National Democratic Institute's conference on Citizen Technology and Election Accountability here in Nairobi just wrapped up. The two days brought together election experts and technologists from all over the region. Much of our discussions focused on how to move away from relying on impressionistic and anecdotal data and start properly integrating technology into on the ground operations to provide more real time, representational data that will help teams better communicate about complex situations.
I got to talk about real time election observations and mobile data collection (specifically our recent integration of Slingshot SMS into Managing News) and led a session on publishing data for "Results Management and Visualizing Election Information" where I discussed our Afghanistan Election work. In addition to walking through the communications strategy behind our Afghanistan election data project from last fall, I showed the first public example of "Maps on a Stick", a client-side mapping tool that we will be releasing later this week. Maps on a Stick makes it easy to carry around custom map tilesets and mash them up with information (read KML data) and is designed for low and no bandwidth environments. The bad internet at the conference venue made the demo awesome.
