Ushahidi and Crowdsourcing in a Time of Crisis

January 27th, 2009 in News, by Head Honcho

Many people take the Internet for granted. While many utilize the Internet for mundane activities like online gaming or watching videos, people in some parts of the world rely on the Internet as their only link to the outside world. The Internet serves as a vital, if not the only, link for news and information.

That is the case in Kenya just a year ago. The post-election unrest was widespread, but it was hard to monitor the situation as it happened. That’s what prompted Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh to set up a site where people could document and find real-time reports about the violence in Kenya. Thus, the website Ushahidi was born.

Ushahidi is a website that crowdsources crisis information. The site was created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them.

Ushahidi can be said to have fulfilled its goal with the Kenya crisis. Rachel Nixon reports in NowPublic that by the time the violence subsided in April of 2008, the site had received approximately 140 reports. Ushahidi went on to use its model of crowdsourcing crisis information to map attacks against foreigners in South Africa. It is also using the same technology to track the eastern Congo conflict.

Ushahidi’s goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs. This tool will be tested and made available as an open source application that others can download, implement and use to bring awareness to crises in their own region. Organizations can also use the tool for internal monitoring purposes. For those who would like to take part, they can contribute in many ways, such as: doing timeline, map work, chart, graphs, news and incident clustering, and authentication. Hopefully, Ushahindi can serve its purpose in other parts of the globe as much as it helped in the Kenyan crisis.

Here is a video about Ushahindi and how it can change the world.