crowdsourcing

The following post is by Lukas Biewald, originally published on CrowdFlower's blog and reposted with his permission.  Lukas is the founder and CEO of Dolores Labs and CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing technology and resource.

Image source: Ushahidi

Friday night I was getting ready to spend the weekend working on my board meeting slides when my friend Ian Monroe came by the office and told me to talk to Robert Munro. Robert is a computational linguist who does research on large scale processing of text messages — an obscure subject until the earthquake in Haiti happened two weeks ago.Robert had been working with Josh Nesbit, cofounder of FrontLineSMS:Medic, an awesome NGO dedicated to building SMS based communication infrastructure for people in the developing world.

On December 7, 2008, incumbent Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a highly contested presidential election with Raila Odinga.  Odinga and his supporters cried foul, and international observers agreed that the election count was flawed.  Violence soon erupted as a reaction to the election news.  In the end, a coalition government was formed, but not before, according to the BBC, "some 1,500 people died in political violence."

Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, is a response to this violence.  According to the Ushahidi web site,

"Ushahidi's roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.

The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them."