In Egypt where increasingly women face undesirable attention from men , HarrasMap is a an independent community watch project, planned to launch in the coming few weeks, it will enable women to report harassment instantly by sending a text message to a centralised system, the reported incidents are used to build a detailed, public map of harassment hotspots. HarrasMap will be built on open-source mapping engine Ushahidi (crodwdsourcing crisis information system) with geocoding capabilities for cities, neighbourhoods, landmarks, etc. FrontlineSMS will be integrated with Ushahidi to allow for 2-way communication between the system and reporting victims.
Round of applause HarrasMap!
1- will it work English / Arabic to support those who can’t type in English?
2- How are you planning to make people aware of it?, because there are a lot of women out there who do not have internet access and will not see this post
3- What are the women supposed to type in the message?
4- What good will it do if no action will be taken against harassers?
By: dohashawki on October 20, 2010
at 3:28 pm
Hi There,
Thanks for you valuable comments, I’m only one of HarrasMap fans, please direct your inquiries to http://harassmap.wordpress.com/ they should be able to help with helpful answers. As per my understanding:
1- the system is bi-lingual; i.e. you can send SMS in Arabic if you choose to,
2- HarrasMap would surely have a campaign, again you better check with them
3- Women can type one word and the phone device would detect the location
4- There must be action-ing involved with the reporting otherwise not much results would be foressen.
Many Thanks,
Inas
By: Inas Hafez on October 20, 2010
at 4:25 pm