets and mash them up with information (_read KML data_) and is designed for low and no bandwidth environments. The bad internet at the conference venue made the demo awesome.

In the past two days I’ve learned a lot about the different mapping needs of NDI’s Kenya in country partners, who are preparing for the upcoming constitutional referendum that will possibly happen this summer, in addition to other parters in the region including the Uganda and Ghana teams. Uganda is in full election swing with campaigning already starting for the February 2011 election, and Ghana is showing off their SMS tracking system, which is the most powerful SMS data collection system I think I have ever seen.

A lot of progress was made from talking about the art of the possible on the technology side and getting classes in statistics from the seasoned NDI election analysts. There was also a lot of discussion on how to properly balance crowd sourced data in election monitoring. Erik Hershman from Ushahidi was here yesterday with Jon Gosier talking about their work, and Mikel Maron was here talking about OpenStreetMaps and representing Meedan, which is working with NDI to integrate tagging concepts with their SwiftRiver ideas.