Ushahidi.com - Crowd Sourcing Crisis Information

Africa is a beautiful continent, with beautiful countries and a variety of cultures. However, African economy and politics have motivated a quite unstable social situation where people no longer feel secure.

Based on these facts, as well as taking advantage of the worldwide technological advances, a team of qualified professionals has developed an interesting site called Ushahidi.com. The word Ushahidi, means “testimony” in Swahili, and can be conceived as an effective platform that can be used by the African population in order to be well informed about every single major fact going on in Africa.

In this way, many people form different African countries will be allowed to have specific and useful data about any crisis going on close to them. On this site you will be able to submit a wide assortment of crisis data in different ways. In fact, you can do it through text messaging using your mobile phone, as well as by email, etc.

One of the good things about this site is that its creators have a multicultural background since they are coming from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Malawi in Africa, Netherlands in Europe, and the United States of America.

Therefore, if you are in Africa and you need a solution that lets you be informed the latest incidents going on in Africa, Ushahidi.com will allow you to send SMS, emails or web messages with the intention to aggregate information that can be useful for any crisis response.

“Our goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs. This tool will be tested and made available as an open source application that others can download, implement and use to bring awareness to crises in their own region. Organizations can also use the tool for internal monitoring purposes.”

This is an interesting solution that will give African users the possibility to share information about a variety of things going on in Africa. This will be attractive for African people to be well informed in case of crisis.

How accurate is the information sent by the people? How do you know if they are false alarms?