Second of Twelve: #EgyElections Day Two
Hello dear readers - As is becoming something of a tradition I'm going to do a pot of liveblogging for Day Two of Round One of the First House of the Egyptian Elections. I'm doing it in reverse-cron format with newer stuff at the top. Regretfully I have to catch a plane to Nigeria tonight, so I'm going to be abandoning my friends here before the bitter end.
4:20 PM
And my time here is drawing to an end. We've been making a big push on our media outreach. Like the proverbial tree in the forest we want to make sure someone can hear the statements from Project Rakeeb. We landed one particularly big fish today with the Washington Post, who called Rakeeb "a team of well-regarded Egyptian electoral observers." Hopefully this will snowball into more mentions in other sources.
I think our @RakeebEG Twitter handle hasn't been as well-used as the Facebook page; it does take a lot of time to manage social media, which is a challenge to think carefully about when taking them on. We've picked up some high-powered followers from the press, but I don't think we're sufficiently feeding them information. It's a different medium than Facebook, which again creates challenges since simple content recycling is not optimal.
Looks like all is in control out here. I've spent some time today making sure that all the people who need to have the information to access all the information systems and understand the network topology. (pro tip: watching things come crashing down without the password needed to log in and save them is bad. Put them in a Google doc and share with a small group of folks.)
It's been a heck of a trip and a spectacularly successful election. Rakeeb is the first time a statistically-based observation has been done in Egypt, so it's been a learning opportunity, but the partners and data clerks did great.
At the macro level I can't say how (frankly) surprised and delighted I am at the great success (so far) of this election. I'm so impressed with the Egyptian people who appear to have put aside their cynicsm and anger to participate in the election. The turnout looks like it was excellent, certainly way higher than the pessimistic 30% that I'd been quoted from local friends, and things have been so far very peaceful.
I'm proud to have been able to play a small role in this. Our team will certainly continue to support the Egypt team and Project Rakeeb through the next 10 (!) elections, but who knows if I'll be able to work on the front lines again. Inshallah, perhaps I'll be able to return.
Thanks for reading and good luck to my friends - they still have a long night ahead of them. Polls are scheduled to close at 7, and only then can the last round of reports come it. That'll take hours, and then there's the analysis. The preliminary statement wrapping up the whole process should be ready some time tomorrow - I'll be sure to share!
2:10 PM
It's quiet around here. Frankly, it makes me a bit anxious. For the last hour I've been focusing on the web site (check it out at http://www.rakeeb.net - hit the 'EN' button on the right for us non-Arabic speakers.) Interestingly with this project the Facebook page is as important - if not more so - of a way to get information out. Social media in North Africa seems to be largely superceding traditional web sites; for example, the announcment that they were going to *grumble grumble* add another day of voting came via Facebook from the council of ministers.
We all just left the office to allow some of our data clerks a bit of privacy for prayer. It's defintely a fascinating experience to experience such an unfamiliar culture.
Anyway, our crackerjack developers from Advanced Computer Systems have done a great job with some innovative new elements of Rakeeb's online presence. My favorite is the Critical Incidents map.
As Rakeeb's observers are at their polling stations they're dutifully making notes on various aspects of the election that are reported at predetermined times. However, there are some things that are so important that they can't wait - these are what are referred to as critical incidents. They might be violence and intimidation, egregious violations of election law, or harassment of the observer themselves. These can't wait, since they can dramatically impact the results. Our observers are carefully trained in what is or isn't a violation, so they tend to be much more grounded than random citizens texting in sensational reports. However, they can sometimes blow up a minor issue, or may be mistaken on the events. The whole point of something like this is to be rigerously grounded in *fact*, and as such we have a specific team of people chasing every critical incident and verifying that it meets the threshold. Once an incident has been validated, it goes up on the map, and people can see throughout the course of the day confirmed issues across the country.
This takes a lot of the strenghts of the Ushahidi model and the trained observer model to create a near-real time but highly reliable source of information as the election proceeds. It's related to some of the clever concepts with the Viva el Voto project. I'm genuinely excited at the prospect of taking two approaches with different strengths (citizen reporting and trained monitors) that have too often been weirdly adversarial and marrying the best of each.
12:20 PM
Problem solved. Etisalat has grudgingly admitted we may not be spammers and unblocked our messages; the queued ones will be pouring through now.
12:10 PM
Problem diagnosed. Etisalat, one of the Big Three cell providers here in Egypt, was not letting messages through to our gateway aggregator. Unfortunately it's not problem solved, but knowing what the issue is means you can try and work around it. Our dataclerks have been pounding the Etisalat subscribers to get the info by phone.
A SMS gateway aggregator is a company with a relationship with some or all of the phone networks in a country or region. We, as a short-term non-profit operation, would never be able to get a professional relationship with the telecoms here. It'd be like Gulliver trying to get a haircut with the Brobdingnagians; even if they are interested in your small money their tools aren't well suited to the task. Agreggators provide that middleman; we can connect to them, and they have permanant pipes to the provider nets to slurp up SMSs aimed at their shortcodes we rent through them. It's another point of failure, though, and it looks like it's failed now. The gateway provider and Etisalat are now yelling at each other to get it fixed.
11:30 AM
We've encountered what might be a snag. Looks like some messages from our SMS gateway are getting stuck or slowed, which if true would depress the apparent participation rate of our observers. There's about 8 steps between our observers hitting "send" and the info showing up on our web site, so if there's a problem it's not always obvious. Also, of course, there's the problem of the dog in the night-time: noticing things that aren't happing can be a challenge. Meanwhile I'm starting to twitch a bit, so I guess the turkish coffee is doing it's work.
Developing...
10:30 AM
The day is pretty quiet out there. We are hearing reports of very long lines in "freedom queues" (love that euphamism) but overall things are generally more chill than yesterday. It's a big lift for our observers to report on two very long days in a row.Everyone's tired, as mentioned below, so energy's a bit lower than yesterday, and the euphoria of the first real election in ages has worn off a bit. Happily Ines, one of our rockstar local staff, made us some amazing Turkish coffee. I need how to figure out how make that myself. Cardamom+coffee=brilliant.
8:15 AM
The one big ongoing technical problem we've faced is our internet connection. Since our observers are texting in hundreds of SMSs to report on the situation in their areas we need to make sure that those messages keep flowing no matter what. We're doing so by having those pulled from a cloud-based server; however, since (like in Nigeria) our data clerks need to also update the server they need to be in the same database. We were doing so by having local non-routed physically wired computers connected to a local web server which was hitting the same remote database. However, our DSL lines were soooo bad that they were 1) dropping every half hour and 2) choking on the database connection. Not pretty.
When a tech problem is interfering with work is when the pressure really starts rising. We have to come up with a solution fast given the materials at hand. Fortunetly for us Egypt's a well-developed country, and we had the budgetary flexibility to throw money at the issue and make it go away. For some reason USB modems go for far less in Egypt than elsewhere, so it was fairly affordable.
7:00 AM
As election experts know, there are a lot of elements without which an election monitoring mission cannot possibly go forward. First among them, of course, is coffee. We shut down the operations from Day One last night at about two when the exhausted leadership of our partner organizations finished writing their third (and most important) statement so far with an overview of the entire voting day.
Statement writing is a fine art* and a key element of an observation mission. Actually, strike that- it's the whole point of an election mission. All the observers, training, printing, hats, databases, SMSs, and occasional prison time all come together in the form of a report that can help inform Egyptians and the media on what has actually taken place. Egypt's popular these days, and so there's a number of other groups doing observations, including NDI, but no one else is doing a statistically-based monitoring mission able to draw representative conclusions.
Anyway, since this statement is so important it kept us very late. We also had to translate it from the original Arabic to English and be prepared to release them both at the same time; arguing over nuances of connotation takes a while and gets a bit tiring. Point of the story being it was a late night but #CoffeeWatch isn't a problem today: I had some over a quick breakfast at the hotel and guzzled more when here. Thanks be it wasn't Nescafe. We'll limp through, but everyone's just beat. Election days are always very draining; back-to-back becomes a lot.
*Speaking of not-fine art, I'm foggily aware this is becoming rather stream-of-conciousness-y. I like to think of myself as a geekier and even less talented James Joyce when running on insufficient sleep.