During the post-election fighting in Kenya earlier this year, well known blogger and political activist Ory Okolloh asked what could be done to map the violence that was being reported across the country. Erik Ersman of AfriGadget and White African, read her question and decided to make contact. “I Skyped with her and said let’s take it a step forward and get information that isn’t being reported elsewhere.”

Erik then called David Kobia, an old contact from his years in the new technology field. David has extensive experience in Web Development in addition to his other initiatives, which include starting the African community Mashada. Erik and David kindly spent some time chatting with me over Skype last week, which was quite a cross-continental affair, given that David is in San Francisco and Erik is visiting Johannesburg. 

Named Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahilli, the system they built was put together over a weekend. “These events were happening so quickly, the only difficulty was to get it out the door” explained David. Erik agreed that speed was the priority and that they had “no specific goals, there was no time to formulate really, we were just trying to change things for the better.”

Ushahidi started out as a Google Maps Mashup which allowed for people on the ground to SMS instances of violence via mobile phone that would then be mapped. The reports coming in were verified by a few bloggers who were on the ground, including Ory Okolloh herself. Given that almost no news was making it out of the country, Ushahidi proved to be an important source of information for the international media and a valuable chronicle of what was going on. As David said, the faster news could get out, “the faster action or help can be initiated”.

While they didn’t realise how much attention the system was going to get, the Ushahidi team were aware of its value and possibilities. They received “lots of attention from other countries that were struggling, asking if we could build it for them,” which is exactly what they’ve now done. Ushahidi was first used again here in South Africa to map the instances of xenophobic violence that flared up earlier this year.

Ushahidi has evolved since its inception, with its management team and advisory board consisting of some fascinating people. Ory Okolloh is the Executive Director of the organization; Erik is the Director of Operations; David is the Director of Technology Development and their fourth member, Juliana Rotich, is the Program Director.

With the funding Ushahidi has acquired from a number of grants, they’ve put together a second version of the system, which is in its alpha phase and currently being tested. Essentially, as Erik outlined to me, they’ve moved Ushahidi from being a one-way to a two-way system.

“It still has the same components you originally saw but it now has some two way messaging, people can sign up for alerts and receive them within 20 metres of incident reports… their positions are set up through SMS.”
Ushahidi has also been substantially upgraded - it’s now a platform as opposed to a Web Mashup, which will be available for any organisation to use.

“We’re following the WordPress model,” Erik explained, with the idea being that plug-ins and features can be designed to suit the needs of specific organisations. David hopes that the system will also be adjusted by its users. “We’re trying to create a modularised system… something we can get the open source community in with and make it easy for people to develop new modules for it.” They can’t and don’t want to restrict how people use it. “We came up with our own ideas, but quickly realised those are just our ideas.”

Ushahidi does have many applications that its creators had not anticipated and the five NGO groups they picked for the pilot program starting this month offer some good examples.

Foko, an initiative that hopes to both protect the Malagasy people and bio-diversity in Madagascar, is using the system to track deforestation. People can text in messages about damage happening to the forest near their villages, so that Foko can get real time info and act accordingly. One of the other organisations using the system is Peace Caravan, who’s members are using the system to source peaceful and positive messages about things happening in Kenya.

While it has applications in citizen journalism and organisational communication, Erik finds it unnecessary to define the system, saying that they’re “bridging a few different ideas”. The primary focus seems to be on adjusting the system to the needs of its users, as defined by them, which is where the real value lies. As David so eloquently put it, “that’s the power of crowdsourcing”.