ushahidi

Being part of Ushahidi has given us a front row seat to what I like to term the “InfoWars“. A time when it seems like the fourth and fifth estates are pitted against the other three.

For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Ushahidi to gather feedback from people all over the world who have put the platform to work. I’ve found it incredibly inspiring to learn about their implementations and see how Ushahidi has evolved in response to their needs.

Creating an ecosystem of early warning and response actors in Liberia necessitates involvement from various levels of that system – local civil society organizations, international NGOs, the UN, government ministries, the national police and armed forces.  Our team on the ground has spent much of the first couple months meeting with international NGOs (of which there are more than 70 based in Monrovia alone) and the UN – key players in this multi-layered approach to conflict prevention and intervention.  Many of these potential partners were eager to begin mapping – but with several of them, we hit the same wall: our maps, they said, didn’t have enough information.  Well, not “our” maps, but rather the base layer maps used here in Liberia for Ushahidi instances – Google Maps.  And Googl

[Cross-posted from PakReport Blog, written by Jaro Valuch of Konpa Group]
It was clear pretty early after the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 that the disaster was exceptional in the scale of destruction as well as it was exceptional in the scale and type of response it triggered. Particularly unprecedential was the response from tech and crisis mapping community.