How it began
After Kenya's disputed presidential election of December 2007, violence broke out and it was hard to know what was happening on the ground. Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan lawyer and blogger, posted an online call asking whether any programmers would build a map of where violence and destruction were occurring using Google Maps. David Kobia, Erik Hersman and Okolloh had a working site within a few days, and co-founder Juliana Rotich dates its launch to January 4, 2008. Ushahidi means testimony in Swahili.
How it works
People send reports by SMS, email, Twitter or a web form. Each report is geolocated and time-stamped and then shown on an online map, building an archive of events by place and date. Reports can be verified and triaged by the people running a deployment, and alerts can be sent back to people in the affected area. The software is open source, so any group can set up its own map.
How it spread
The software was reused in May 2008 to track anti-immigrant violence in South Africa and from November 2008 to map violence in eastern Congo. It was then used to monitor elections in Mexico and India, by Al Jazeera during the 2008 to 2009 Gaza war, and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Around 2010 the team released Crowdmap, a hosted version that cut setup time from days to minutes.
What changed first
In Kenya the site gathered tens of thousands of reports. According to the Wikipedia account of later studies, its data was better than that of the Kenyan mainstream media at the time for non-fatal violence and for information from rural areas. The site was later also used to channel donations from abroad.
Where it stands today
Ushahidi is a nonprofit technology organization based in Nairobi. An arts and technology archive records that the platform has been deployed more than 150,000 times in over 160 countries and has gathered more than 50 million reports, including during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
