Ushahidi
| Founded | 2008 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, Juliana Rotich, David Kobia |
| Type | 501(c)(3) |
| 2652079 | |
| Focus | activism, mapping |
| Location |
|
| Origins | Crowdsourcing |
|
Area served
|
World |
| Method | mapping and geospatial |
| Owner | Ushahidi, Inc. |
|
Key people
|
Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, David Kobia, |
|
Revenue
|
US$300,000 |
| Endowment | US$1,800,000 |
|
Employees
|
29 |
|
Volunteers
|
50 |
| Slogan | Crowdsourcing Crisis Information |
| Website | ushahidi |
 |
|
 MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions, Ushahidi, MacArthur Foundation, February 2013 |
|
|
Juliana Rotich: Meet BRCK, Internet access built for Africa, TED Talks, June 2013 |
Ushahidi, Inc. is a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source software (LGPL) for information collection, visualisation, and interactive mapping. Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony", closely related to shahidi which means "witness") created a website in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence reported by email and text message and placed them on a Google Maps map.
The organisation uses the concept of crowdsourcing for social activism and public accountability, serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping"—the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information. Ushahidi offers products that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet, while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.
The Ushahidi platform is built on the Kohana web framework, a fork of the CodeIgniter framework. It includes support for Nexmo wholesale SMS API and Clickatell SMS Gateway. Furthermore, the official Ushahidi-hosted websites use the commercial service. Ushahidi provides the option of using OpenStreetMap maps in its user interface, but requires the Google Maps API for geocoding. Ushahidi is often set up using a local SMS gateway created by a local FrontlineSMS set-up.
Crowdmap is designed and built by the team behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform evolved, so did its users. Crowdmap now allows users to set up their own deployments of Ushahidi without having to install it on a web server. Since its release in 2010, prominent deployments of Crowdmap have documented the global Occupy movement and the 2011 London anti-cuts protest.
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Wikipedia