Community Interview: Using open sourced crowd mapping to improve citizen and government engagement

Published in

Read, Write, Participate

4 min readNov 30, 2016

This interview is part of a series featuring projects that recently completed Mozilla’s Open Leadership Training Series and presented at MozFest 2016. Over the past few months, these projects have gone through one-on-one mentorship and training on best practices for working open.

Winnie Makokha is a master’s student in Occupational Health and Safety. She is also a volunteer researcher in the Digital Skills Observatory, a Mozilla project in Kenya to study the impact of digital skills on new smartphone users. She spends her time in Kisumu and Nairobi, Kenya.

I got to know Winnie and her project during the three months of our mentorship meetings, but it wasn’t until MozFest 2016 that we finally met in person! Winnie’s project to use crowdmapping as a tool for citizen and government engagement started as just an idea, and over the course of the program she refined it through extensive research into existing crowdmapping tools. I’m very glad I had the chance to watch Winnie’s awesome idea take shape, and I know that the skills she gained in using GitHub and creating an open project will take her far.

Winnie, discussing with DSO participants on a workshop activity

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Winnie having a selfie moment with the participants of DSO during one of the workshop interventions

What is your project about?

Using crowdmapping to improve citizen engagement with their governments on education and public health.

What made you start thinking about crowdmapping for citizen engagement?

My friends and I were writing a paper for the Geneva Challenge whose theme was ‘challenges of urbanization’. With the public health background from our Bachelor’s degree, we realized that citizens bear the brunt of poor service delivery. They are the main consumers of all manner of public goods.

Thus, to empower them, we thought citizens should be provided with a platform where they alert, proactively or actively, on issues in public health. This information can in turn be mapped and help inform decision making or help improve service delivery.

What are some examples of situations where citizen and government engagement could be improved?

On matters regarding public education
In public health including hospital services
On security
On water and sewage services
On electricity and other forms of energy provision supplied by governments
On public transport systems including ferries, roads, trains

How has your research helped you in this project?

Insights from my master’s research and the DSO project were arguably very valuable for this project. In the DSO project, the research was participatory in nature and some of the interventions given to the participants were through face-to-face workshops. This helped me in designing ‘how to engage’ with collaborators.

Also, guided literature reviews, a process that is part of my master’s thesis, helped me gather information on what is the origin, uses and the existing crowdmapping platforms in relation to citizen engagement.

What problems have you run into while working on this project?

Being able to come up with the platform/method that the citizens would be able to tap into for communicating on issues they would want to engage in. While using mobile phones for communicating was the proposition for the project, their use would have to be modeled to ensure that majority of citizens utilize this opportunity optimally.

Also, to deliver on the project at any scale would require money for engaging experts in crowdmapping solutions.

What did you learn by bringing your project to MozFest 2016?

The world is a global village and people despite their countries of origin are in need of constantly providing feedback to policy makers and law enforcers regarding the services they consume publicly. Also, there are numerous open source crowdmapping platforms already in use by different groups of people; therefore it is important to consider existing platforms, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and then contextualize them (if possible) for individual projects.

How has your project evolved since you started working on it?

When I started, public health was the only public service I had in mind that citizens would engage their governments in. However, I included education along the way as I realized in my country, Kenya, for example, it’s one of the services the citizens receive from the government. It is heavily funded as well, and its impact has to constantly be evaluated.

What kind of skills do I need to help you with this project?

Getting contributors on board and resource planning (money/experts).

How can others join in and contribute to your project?

I have a draft contributor guideline on GitHub, however everything in there is a work in progress as I try to incorporate more ideas including medium of communication for collaboration.