Ushahidi
Ushahidi, Inc. is a not-for-profit technology company with employees in nine countries dedicated to helping underprivileged people be heard and those who manipulate and process those people's information. It was founded in 2008 by Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh , Juliana Rotich and David Kobia in the Kenyan capital Nairobi . Ushahidi software was instrumental in creating the Kenyan tech ecosystem known as Silicon Savannah. His collaborators founded iHub, Akirachix and BRCK.
The organization uses the concept of crowdsourcing social activism and public accountability and serves as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping": the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information . Ushahidi offers products that allow local observers to submit reports via their cell phones or the internet while simultaneously building a temporal and geospatial archive of events. The Ushahidi platform is widely used for crisis response, human rights reporting and election observation . After the controversial presidential election in Kenya in 2007, Ushahidi ( Swahili for testimony , closely related to Shahidi, which means "witness") created a website that collected eyewitness reports of violence via email and SMS and placed them on a Google Maps map.
The software creates a map and draws on it which observations were made by people in which places.
The Ushahidi platform has been used over 125,000 times in over 160 countries, including the 2012 Obama campaign for America; the United Nations Department of Field Services and Peacekeeping in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake ; to oversee the Nigerian elections in 2011 ; from the Nepalese Army to respond to the 2015 earthquake; in and by local activist groups, such as Humanitarian Tracker, to document violence against Syrian citizens; HarassMap to help women report sexual harassment.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ David Adewumi: Kenyan tech bloggers launch crisis-report site . In: VentureBeat . January 15, 2008. Retrieved January 16, 2010.