Esra’a Al Shafei: Tech Trailblazer

by Suhair Khan

Esra’a Al Shafei is a blogger, civil rights activist, Senior TED fellow, tech entrepreneur, and is just 26 years old. Based in Bahrain, she runs an organization that spans countries and in every sense of the word, navigates and redefines boundaries.

Soft spoken and slight, she speaks quickly and earnestly. Esra’a works as founder/Executive Director of MideastYouth, an organization which contains in its diverse basket everything from the activism to impact. The company has even utilized Crowdvoice.org to create a platform of Mideast Tunes - it is no wonder “Fast Company”, one of the worlds leading progressive business media brands, named her one of the world’s “Top 100 Most Creative People.”

Overcoming the challenges of distance, resources and more, Esra’a’s platforms are now grantees of the most prestigious organizations - Omidyar Network and Echoing Green among them. And like any start-up, they continue to explore means of scaling and becoming self-sustaining while continuing to allow openness and information sharing for young artists and activists alike. Here is an upclose look at Esra’a and how she continues to strive for excellence through innovation and thought leadership:

On the beginnings of Mideast Youth...
I started Mideast Youth in 2006 when I really wanted to have a common place for controversial discussions with a diverse audience and membership, specifically focusing on ethnic and religious minorities that were historically discriminated against in our societies. I grew up in Bahrain, so I also wanted to create a place where we can talk more openly about underrepresented issues such as migrant rights violations which are unfortunately prevalent in the Gulf.

In 2007 we realized that we had created a decent enough following for each of these issues that we created other campaign sites, such as MigrantRights.org. News and activism crowdsourcing hub Crowdvoice.org and brilliant music aggregator Mideastunes.com quickly followed.

Most recently, we have launched the Making of a Century iPad app, with the goal of crowdsourcing the last 100 years of history!

On Mideast Tunes and Esra’a favorite songs...
Mideast Tunes is a multifaceted platform for underground artists in the Middle East and North Africa who use music as a tool for social change. It’s mission is to bridge barriers of faith and geography to unite young people committed to fostering constructive discourse in the Middle East through their music. With 630 bands and still growing, the site has expanded really quickly to serve as a primary resource for discovering up and coming Middle Eastern talents across a range of genres in many languages - rock, folk, electronic, rap - it has it all!

Naming my favourites is tough, I leave Mideast Tunes open in the background at all times and I discover a new favorite band each day. I would say that the most repeated tracks on my playlists come from the following artists, which I guess make them my favorites:

Palestinian electro-band Checkpoint-303
Iranian rock group 123
Jordanian folk band Jadal
Egyptian indie-pop sensation Maii Waleed

On CrowdVoice.org and the future of crowdsourcing...
CrowdVoice.org is an open source platform that tracks voices of protest from around the world by curating information and crowdsourcing valuable data, such as eye witness videos, images, blogs, and a wide range of news reports in order to facilitate the spread of knowledge on current social justice movements worldwide.

The idea came from us needing a platform to organize information about the specific campaigns that we were running and not being able to organize the content in a meaningful way while allowing others to also moderate, add to and help distribute the information that we were gathering.

I really think crowdsourcing content, curation and moderation has incredible power and that we've only seen the beginnings of it online; the model has really worked out for us at CrowdVoice.org.

I think people tend to trust the service more if you leave the most important parts of it in their own hands - it's important to give as much control to the users as possible, especially with the kinds of topics that we deal with. We relied almost completely on the users to submit and moderate material which was risky at the beginning, but I think the users appreciated that and kept coming back.

We're working now on a new layer of CrowdVoice pages that will provide a visual graphic of each issue, sort of like an interactive infographic where you can explore statistics and still be able to see how it's backed by the wide pool of sources that we are already curating for many issues on the site.

On using open source technology with Crowdvoice.org and managing a remote team of engineers...
Right now just CrowdVoice is open source though we're working on opening up the others, when we feel it's more or less ready. We're still doing a lot of work on all of them. With the exception of blogs, which all run on WordPress, all our applications are run on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Since the beginning our team has always been spread out and working remotely. We have some developers spread out and some in the same place working as a team, it depends on the project. It's been very manageable for us, even preferable. It’s less distracting, and affords us the ability to work from anywhere, or in our own chosen spaces.

Being a woman in Tech...
For me I never really looked at my gender as either an advantage or a hindrance. I think most people look at web products and judge them by their looks and functionality, and rarely by the genders of the people behind it.

Having said that, our team consists primarily of women, but it happened naturally as opposed to us singling women out. Whenever we worked with anyone as a team we always looked at the energy and expertise of the individual and not so much by whether or not they would fit in because of their genders.

Esra’a’s inspirations...
I would say Matt Mullenweg, the developer of WordPress, is the person I look up to most in this field. I really appreciate his philosophy and commitment to open source. I learned a lot from him and his ideas.

Greatest challenges...
When we began development on our three core applications: CrowdVoice, Mideast Tunes, and Ahwaa, we began to face many new and unexpected obstacles with censorship, hack attempts, and more difficulty finding financial backers.

As we have grown, as with any non-profit startup, getting enough funding to expand, build out our technologies, hire talented people, and move forward has always been a challenge. We want to core services completely free and open source while at the same time monetizing these platforms to achieve financial sustainability.

Her plans for the future...
Our plans always depend on how well or how not well we are doing with any of our projects. At the moment our main focus is on CrowdVoice and making the platform more organized, more visually striking, and easily accessible for all users in multiple formats. Beyond that, our options are open!

For more on the organizations discussed in this article:

CrowdVoice – On Twitter @CrowdVoice
MideastTunes – On Twitter @Mideastunes
MideastYouth – On Twitter @Mideastyouth
Ahwaa - On Twitter @AhwaaOrg

Aashika Damodar - Day 7

Democratizing knowledge

This is my last day of the “ Days in the life...” piece for Google Women in Technology, and I’m contemplating what I want to write about. Today’s to-do list is a large mix of things, from responding to emails, writing and conference calls with existing partners. As I’ve stated in the past posts, technology is not a silver bullet. It will not fulfill our most basic needs, but it will certainly advance our activists’ capacity to shape public opinion, plan actions, protect individuals at risk, and reduce the barriers for the everyday person to know, care, and help. What did I learn about technology’s capacity through my own work? I think I will take this time to talk a bit about the lessons learned, what I believe digital technologies can do for our movement, and what I see happening in Survivors Connect’s future.

I think the struggle for all organizations, no matter what the issue is, will be to find a balance between conveying our cause in an accurate and nuanced way, while being immediately understood and accessible to the everyday person. This balance is critical, so with any product/campaign material that an organization creates, you have to ask, “Will this advance our cause?” One way to do it is run the material by your friends and family who aren’t as involved in the issue as you. See how they view it. Share the material with other experts, how do they view it? Do some testing with your material. Once you’ve created a great video or other sharable content for your campaign, think about how it will help activists (old and new) move up the ladder of engagement. These materials are intended to compel people to act immediately, meaning they need to be short, succinct and sweet. But we all know socio-economic issues are much more complicated than that. So consider, after someone has joined, how will you foster them into expert activists? Also, consider co-creating materials with others. I am a huge fan of collaborative projects. I would like to see issue-based organizations co-develop videos, infographics, campaigns and more so that I as a follower get the feeling of some consensus among like-minded groups.

The Internet and various other technologies are providing people with an open space to share and grieve about anything. When a collective begins to do it, it can make some serious noise. As organizations that have resources and capacity to create content, we need to be mindful of the design, message and range of possible outcomes. In the world of anti-gender based violence activism, there are so many types and the solutions aren’t always so clear either. Here is our opportunity democratize knowledge by ensuring that experts like us do justice to the issue while using modern-day tools. Combining the two will be a potent mixture that will give the worst human rights abusers of the world reason to fear.

Aashika Damodar - Day 6

Starting small and growing beyond tech

Caption: Program Planning for Enslavement Prevention Alliance-West Africa (EPAWA)

It’s 6:30 AM and I am getting ready to do a stakeholder interview with members of iHub in Nairobi who are evaluating an Internews-funded project in Accra called SMS Kita Hudi Yee, a text-message based community monitoring program on various forms of forced labor and human trafficking conditions in Ghana. This 3-month pilot project started back in September 2011, in partnership with the Enslavement Prevention Alliance in West Africa. I was excited about this program for various reasons. For one, it took place in Ghana, one of my favorite countries in West Africa, and two, this was a new model of programming and usage of mobile tech, which Survivors Connect was interested in trying.

This was a unique opportunity for us to experiment with new ideas, as well as have the backing of iHub researchers to help us evaluate what did and didn’t work, and ways we can improve in the future so that other organizations can try similar methods. This program involved trained community monitors who were equipped with mobile phones and tool kits on how to identify potential trafficking, and alert EPAWA headquarters of evidence via SMS/MMS or calls, of which EPAWA would map, investigate and respond. I was in Ghana for two weeks to train EPAWA on how to use various open source technology tools and do programmatic design. Now that we’re past the 3-month pilot, it was time for iHub to interview all stakeholders of the program to evaluate the project. Here are some of the thoughts I shared and lessons I’ve learned, which I shared with Leonida Mutuku, Marian Tadefa-Kubabom and others:

Start Small: I know it’s easy to think of technology as being the grandiose solution to our development problems (and “first” world problems too!). Given that the ICT4D space is very young, I can’t stress enough how important it is to start small. Starting small means you can be flexible, agile and evaluate strategies easily and efficiently. This is one of the reasons we love using Frontline SMS as a starting platform to test our ideas. Makers of Frontline SMS, much like us, believe in “horizontal scaling,” which is essentially the idea of hundreds of systems serving smaller groups of people in designated communities, as opposed to large centralized/national solutions that serve millions. When it comes to topics as sensitive as gender-based violence, it is really important to us that solutions are localized to small communities, managed and maintained by that community and there is local ownership.

Technology isn’t everything: Surprise surprise! I think in reality, everyone knows this, but somehow I find over and over again that people forget this. Technology is a beautiful thing, which has incredible capacity to enhance various aspects of our lives. But technologies such as mobile or social media are first and foremost tools. Through our various partnership programs, I’ve found the most successful projects are those where there is a committed team of individuals engaged and actively managing the project. Delegation, skill and teamwork is needed for literally anything to succeed. What we do with technology today and the diverse variety of applications all come from the context in which they are used, NOT the technical capacity itself.

Aashika Damodar - Day 5

Online platform as bridges

Today, I had a long conversation with Stella Marr, a survivor of sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation about a project we have called Freedom Connect. Freedom Connect is a project we started a couple years ago, as an experiment in creating a small social networking space specific to activists and survivors against human trafficking. It slowed down due to lack of capacity on our end, however Stella Marr is the reason for its revival and now thriving e-community of survivors. Stella calls this platform a “virtual club house and safe house where survivors can be themselves…it’s something we all had been wanting for years, but it didn’t exist until Survivors Connect provided us the platform to find each other and speak out.” Stella also explains that this is a leaderless network, not guided by any particular political agenda beyond being a space to connect with other survivors.

Before a survivor can join, Stella is sent a membership request, and she initiates a Skype or phone conversation with the individual to learn more about them, their background (to ensure it is not a pimp or other untrustworthy individual wanting access) and learn about her individual goals, after which she is made a member. Survivors from the Philippines, Ireland, UK, Canada and others have signed up to join and they are Skyping, blogging, commenting on each other’s blogs, tweeting are engaging in really interesting and unique ways.

From this online community-building project, I have learned a lot of key lessons in organizing:

1. A community is a group of people that have something in common, which brings them together. I know this sounds obvious, the point is, you cannot necessarily force a community to assemble where there isn’t one. We originally conceptualized Freedom Connect to be a space where people could come together to connect with other activists, regardless of organizational affiliation, but that did not happen. One of the problems here is that anti-trafficking organizations often are not so great at collaborating, and like to retain activists (and survivors for that matter) as “their” people and be a main point of contact for them for information and resources for activism. Survivors like Stella, as well as several others have told me time and again that they have had immense difficulty in getting connected to survivors. A need was born, and so was a community. Freedom Connect is exactly what it needs to be – a networking space for survivors.

2. Keeping a Community together means respecting member’s opinions, emotions, and experiences. All current members have come from various walks of life and experiences. Some survivors have been supported by other larger anti-trafficking organizations, where they received rescue/rehabilitation services, while others escaped or became survivors “on their own.” Whatever the experience is, opinions should respected, and in an online community, people will respect and continue to utilize the space if that value is evidently practiced.

3. Empower your members: I’ve noticed over the years that cause-specific organizing in anti-trafficking is sometimes organizationally centered as opposed to issue centered. Meaning that specific non-profits will take the lead in launching campaigns which revolve around the organization’s brand, and activists often follow (and survivors’ stories embedded to fit the script). This is about brand-building, and the brand builders have an easier time with fundraising than those who don’t. With campaign and organizing tools readily available, the economy of “content generation” had democratized and we can find really compelling interesting perspectives told without organizations, campaigns or brands. This is what all the members at Survivors Connect are doing. I think that in the future, the survivors of this network may come together to create a clear call to action without having a formal 501c3 organization behind it. This online tool may help in leveling the playing field between non-profits and individual survivors creating the discourse of the anti-trafficking movement.

Aashika Damodar - Day 4

Why I love my job :)

Caption (Activists in Guatemala, Justicia para mi Hermana)

As I’ve mentioned, Survivors Connect has partnered with various grassroots organizations around the world to develop innovative programs to combat GBV and TIP with the power of ICT. Today, I reconnected with one of our favorite projects, “Mensajes de Paz” (which means Messages of Peace in Spanish) in collaboration with Justicia Para mi Hermana (Justice for My Sister, JFMS). JFMS is a 70-minute documentary about violence against women in Guatemala. At its core, Justice for my Sister is a David versus Goliath story. A courageous woman named Rebeca takes on a giant system to demand answers for her sister's brutal murder and she has all the odds stacked against her - yet her resilience and power is unstoppable.

Violence against women, and specifically femicide (gender-based killing) is an epidemic in Guatemala: nearly 6000 women have been murdered in the last decade and only 2% of the killers were sentenced. This film documents one of the few successful cases from beginning to end. The director, Kimberly Bautista is also a survivor of GBV and has turned her experience of survival as her driving force to address this problem at large in Guatemala. She reached out to SC to ask for help about ways to extend the impact of her film screenings, which were taking place in various villages and communities to raise awareness. We partnered to create Mensajes de paz, which does two key things: audiences can subscribe to the service to receive news, tips, updates, and inspirational quotes on how to prevent violence and other activities related to the film on a bi-monthly basis, all via mobile and text messaging.

Audience members have responded positively to the bulk messaging and text back affirmatives and from time to time, the colloquial equivalent to "Right on!" ("A huevo!"). It also allows women to communicate directly with the JFMS team via text and call for referrals or advice on how to address GBV, report threats and get support. We receive messages from women asking how to leave their aggressor and one of our operators said, “The most important thing is to be set on leaving. Remember to take your personal documents, telephone, and cash." She also suggested spending a week or two in a transitional women's shelter, since most aggressors will look for their partners at her family's house once she has left, and she provided her with a local reference.

This is one of the reasons I love my job. This sort of basic advice-line/service is so rarely available in places like Guatemala. Not only is JFMS doing serious awareness with this film, but also delivering a new resource to people, all via mobile and is making an impact. I visited Guatemala back in November 2011 to help design the program with Kim. The project is still running strong and we’re now strategizing about how to raise funds to scale the project, take the film screenings to new communities, hire additional staff, and improve technical capacity.

Aashika Damodar - Day 3

Mapping the problems

Caption: Freedom DataMap is a collaborative mapping project to gather information about human trafficking and efforts to achieve freedom from slavery globally.

Though it is Saturday, work does not stop at Survivors Connect. Today my colleague Jessica Woodard and are working with the Ushahidi SWAT team to do some beta testing of their v. 2.2 Juba platform. Ushahidi is an organization that specializes in developing open-source tools for information collection and interactive mapping. We have used the Ushahidi platform to crowdsource and map information about the anti-trafficking movement. For example, back in 2010, we launched our first version of the Freedom Datamap, which is an installation of Ushahidi that maps information about where anti-trafficking organizations work, what they specialize in, and how to reach them.

This project started all because of a question we’re often asked - “Is there an anti-trafficking organization in my town?” There are hundreds of organizations out there, but not any one individual knows them all. We figured out that with the Ushahidi platform, we could ask people to assist in building a pseudo “global database” of organizations by sending us direct emails, tweeting, or submitting to our site.

Freedom Datamap aggregates this information, alongside news, blogs, photos and videos relating to existing resources all on this interactive map. Now we can geo-spatially visualize where efforts are concentrated, as well as areas that still need support. We have over 500 reports of organizations working globally on the problem, from small grassroots organizations to large international non governmental organizations. We have mapped out hotline resources, shelters, advocacy initiatives as well as news reports of major cases of human trafficking. Through this exercise, we're hoping to identify not only where organizations work, but discover gaps in critical services in the areas of prevention, prosecution and protection of victims and survivors.

We’re still learning quite a great from this project and hope to publish a report this year. In this testing exercise, we are also considering upgrading our platform to the 2.2 Juba version when it’s ready, which will give us far greater functionality and a better user experience. Our first version of the Freedom Datamap was a password-protected site, since we wanted to limit the user base to activists. Soon, we will do a fully-public launch. SC has also partnered with other organizations to use Ushahidi – for example, we launched iSpot Fair Trade in partnership with the Fair Trade Resource Network to map where fair trade goods are sold in the US and Canada. We’re also doing datamapping of legal resources in Africa, integration of Ushahidi with our SMS data collection projects and more. Stay tuned for more!

Aashika Damodar - Day 2

Students and cell phones

Photo caption: (Amanda Marshall, a Phones4Freedom Supporter)

Today I had the great privilege of visiting George Washington University to speak to several MBA students about Survivors Connect’s use of mobile technology to combat human trafficking. Sushmita Manatt, a second year MBA student, and her team applied for the Clinton Global Initiative University program, which brings together student leaders from colleges all over the world to discuss solutions to pressing development issues.

They discuss real world challenges as well as take concrete steps toward solving them by making “Commitments to Action” for their cause. Manatt and her team have made a commitment to supporting Survivors Connect by launching their own Phones4Freedom campaign in the metro D.C. area. Phones4Freedom is an innovative mobile recycling program, which we launched a few years ago.

We have partnered with the WirelessSource, which recycles old and used mobile phones. For every phone donated, Survivors Connect earns “points” towards our SMS:Freedom programs, so that we can purchase the appropriate equipment for our SMS-based helpline projects in various countries. We sat together to brainstorm ways to engage local businesses with the Phones4Freedom campaign (such as setting up collection boxes), places to schedule film screenings and other awareness events, and other strategies to reach their goal to collect 300 or more mobile phones for recycling. They are a wonderful group of students and I look forward to spending the next few months working with them!

Aashika Damodar - Day 1

Meet Aashika

I have been given the great honor and privilege of participating in the Google Women in Technology “Days in the Life” project! This is a great opportunity to share bits and pieces of my world as a tech enthusiast, leader of Survivors Connect, artist, and anthropologist with a strong passion for combating all forms of gender-based violence, especially human trafficking.

Aashika Damodar, Founder of ‘Survivors Connect’

Survivors Connect is a non-profit that is dedicated to developing and extending innovative Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools to enhance anti gender-based violence (GBV) efforts. As a small, all-volunteer led organization, my week is mixed up of days where I act more like an Executive Director, some days where I am a Program Manager and other days with activities that fall in between. It is a great job and I love every day of it.

Mobile technology as well as other communication technologies are becoming a primary point of entry into the digital world for millions. As mobile technologies proliferate, it is my goal to understand how these technologies shape the way individuals engage with their surroundings and the world at large. We’re also looking at how simple technologies can connect survivors to resources they need, prevent vulnerable communities from falling victim to trafficking, and how we can do better monitoring of the problem at large. The degree to which people use their mobile phones to manage their social lives, increase productivity, connect to news and media was just unimaginable to me years ago. The impact of ICT on the development agenda is still young and we hope that our organization can contribute by showcasing what it can do for human rights.

Days in the Life with Aashika Damodar

an insider look into the NGO “Survivors Connect” and how technology is helping make a positive change in the world.

Aashika Damodar is a recent graduate from the University of Cambridge in Development Studies. She is the founder of an NGO called Survivors Connect, which works to develop and extend innovative technologies to enhance anti-trafficking efforts for activists and survivors. She is also a social anthropologist, artist, and entrepreneur. The list of projects she’s running and/or involved in is long enough to fill up a book, but today we present her as the person who wrote a diary on her work at Survivors Connect and life during a typical week in February 2012.