Ushahidi is a small African-born organisation thats suddenly on the tip of the tongue of every humanitarian organisation, aid worker, development expert and journalist.
The New York Times seems to thinks it can use use to find Osama bin Laden and now there's a Ushahadi for Somalia to track the activities of pirates.
Its roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan blogger/journalists after the disputed 2007 election. But its the journalists at the New York Times Week in Review we should worry about. They seem determined to push Ushahidi as a tool to catch terrorist kingpins.
This is the reductio ad absurdum process that gives newspapers a bad name and could quickly turnUshahidi's clever technology into something suspect thats likely to get people slung in jail for using it in conflict affected states.
I'm sure its true that "any Pakistani" could text a message "Where's Wally?-style" to the US. If enough people did it, the drones would soon be overhead dropping bombs. But don't tech-savvy Al Qaida already know this?
Thanks to the Haiti disaster and the Chile quake that followed, Ushahidi got busy and received thousands of messages reporting trapped victims. In an extraordinary surge of volunteerism, the messages were translated from Creole by Haitian- expatriates aroudn the world.
Then they were plotted on a "crisis-map" at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Turt's University near Boston, Masachussetts. Just 4 days after the earthquake, Haitians could text their location and urgent needs to "4636" for free.
The Ushahidi team would then instant message searchers in Haiti in English, telling them where people were trapped.
If the crisis centre wasn't sure of the address it replied and asked for more location information, usually getting a reply in minutes.
If a relief worker from the Red Cross had a field office in neighborhood of Delmas, they could subscribe to Ushahidi to receive information on all reports originating from their immediate vicinity by specifying a radius.
By the time of the Chile quake the volunteers managed to map over 100 reports including many pictures, less than 48 hours after a Ushahidi-Chile platform was set up.
Ushahidi has been spreading like wildfire since 2007 when the prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh returned to Kenya from South Africa to vote and observe the election.
She was threatened and left, posting online the idea of an Internet mapping tool that would allow people to report anonymously on violence and corruption. Almost overnight, the tech community had the Ushahidi Web platform up and running.
Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, is now working on a new platform that can be used anywhere in the world and indeed the volunteers are been busy tracking election fraud and violence in Togo to the Islamic rebells and pirates in Somalia.
The core engine of Ushahidi is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US.
One thing that the writer Anand Giridharadas got right in his Times piece is that Ushahidi could transform in humanitarian work.
The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.
And it is interesting that the innovation has come from a place where hardship and poverty are the the norm, rather than the pampered elites of Silicon Valley, their dot coms bulging with cash, their universities overflowing with foundation grants. Here's Giridharadas again:
Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.
Now that Ushahidi's remixes are being put to work everywhere from the monitoring elections, report medicine shortages; collect early warning signals of conflict and as a system of traffic monitoring Washington, D.C. it seems there are now limits to its use.
But lets not be naive and think we are going to find Osama bin Laden with a few thousand text messages.
Conflict and early warning response
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