Ushahidi learning from Puerto Ricans experience

We recently had the privilege to be invited by the Universidad de Puerto Rico to attend Meshing with Data 2018, in Bayamón. This was a hackathon focused on mesh networking and disaster response, in light of the aftermath of hurricane María last year

Mesh networking

For those not familiar with the term "mesh networking", in a few words, it's a network topology that aims to dispense with the traditional network traffic aggregators, such as dedicated routers or switches. An ideal mesh network would be entirely composed of end-user devices (i.e. cell phones), connecting directly to each other (i.e. with bluetooth or wi-fi direct) and organizing the flow of traffic among themselves.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fa/Unstructured\_peer-to-peer\_network\_diagram.png

If you would like to do some research, there are established and developing technologies in this space: goTenna, MeshKit, Bridgefy and hiro-net to name a few.

Ready to learn

This was a unique chance for us to learn. First of all, I was looking forward to listening to the experiences of people during the hurricane. My other hope was to engage in conversation, seeking ways crowdsourcing technology like Ushahidi Platform can help in the next hurricane season.

Luckily for me, as part of our invitation to the event, we were graciously given the chance to run a workshop on the Ushahidi Platform and crowdsourcing in disaster scenarios.

The Ushahidi Platform has been used for the last 10 years to successfully assist the response to natural disasters in places like Haiti, Japan or Nepal, to name a few. Yours truly did his best to research (reading others excellent work), and then present to the audience the success factors and the challenges that were present in these scenarios.

It was after my presentation that I was able to hear the stories and participate in the conversations I was hoping for.

Most of us have heard that Puerto Rico experienced a long lasting power outage at the time of hurricane Maria. What I learned in Bayamón is how a nearly complete communications blackout made coordinating response so difficult.

The cellular network was not functioning for the majority of the islanders, and the same happened to any other form of internet access. The few people that had landlines could use them sparingly. In the rest of cases, the only remaining means of communication was AM radio. Islanders were sometimes driving up (or walking to) radio stations, in order to personally relay their messages to be broadcast.

The diaspora of Puerto Ricans living outside the island was able to gather in chat rooms and organise help. Some of that help went to critical efforts, such as ensuring that electricity generators in key facilities would receive fuel and local grids could cover the basic emergency needs. However, their work was severely hampered by the patchy communication. It would usually take several days to receive any sort of news or feedback from people in the island.

No one expected the island’s infrastructure to be hit the way it was. But, there was determination in the room to be ready for the next occasion. Right there, students and enthusiasts were hacking their apps to become the tech that solves the next crisis for Puerto Ricans.

Alongside the hackers, mentors from IBM, Microsoft, universities and organisations. Local professors were already imagining ways to engage their students to run projects on the Ushahidi Platform, which they had just learned about.

What does this mean for Ushahidi?

But here’s a reflection. Similarly to how the Puerto Ricans didn’t expect what came upon them, I think that we at Ushahidi haven’t prepared our Platform to be a good fit for a disaster scenario like the one I was described. In a place with prevalent lack of internet access or SMS service, it would be very difficult for the population to send their reports.

Therefore, I want to bring something to the attention of my colleagues at Ushahidi, the community that we are blessed to have around the tools we build, and the funders we are so fortunate to work with.

We should lend attention to the work being done in Puerto Rico. We should strive to find ways to make Ushahidi Platform work on mesh networks. We need to keep looking out for those use cases that challenge our assumptions, i.e. where neither SMS or internet are available. These can be extremely valuable, not only in Puerto Rico but in many other places where connectivity is a challenge.

I for one had the chance to strike an exciting partnership during the hackathon in behalf of Ushahidi. One using tools and technology I hadn’t expected. With any luck, I’ll soon be writing about it here again!

For that chance, for the conversations, and for the invitation, I would like to thank the organisers Obsidis Consortia, our contacts at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, our community members that made the contact possible in the first place , and all the people I had the pleasure to meet.

Gracias, Puerto Rico.