CauseShift

Innovation in Action:
One of the most interesting projects that has emerged during the response to the earthquake in Haiti is Ushahidi, a free and open source platform that “allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline.”

In short, the goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

The Important Details:
Ushahidi, of course, isn’t that new — its just beginning to gain the mainstream recognition it deserves because of its use in Haiti.  In March 2009, I was part of a group at WeMedia that recognized Ushahidi as a ‘Game Changer.’

What’s a Game Changer?  “Game Changers lead society to knowledge. They inspire involvement and action through media. They provide example, insight and inspiration for leaders and visionaries from all fields by demonstrating how to navigate and lead the connected society.”  Ushahidi won “For redefining the ability of people to quickly communicate vital information for action.

Unlike many citizen journalism initiatives, it dispenses entirely with the many-to-one model of information dissemination and instead makes it possible for many people to communicate relevant information to many people simultaneously. Created by young people during a crisis, it builds on low-cost, high-penetration existing technologies that foster participatory action into the future.” Makes total sense, right?

In a special essay prepared for the WeMedia conference (it wasn’t published online, but since I helped to organize the event I had the text), Dorian Benkoil, an award winning journalist and founder of Teeming Media, wrote the following about Ushahidi:

What if a people throughout a crisis zone could send text messages that save lives, secure international aid, and inform the world of their plight? Ushahidi can lay claim to all these noble goals.

The idea behind the social software mashup is deceptively straightforward: Use uncomplicated Internet applications to receive text messages from people inside the crisis area and locate them on a map alongside feeds of news reports. Show it all, aggregated, on a Web page. Also send out the information via text messages, so those on the ground can get relevant reports.

The project was born of the Kenyan crisis early last year, when, during elections, violence broke out leading to the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. Well-known blogger and activist Ory Okolloh wrote in a blog post during the violence that it would be very useful if someone could help create a Google mashup of media reports. Erik Hersman, an American who grew up in Kenya and Sudan and is also a well-known tech blogger there, contacted Okolloh, then reached out to the tech community in Kenya and elsewhere. Okolloh, Hersman and others who joined launched the site then put out word, which spread quickly. People connected to Kenya sent the information around the world to each other and back into the danger zone. The website received hundreds of text messages and some 50,000 unique visitors in January and February. NGOs like the Red Cross started to take notice, and, Hersman suspects, apportion resources with the additional knowledge. One story told was that a group of 60 people trapped with a forest ranger reported having no food or water through the Ushahidi interface, and an NGO sent supplies and helped them get away. Meanwhile, deaths and atrocities were reported that could have otherwise gone unrecorded.

The goal of Ushahidi, Hersman says, is to decrease the impact of a crisis: “By crowdsourcing this crisis information, we hope to bring more data, information, from ordinary people on the ground, rather than just the top-down hierarchy of how disaster management was handled in the past, and how early warning was handled in the past as well.”

The site provides its software applications openly and has been adapted by Ushahidi and others to help record human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, deforestation in Madagascar, attacks on foreigners in South Africa and “peace heroes” in East Africa. The Al-Jazeera news service is tested a prototype to report on strife during the recent Gaza conflict, and another test is being built to help Teachers Without Borders work with educators worldwide. Ushahidi, funded to date by some $225,000 in foundation grants, has hired its first full-time developer and is moving this Spring from “alpha” to a more robust “beta” phase with applications for smartphones such as the iPhone, Google’s Android operating system and a standard known as J2ME that will work with any device that used GPRS, a common standard for cellphone networks.

While he knows the site will have to cast a dispassionate eye to measure what good Ushahidi is doing for the money it receives, Hersman also thinks about the future possibilities. “What will happen when we get the greater ecosystem working in conjunction with Ushahidi — more of these microblogging services [such as Twitter] and mobile phone networks?,” he asks. “It becomes even more exciting when you look beyond the digital environment in the U.S. and start plugging into the social networks that are used in other parts of the world.”

“I don’t know what the the future will be,” he adds. “But I think it will be very powerful.”

In addition, I had an opportunity to interview Erik Hersman, the founder of Ushahidi, for a podcast (the podcastis a little rough – it was the first one in a series and we still had some details to iron out – but Erik Hersman is incredibly smart, and interesting).  You can listen here.

The Washington Post wrote that it is still too early to know the benefits that Ushahidi may provide in Haiti, but “The crowd-sourcing represents what [Patrick] Meier [Ushahidi's director of strategic operations and founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers] sees as the future of crisis response. “We’re going to need to collaborate, we’re going to need to share data,” he says. “The best way to provide humanitarian response is to be able to provide platforms” and tools that allow people to share on-the-ground information quickly.”

Take a look at Ushahidi.