Recently in Ushahidi Category

Looking at a sea of puzzled Dubin schoolboy faces unable to grasp an intricate point of Algebra, a frustrated teacher of mine liked to remark that: "some boys' mothers have very slow sons."

That lost feeling returned last week when I attended the World Bank's Innovation Fair in Cape Town and the discussion kept returning to Ushahidi and social mapping. 

The sceptical journalist in me demanded evidence that all the energy going into mapping and geo-location was capable of doing any good. What was going to stop a government, with evil intent in mind, from undermining an Ushahidi project by disseminating false information?

"How many Haitians had been pulled from the rubble thanks to Ushahidi's enormous texting and geo-location efforts by volunteers around the world and on the ground?" I asked.

"We don't know" came the honest reply.

 It took time to penetrate, but after learning about several social mapping projects taking place around the world, I finally 'get' why mapping is central to the future of communication. Its already being used around the world to empower traditionally voiceless people. 

Take the Map Kibera  for example a project in which local residents of the famous Nairobi slum collaborated to map what they believe is important in their community. Kenyan government maps depict Kibera as a forest! This is very convenient because trees don't need services. Thus, almost  a million  people living in Kibera get virtually no services from the government.

Not any more. Thanks to Map Kibera, the slum now has a political personality all its own. At a click on a map its residents can make the case for resources. Along with video and twitter feeds the community is finally gaining a voice of its own.

The worry that Ushahidi's technology might be deliberately undermined by a repressive government still lingered, however. Given the behavior of Chinese hackers and Iranian secret police this seems a looming danger. This morning I received an email of a post about a TED talk by Patrick Meier, one of Ushahaidi's founders and current spokesperson of the organisation. 

Its well worth a read.