Ushahidi: Reporting Kenyan political violence by SMS
by Imran Ali
Recently, MIT’s Technology Review highlighted trends in social media, Web 2.0 businesses and the future of the web, with many industry notables commenting on mobility as one of the strongest and most promising threads.
Buried amongst a round-up of the most exciting startups to track was, David Talbot’s story of Ushahidi, a platform enabling Kenyans to use their mobile handsets, text messages and the web to report incidents of political violence witnessed in the aftermath of the December’s disputed elections.
The post-election violence that swept the country and scepticim of official figures led a number of web developers to develop a service that enabled Kenyans to log reports by text message, then aggregate and render incoming reports on a Google Maps powered web site.
The service is similar in tone and use to Sciponius, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to track block-by-block incidents across the disaster zone.
Talbot goes on to explore the future potential of Ushahidi as a non-profit that can repidly deploy its service to other crisis areas, noting that a mutation of the service is already being used to monitor anti-immigrant violence in South Africa.
What’s particularly unique about Ushahadi is its foundation in fundamentally mobile technology - as noted by Global Voice’s Ethan Zuckerman in the same piece; in countries where mobile penetration far exceed that of broadband and the web, services such as Ushahadi provide a uniquely empowering voice to those who would otherwise go unheard.
