It goes without saying that we rely upon location pretty heavily here at Ushahidi. SwiftRiver’s mandate is to help users process and validate data. For Ushahidi users, applying geospatial context to content that doesn’t carry it (like SMS, news articles, blog posts, in some cases Tweets) has proved tedious, with questionable results.
Ushahidi was born as a group of ad hoc Kenyans who came together to build a tool for crowdsourcing information 3 years ago. The organization was formed a few months later, so both are almost 3 years old.
The following post was written by a volunteer developer, Vladimir G. Ermakov a Master’s student at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Over the past few months he took on an ambitious project: to contribute code that would allow us to parse news articles and attempt to auto-detect the primary location that is the subject of any given text.
Here are some interesting user-interface designs that show the diverse looks possible for Ushahidi deployments. The first is the original Ushahidi platform launched in January, 2008.
[This is a guest blog post by Gregory Asmolov, an intern at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, contributing editor to “Runet Echo” and a Russian language blogger. He and Alexey Sidorenko deployed the Ushahidi platform Russian Fires.ru. This deployment is the second for the Help Map Team]
Ushahidi: Creating a New Narrative from Ushahidi on Vimeo. The Ushahidi Platform allows everyone to create the narrative.
In this video, the Ushahidi founders and others discuss the origins of, and rational behind, the Ushahidi platform.
Ushahidi creates open source platforms, which means that we rely heavily upon the community of practitioners, coders and fans in order to make things work.
