Structuring

Overview

This team is responsible for handling all incoming messages coming from SMS and Twitter, which arrive as “Unstructured posts”. This will involve the determination of origin(geolocation) and post creation.

SMSes will be from

• Verified Sources - Our trusted reporters on the ground(members of our partner organizations like ELOG).

• Unverified sources - Other Civil society organisations, or the crowd.

Step by Step Guide

Log into your team slack channel

Make sure you’re logged into slack and announce to your team that you’re starting your shift. If you don’t have access to the slack channel, please get in touch with an Ushahidi team member or your team leader and we’ll grant you access as per the Uchaguzi Access Chart here

Log in to the Uchaguzi Deployment here

If your account has not been upgraded to manage incoming posts, please alert your team lead with your username and we’ll upgrade you.

Navigate to the “Posts from SMS and Twitter” Saved search

These include incoming SMS, and Twitter posts. To access these posts, click on sort and filter, go to filter by then click on saved searches and select Unstructured Posts from SMS, and Twitter as shown below.

This will direct you to a data management view of all unstructured posts. Each post will have an indication of its source of origin.

Select a post to structure

You can do so by clicking on a post card as shown below. Your post detail will pop up on the right hand side of your post card.

If the post is being edited by someone else on your team, you will see a notice on the top of the post detail pane. You will not be able to edit the post again until the post has been saved and taken out of edit mode by your teammate.

Please note: if you are an admin, you have the ability to override the edit lock. If you choose to override the lock, any changes being made by the person editing at that time will be lost if they have not saved them. Proceed with caution.

Review your post for quality

• Read the content of the post to determine the survey to which you should assign this post to. Review the Uchaguzi 2022 Survey classification criteria.

  • Archive the post immediately, IF:-

    • The post content isn’t relevant to election issues or is off topic

    • The post is a duplicate report of the same news article e.g Retweets

• If you require more information from the author of the post, you will be able to message the author, ONLY IF the post was submitted via SMS. You may reply to the post if:-

  • The location of the incident is not specified in the message content

  • You require additional information about the incident being reported

NB: If you have requested additional (location or detailed) information, note down the ID of this message, keep this message open on another tab, and refresh every five minutes to check for responses.

Select the appropriate survey to which this post would best fit in.

Add appropriate content to post as you structure it

Review the anatomy of a post for direction on what details you will be able to add

• Make sure to fill out all required fields. You should be able to extract a title, description and location from the content of the post.

Set appropriate task status for Verification, Translation, Geolocation and Escalation

Scroll down to the tasks section

• Translation

  • If the post is in any other language apart from English, mark the “To be translated” category as shown below

• Geolocation: Scroll down to the geolocation task

  • If you’re able to find the specific address from the media stream item, use that to establish a location and mark the “Geolocated", and mark this task as complete

  • If you’re unable to find the address given, add it to the Refine Location Name field, and mark the “Needs geolocation” category checkbox

  • If no location information is available, mark the “Impossible to geolocate” category checkbox

• Verification: Scroll down to the verification task

  • MARK THIS POST AS UNVERIFIED. It is important to mark this post as unverified for action by the verification team, unless it has been submitted by a trusted reporter.

• Escalation: Scroll down to the escalation task.

  • If the unstructured post you are processing needs to be escalated, select the “Needs escalation” category, and flag it to your team lead, who will fast track its processing by the emergency team.

Warning: PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH THE POST.

Save your post

Once you’ve completed filling out all the required details, click on Save.

Structuring a Twitter post