Crowdmap for Lebanon?

[Patrick Meier (iRevolution)]

Thanks for checking in, nobody has reported launching one for Lebanon

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Membership Coordinator <llinf...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has a crisis crowdmap been set up for Lebanon?

[David Munir Nabti]

Hi All-
I suppose I/we should have joined this group earlier...! (thanks, Rob,
or the heads up). Patrick, you've been on some of our email chains
related to the crowdmap we are working on for Lebanon.... (Unless, by
chance, the person is referring to one of the many "Lebanon"s in the
US?!?)

By way of quick intro...
We are working on launching a citizen reporting crowd-map in Lebanon
called Khabbr, related to the Hibr.me, an independent youth-powered
alternative media outlet in Lebanon we've been running for the past
year+. Hibr.me is a media outlet that works online (www.hibr.me,
though in process of getting a needed makeover), in print (25,000
copies distributed each month), and in person (trained over 500 people
all over Lebanon in 2010, in 50+ workshops).

Khabbr (which means "inform" or "report") will be a broad-based
citizen reporting, resource mapping, and event tool, integrated in
many ways into our hybrid citizen-journalism/traditional-journalism
media outlet...

I was part of the Sharek961 (Ushahidi implementation) effort a few
years ago related to parliamentary elections in Lebanon... and amongst
the issues we experienced, and have been seen in many places, were
issues of lack of awareness and lack of trust. Since Ushahidi is
usually implemented for an issue or incident during problematic,
stressful, hectic, dangerous, politicized times, it is difficult to
address those core issues of awareness and trust.

Our plan is to have Khabbr be a used and useful tool during peaceful
times on a wide range of issues, so people learn about it, know how to
use it, are part of the community and effort, and trust it... then,
when crisis issues come up, the whole system will exist, the community
will know how to use it, and we will be able to easily flip on a
category around whatever kind of crisis that emerges.

That being said, we still need help finalizing the implementation...
we have a short-code working, but it is very expensive for people to
use, so we want to find another for people to use SMS. We just got a
sim-card modem a few days ago, but haven't set it up yet.

We also need to do some substantial reworking of the design and
information flow on the main page ... (someone did a full redesign of
the CSS plus integration into a Wordpress site for the Sharek project,
which was great ... ). We really need to rework the design, layout,
info structure, in order to make it a very user-friendly and
attractive site...

We did a full cleanup and substantial translation work on top of the
best available Arabic translation we found (ar_EG, which was just a
partial translation), converted that to more standard Arabic, finished
it for the front end and back end (with a few question marks
remaining). And then just found out today that the people who did the
ar_EG translation had a more complete translation that did not get
released on the github. We're going to go through those both and
figure out the best translation/etc to move forward with. I tried to
see how I could contribute the ar_AR work we did to the github
(couldn't), tried to get on the Ushahidi translation site (http://
tafsiri.ushahidi.com/? ... locked), and emailed it to some folks at
Ushahidi... SOMEHOW we'll figure how to share that work with
others... though the sharing part is more difficult than I
anticipated.

We are having another problem with a bug, as well... related to how
Arabic displays on the map. And some places the LTR/RTL elements need
work.

Anyway, a lot more info than most people probably wanted... if anyone
is interested in helping out with this effort, or if you have other
questions, please let me know!

Cheers,

DMN


~~~
David Munir Nabti
@dmnabti



On Feb 8, 11:23 pm, "Patrick Meier (iRevolution)"

[Syed]

Hi David,

I have just set-up a crowd map in Beirut:

http://migrantworkers.crowdmap.com/

Also a friend of mine works with Hibr! please let me know if you want
to talk further about specifics of crod map or reporting etc?

Best
Syed

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