Anyone can be the victim of a catastrophic tragedy, or world crisis situation. But in the same way that you can be a victim, you are a witness to all events, and your voice becomes a powerful tool that can collaborate with society. Having all the testimonies of each person, and being able to process that information in real time for a greater good, could mean something great. This is how Ushahidi begins.
Ushahidi (" testimony" or " witness " in Swahili) is a citizen-led platform for monitoring events, particularly those related to crises, emergencies, or tragedies within a region. Ushahidi gathers, processes, and organizes all geolocated citizen information about tasks, news, and any events related to the situation in question.
The idea for Ushahidi emerged in Africa, specifically in Kenya in 2007, after the controversial re-election of President Mwai Kibaki. After the opposition accused the electoral process of fraud, a series of violent acts were unleashed that could not be documented due to the lack of informative references and the great censorship of the government to the media.
Thus, at the beginning of 2008, bloggers and programmers came together in an effort to create Ushahidi, a low-cost website that was capable of collecting information from all its inhabitants and being an informative window on the crisis situation in the country.
Ushahidi is based on crowdsourcing , is open source , developed mainly in PHP under the LPGL license , created so that any person or organization can establish their own way of processing and visualizing information related to a situation of collective importance.
Information gathering relies directly on social activism and citizen journalism, where each "witness" can submit their information via SMS, email, Twitter , or the form embedded on the website . These citizen reports are received by Ushahidi staff, who geocode and visualize the information using Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap . The system uses SwiftRiver , a tool that filters and verifies all online information in real time, prioritizing the most valuable data and discarding duplicates received through various channels. Once approved, the information is displayed on a map, marked by red dots.
Currently, Ushahidi is one of the leading crowdsourcing platforms, and this website has participated in numerous major events worldwide, ranging from monitoring elections in Mexico, India, Argentina and Venezuela, to tracking viruses such as H1N1.
