Tag: Reflections
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My First Solo Cartography Project
Discovering Friendship, Resilience, and Beauty in Kenya’s Taita Hills In 2010, I did my first solo cartography project in Africa. Before coming to Kenya in 2009, I had already established a connection with Ronald Mdawida, the director of Kosmos Solutions International, an NGO working in both the Taita Hills and Nairobi’s informal settlements. Since I…
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Exploring the Uncharted
A Take on Mapping Back in July 2010, one of my first mapping projects in Kenya took me to Mount Elgon. It was a task for the National Democratic Institute, focusing on mapping polling stations for election monitoring before the constitutional referendum held on August 4, 2010. Drawing from this experience and incorporating recent experience,…
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Thoughts on Analyzing and Visualizing Text Messages
This blog post discusses the challenges of analyzing text messages and how to make the data useful.
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Anacostia, The Death and Life of an American River (A book review)
This recent article on the spike of violence in Southeast Washington D.C. made me think of the book I recently read, Anacostia, The Death and Life of an American River. The book chronologically depicts the emergence of Washington D.C. and how power politics and irresponsible urban planning can create disparities among populations in the same…
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Two and a half years in Africa, Part 2
This is the second in a series of blog posts (here’s the first blog) describing my involvement and experiences working in the field of Information Communications Technology in Africa. At the end of 2010, I became the programs director of Map Kibera, a pioneering collaborative mapping project that engaged local communities to map one of…
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Mwananyamala
I often wonder how places get their names. My interest was rekindled while I was working in Kwale, a rural area in the south-eastern most tip of Kenya, where I got familiar with the history of some of the places there. I was at the same time reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden where he,…
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Doing the other 90% in Kibera
A lot of ink has been spilled writing about how technology is only 10% and all the other stuff you have to do to make the project successful is 90%. These two posts talk in detail about the issue: Allocation of time: Deploying Ushahidi and Why technology is 10%. Nowadays we all agree that this…
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Why Map Open Drainage? And How?
I believe that the reasons to map open drainage in the slums are well known and are obvious to most people. Everyone who’s ever been to the slums knows that open drainage presents a huge health hazard to the people living around it. In combination with poor or non-existent water and sanitation systems, open drainage…