Transcript Ushahidi: Made in Africa

Nathaniel Manning
(c)Yasuyoshi Chiba
Founding Team
MIT Tech Review’s Top
35 under 35.
FastCompany’s ‘Most
creative People’
World Economic
Forum ICT Global
Council
TED Senior Fellow,
Pop!Tech Fellow.
TIME Top 50 websites
What is Ushahidi?
Open source software for information collection,
visualization and interactive mapping.
We build tools for democratizing information,
increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for
individuals to share their stories.
Platform
Community
ushahidi.com
Movement
Changing the way
information flows
Massive Deployments
March 2011 - 4,000+ reports
Monitor fallout of tsunami and nuclear crisis
Mobile
Free and open source SMS
gateway for Android
the
default
device
Whitelabeling of
Android and iOS apps
Lessons
Crowdsourcing
platform must be
easy to deploy,
intuitive to use,
simple to localize and
customize
“A map is only as
useful as the process
and people to make it
happen.”
-George Chamales, Rogue Genius
slidesha.re/ushahidi_lessons
Pothole Theory
(CCby: http://www.flickr.com/photos/articnomad/211169462)
The common denominator for successful is trust.
BUILDING A DATA
PLATFORM
Growth & Scale
Citizen
Journalism
December 2010
Help bring awareness to sexual harassment in
Egypt
harassmap.com
Communities
By the City / For the City (NYC)
Integration of social media into placemaking
practices, which are community centered,
encouraging public participation, collaboration and
transparency.
urbandesignweek.org
Election Monitoring
May 2009 - 202 reports, 20,000 views
Allow citizen reporting during election
votereport.in
August 2010 - 1525 reports, 20,000 views
Monitor Kenya referendum election
uchaguzi.co.ke
Limitless Creativity
“The crowdsourced information keeps people aware...in
which regular news outlets are often too bulky or slow to
act...”
- FastCompany
Thank You
ushahidi.com
swiftly.org
crowdmap.com
APPENDIX
ANALYSING DATA
We have a Problem
We are pummeled by information
250 million Tweets/day
How do we find the one important drop of info?
SwiftRiver is a curation tool that combines
search with the power of the crowd
Computer Intelligence
The Human Hunch
+
Curate. Filter. Collaborate.
CrowdSource the
Filter
Real-time information.
Processed into a river.
Filtered by the crowd.
Visualized & organized.
From This
To This