War & Peace
Assetmap.org/Uganda
While citizens can donate to conflict relief organizations such as CARE International, they have few if any formal opportunities to help support post-conflict transformation and peace building. assetmap.org/uganda will utilize digital mapping tools to improve collaboration, best practice sharing, and funding coordination by American citizen efforts to support community development in post-conflict northern Uganda. It is the first project of assetmap.org, a tool that will help citizen global change agents better share their knowledge and resources for collaborative development. Since 1986, Ugandans have been caught in a vicious war between the Government of Uganda (GoU) and the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Subject to village raids and child abductions by the LRA, forced into ill-provisioned, ill-protected displacement camps by the GoU, the people of the Acholi, Teso, and Langi tribes have been caught in what UN officials have called the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.†Despite this horrible situation, Western humanitarianism has provided resources that have helped many community-based organizations (CBOs) grow into effective organizations and support an increasingly robust civil society. As peace talks help end the war, this civil society will be an essential foundation for a peaceful, democratic society. As peace comes, however, the relief organizations that provided the financial support for northern Uganda civil society will move on to other pressing global crisis, leaving a financial vacuum that threatens to undermine local community leadership in development and conflict transformation. American citizens have a unique role to play in supporting this transition. Citizen-led projects including Rotary International club trips, university study abroad programs, and youth-led service projects have created a flow of resources and collaboration between American and Ugandan communities. These groups do not face the institutional imperative to jump from crisis to crisis, and through collaboration could provide more sustainable resources to support the development of post-conflict civil society. Unfortunately, these groups have no mechanism for learning about one another, the fundamental prerequisite for collaboration. New groups, inspired by their examples, have no mechanism for channeling their new resources to existing endeavors. Digital mapping tools can fundamentally change the way that Americans support post-conflict transformation in Uganda
assetmap.org/uganda will help American citizens who are currently or wish to be engaged with development in Uganda better collaborate. To more effectively coordinate citizen-led efforts to support conflict transformation and community development in northern Uganda, people need access to the following information:
1. Where projects operate, 2. What issues they address, 3. Which actors are involved. This information needs to be presented in such a way that it is accessible for all actors involved. The information will be user-generated, and needs be organized in using mapping, tagging, and customized database tools. Mapping tools such as Googlemaps provide users the ability to identify the locations of their projects in Uganda, but the open “description box†associated where map users can describe the location does not provide rigorous enough information to organize and share specific data. Customized database tools like DabbleDB could allow assetmap.org/uganda to design an application that captured and organized information about citizen-led efforts. The relevant information includes the focus of the projects, level of funding, and number of participants. We would like to develop a tool such as a Facebook application that provides information about citizen-led projects in norther Uganda by integrating mapping tools with some sort of customizable database, and allowing participating citizens to link their profiles (facebook or linkedin) to the map location
The founders of assetmap.org/uganda lead an annual Northwestern University study abroad program, “ENGAGE Ugandaâ€, which helps 20 students partner with Ugandan nonprofit organizations each year. The founders have been traveling to Uganda for the last four years running the ENGAGE Uganda program and also consulting around strategy and fundraising with a variety of citizen-led development projects around the country. In 2007, the ENGAGE Uganda teams worked with Uganda community organizations on projects including computer literacy for war-affected children, microcredit training, and sports and youth leaderships.
The founders of assetmap.org/uganda also have previous experience with digital organizing around nonprofit work, including advisory and staff positions with Change.org. In 2005, the founders organized a multi-member weblog to catalog youth volunteer efforts around the world called justnaiveenough.org
We need programmers and developers who can help us determine the best way to integrating mapping, tagging, and customized database applications in a way that allows for easy sharing among users of an existing social network such as facebook or LinkedIn.
We understand the types of information that will be relevant for citizen change agents, and have initiated the data collection process to connect to citizen-led efforts in Uganda outside of our student efforts. Three student interns will be in northern Uganda identifying citizen projects this summer, while one-two will do outreach from our Chicago office to identify projects – particularly on college campuses and in faith communities. We desperately need web developers who can help us build the infrastructure through which these contacts will share information about their projects. This information sharing is the necessary pre-requisite for future collaboration
n/a - users will generate all information and data
