Ushahidi is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Being able to see where disturbances, crimes and other events are happening is an important way to coordinate information from news sources as well as local people.
A new Ushahidi engine has been built using 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 so that other people can see where problems are occurring.
It is built so that it can work with other websites and online tools and it doesn’t depend on users having access to expensive technology like computers: they can use their mobile phones, a piece of technology 4.1 billion people had access to in December 2008.
Erik Hershman, director of operations at Ushahidi says, ‘We take the stance that you go for the lowest common denominator, which is the SMS enabled mobile phone. So you take your Nokia 1100 and you say, “If we can make the technology work on this that’s useful for people both on incoming messages and outgoing messages then we have something that’s valuable and let’s see what people do with it.” The first iteration of that was in Kenya during the post election ballots. We quickly created a website. It was a mash-up of maps and incoming mobile phones messages that we called Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili, then what we did was get funding to build a global version of this.’
Ushahidi’s creates a platform that any person or organisation can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform allows for
plug-ins and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs. This tool is 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. Organisations can also use the tool for internal monitoring purposes.
The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It was being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US. ‘Traditional media tend to have a problem of scale and scope. They can’t get to everywhere that the news is happening,’ says Hershman. ‘We pull the information in from traditional news sources but also ordinary people. Put that on the map so they can see what’s happening.’
Hershman also explains the benefit of taking a local approach to problem solving: ‘If you’re solving African problems let Africans solve those problems. The developers working on Ushahidi are from all over Africa who are developing it for their needs and their locations. If you can make it to the constraints and all the negative things you think about Africa means that if you have the perfect trial zone for creating an application that can work everywhere.’