Justin Kiggins's Blog

FUSE is a portrait exhibit of the complex worlds of resettled refugees in the Phoenix metro area.

In April 2008, COAR launched a photo exhibit with artist Eliza Gregory. Titled “FUSE: Portraits of Refugee Households in Metropolitan Phoenix,” the exhibit sought to raise awareness in the community regarding Phoenicians’ newest neighbors. From the summary of the exhibit:

FUSE is a portrait exhibit of the complex worlds of resettled refugees in the Phoenix metro area. It fosters critical thinking on who refugees are and how, through sharing experiences, the Phoenix metro community can seek common ground. The photographs validate the struggles and triumphs of these families, portraying them in a way that cultivates a deeper sense of belonging in the community.

In order to support this effort, I helped put together an integrated system, allowing audience members to engage on a more direct level with the portraits.

Using podcasts of interview clips with the refugee subjects of the photos allowed us replicate on a very tight budget what would be quite expenisive with a proprietary museum guide system. With Podlinez, audience members could also call a phone number printed next to the portrait in order to hear the podcast.

Finally, audience members were also able to give feedback on the exhibit via SMS, which was compiled into a Twitter feed for the exhibit (I’ll describe this last piece later, in Part 2).

Beyond the photographs: audio portraits via podcast

So, here is the basic outline of the system:

• Audio interviews with the photographic subjects were performed by Rose Love Chou during photography sessions. Later, she selected and edited clips in consultation with Eliza Gregory & saved them as mp3 files.
• COAR’s website already uses Drupal with the CCK, Views, & Pathauto modules among others. A few other modules needed to be installed, too, to handle the media files nicely. These were then setup to present a podcast and interactive pages online.
• The podcast RSS feed was run through Feedburner to clean up downloads, and offer users who might not be familiar with podcasts a bit more guidance.
• Feeds for each of the audio files were submitted to Podlinez to handle call-ins.
• Donated mp3 players were preloaded with the audio portraits and left at the entrance to the exhibit.
• Phone numbers were printed on the labels so that people could call and listen to the audio through their cell phone.

Setting up the podcast in Drupal

I’m not going to go through the nitty gritty details of installing Drupal modules, but here is the list of modules we used for this system:

• CCK
• Views
• Pathauto
• Image_field
• Imagecache
• Token
• Audio Field
• Media Field Display

Drupal’s framework is incredibly flexible, allowing you to do amazing things with just a little bit of elbow grease. This was all done under Drupal 5, so I am not going to go into too much detail with the configuration because the details are probably out of date even though the concepts are still valid with the new CCK and views modules.

The “portrait” content type

Drupal is built around nodes (units of content). For our purposes, we wanted a “portrait” to be our content type. Each content type will have a photo, a number (the title), and a caption. Some of the content will have an mp3 audioportrait as well.

So, we first create a new custom node type and called it portrait. Then, we add the following CCK fields: photo (an image field), photo_caption (a text field), and audioportrait (an audio field).

Next, we can go to pathauto settings and set the URL pattern for each portrait to be fuse/portraits/[title]

Now, to control the visual presentation of the content we can do a few things. First, we can use Imagecache to setup automatically resized versions of the uploaded photo. Then, we can go to the view option for the content type and change the presentation of each of the fields. For example, we can get rid of the labels for each field, set the image field display mode to the resized image_cache version, and set the display for the audioportrait to the Media Field Display. That last one will let the users play back the audio portrait right in the browser.

The bread-and-butter: Views

Next, we use the views module to setup each of the views for the different modes of presentation. This is the key to the whole deal because it lets us build the actual feeds for the podcast and for Podlinez.

• The fullpage view is simply a “full node” view set to only presenting one node per page. This uses the “full page” version of the node (and therefore, all of the display options we setup before) with “pagers” turned on so that the user has “next” and “previous” arrows at the bottom of the page.
• The podcast view is a “table” view with the only the title and audioportrait fields displayed. We also add the “RSS: RSS Feed Selector” argument in order to present all of the portraits with audio in podcast form. Instructions for downloading the podcast was inserted into the header of the view. The podcast was also pre-loaded onto three mp3 players that were donated by local businesses.
• The podlinez view is of the type “Views RSS: RSS Feed” tweaked to deal with Podlinez. Since Podlinez will only playback the most recent episode from a podcast, there is no way for the user to browse through all of the audioportraits. By allowing the portrait number to be passed as an argument to the view, each audioportrait gets “it’s own” single-episode podcast.

Accessing the audio through Podlinez

Podlinez is a free service that lets you call a podcast from a phone. You simply submit the URL of the podcast feed and they kick back a phone number. They preface the podcast with a “brought to you by Podlinez” kind of ad. They cull the list of numbers periodically, though, so if no one calls your podcast for more than two weeks, you might lose your number. It was brought to my attention by Casey Muller.

Since you have a list of feeds (one for each file) from the view you setup in Drupal, simply go to the Podlinez homepage and drop that URL into their phone number generator.

Word of caution: Be sure to test your phone numbers before “going live” and printing panels with phone numbers on them. Sometimes the numbers that they give you don’t work. This can be particularly problematic if you are trying to throw this together at the last minute, hours before opening, like I was. I tried adding the feed again and it would tell me “We already have a phone number for that feed” and give me the non-working phone number. The tech people at Podlinez were quite helpful in taking down such numbers, but you should give yourself a few days before opening to get the kinks worked out.

Shouldv’e, could’ve, would’ve…

In hindsight there were a few things that I would pay closer attention to if I were to do this again:

• Podlinez is not perfectly reliable. As mentioned above, some of the numbers didn’t work when I first added the feeds. Some stopped working a few weeks into the show.
• The donated mp3 players were of poor quality. One stopped working after the first week. Another after two months. They were basically the cheapest ones that Best Buy was willing to give up when the team went hunting for in-kind donations.
• Needed to use better equipment for recordings. To say the least, there were sound quality issues. By the time the audio has been digitized, compressed to mp3, recompressed by podlinez, squeezed through the cell phone signals into a museum with bad signal, & played out on a bad cell phone speaker, a soft spoken non-native English language speaker can be quite difficult to understand. The only way to fix this would have been to acquire the audio at a better signal-to-noise ratio, with professional audio equipment. That costs money, though.
• User interface wasn’t clear at the exhibit level. Most people didn’t notice the phone numbers on the labels unless they were told. There was no graphic, no bold, no typeface changes at all to indicate that you could call the phone number and listen to a story from the person you were looking at in the photograph. All there was was a phone number underneath the description on around 2/3 of the photos.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

I’ll post soon on Part 2 of this series, which will cover adding the “interactive” layer to the system: using 4INFO, Twitter, Yahoo Pipes, and a few other tools to let audiences respond to the exhibit in real time.

Since I’ve been living in Cairo, I’ve been interested in how organizations here use technology. I’ve been particularly interested in refugee service providers: what tools are they using? how are they using them? are they effective?

So, I was quite excited when I came across an announcement for a discussion on blogging for refugees, hosted by Tadamon‘s Urban Refugees Working Group.

Refugees in Egypt and the Blogosphere.
Are bloggers capable of helping refugees?

Are they capable of reaching out to the local and international community?

How do we link bloggers to NGO’s?

Blogs are becoming international. They are becoming important. They are connecting   diasporas, activists and the international community. They are giving the average citizen a chance to voice out their opinion and to speak out. Some blogs are used to raise awareness about human rights. Tadamon is bringing a group of bloggers to talk to the refugee community about their problems. To discuss whether blogs are useful when it comes to communicating the problems of refugees in Egypt to the local and international community. We are also going to talk about the importance of linking bloggers to NGO’s such as our very own Tadamon Council and other community-based organizations.

So, I went.

The guest speakers

The discussion featured two bloggers (Egyptian Diva and Mustafa Hussein) to start us off with a framework for understanding the potential of blogging in development and human rights work and the current state of blogging in Egypt.

Egyptian Diva opened up the discussion with a summary of how blogs can be utilized, emphasizing the flexibility of the platform for discourse. A blogger has no requirement for what they say or how they say it. She offered as an example that she can, in her organization, write a press release following the cautious “official” language and topics of the organization, then go to her blog and write on the same topic with less reserve. For some organizations, the blog is the primary means of communication with the community. In closing, she emphasized that we should not only be thinking about the blog as a tool for organizations to talk about refugees but as a opportunity for refugees to develop their own voice in the public sphere.

Mustafa Hussein followed up with an overview of the role of blogging in Egypt, particulary with respect to the “citizen journalism” of the 2005 Sudanese sit-in. His discussion emphasized the opportunity to bypass traditional media.

Once the discussion opened up, it drifted from the initial set of “prompt” questions, (assuming “yes” to the first two and skipping the third altogether) and instead seemed to center on the following topics:

• How can we keep up to date on what bloggers are saying concerning refugees in Egypt?
• How do “we” get “them” (refugees) to blog?

Aggregating information on refugees in Egypt

How can we keep up to date on what bloggers are saying concerning refugees in Egypt?

I’ve been trying to find just this kind of information and the information “out there” is sparse. Most bloggers who may address these issues do not dedicate their blogs to this topic, but instead only talk about refugees in Egypt when it is relevant to the broader topics of their blog: in the general context of a human rights blog or a politics blog or a “hey mom, this is what I’m doing in Cairo” blog. There are a number of organizations which work with refugees in Egypt, but as far as I can tell, none of them maintain blogs. Not even Tadamon, the host of the discussion.

It would be quite beneficial to service providers to have some kind of aggregator to bring together information on refugees living in Egypt. The potential implementations of such a tool was brought up in the meeting, especially in the context of a single site which pulled together feeds from RSS feeds dedicated to the topic. I expect it would also be possible to play with a few online tools like Yahoo Pipes or Technocrati to automate some of the aggregation from a larger number of blogs in order to pick up the “straggling” posts concerning refugees in Egypt. Posts like those mentioned before which are coming from bloggers discussing refugees in Egypt as they relate to other issues.

Developing refugees’ voice

How do “we” get “them” (refugees) to blog?

I’m not sure what fraction of the 20 or so people in the meeting were refugees, but the conversation was enough of the “us” and “them” type to suggest that it wasn’t very many. There was a lot of discussion about helping refugees to blog. This was initially inspired by Mustafa’s discussion of citizen journalism. One of the benefits of using blogs as a tool to give refugees their own voice is that the financial aspects are minimal. But, as I noted during the discussion, for anyone to blog, there must be some value that they get out of it.

Unfortunately, rather than asking, “Where is the value of blogging for refugees?” or “Do refugees want to blog?” (and, like I noted, those refugees who might be able to answer such questions were not in the audience), the discussion focused on ways to encourage refugees to blog, such as…

• doing a training session on how to blog
• setting up a “Refugees in Egypt” blog portal/aggregator
• transcribing “their stories” and posting them to a blog on their behalf

I can understand the desire to consider blogging as “empowering” or whatever, but I felt like the discussion started to stray from the point of blogging. Fundamentally, each blogger has their own goals for their blog, but in general, it is not meant to be a uni-directional conversation. So a project where we “let them write ‘their story’ and we can transcribe it and post it on their behalf” becomes simply another gallery of atrocities, omitting the refugees themselves from the conversation. Such a project would have little direct benefit for refugees. Getting refugees involved in the conversations happening on the internet, however, would be fantastic. “But what would they write about?” Well, the *real* beauty of blogging is that that would be for them to decide. Afterall, what does anyone write about on the internet?

Given that there are tens of thousands of refugees in Cairo (Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Iraqi), there might be a few out there blogging already. I would love to know where they are, though. Heck, someone should start aggregating them.

I’m working with two cool organizations… NiJeL and the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights to launch a sexual harassment reporting system for Egypt. It will allow women to anonymously report sexual harassment via SMS and have their report show up on a map. The system will help increase protection in hot areas, and demonstrate to officials the need for a new law and enforcement to protect women.

Read the proposal and vote here:

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/harassmap-reporting-mapping-sexual-harassment-sms

Why is this important?

Well, see for yourself…

There are a few simple rules to voting:

• If you don’t have a NetSquared account yet, register for one at: https://www.netsquared.org/user/register (please check your junk mail folder if you do not see a registration email confirmation)
• You can only vote for each project once
• Each registered user has one (1) ballot
• You must vote for at least three (3) projects and no more than five (5)
• All votes are weighted equally (in other words, your first choice and fifth choice have equal value)

Other cool projects

Since you will have to vote for three projects, I’d like to point you in the direction a few other cool projects which are worthy of your attention, one by NiJeL and one which is complementary to our efforts in harassment reporting:

• FloodSMS – Early Detection and Warning of Catastrophic Flooding via SMS

  This project, a joint effort between NiJeL and ekgaon technologies, will create a flood early warning application, which will push SMS messages to people downstream of a flood event giving them up to 24 hours advanced warning. We intend to pilot this project in the Terai region of Nepal-India.

• Message Sent: رسالة, Improving Basic Cell Phone Literacy in Egyptian Women

  Building on a broad-based adult literacy program in Egypt, the “Message Sent” project will demonstrate the efficacy of simple mobile phones in attracting new adults (80% women), motivating active learning in class and at home, and increasing sustainable use of text messaging and calculations.

• Ushahidi V2 – Mobile.Crisis.Reporting

  The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. This project seeks to expand the mobile component of Ushahidi.

Thanks for voting!!

This post respresents the formal launch of this blog. I am jumping on the blog bandwagon rather late, I suppose. Hopefully, I can offer something insightful. Worst case, it will be a good place for me to compile my own thoughts on the things that roll around in my mind, seeing as how journaling has never done me much good.

So, sparing further ramblings, “Hello World!”