Beginnings in Kenya Ushahidi (
Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see
2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a
Google map. It is also the name of the
open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects around the globe. The Kenyan site was developed and run by several bloggers and software developers, all current or former residents of Kenya. They include
Erik Hersman,
Juliana Rotich,
Ory Okolloh, and David Kobia. The site was initially proposed by Okolloh, developed cheaply, and put online within a few days. International media, government sources, NGOs, and Kenyan journalists and bloggers were used to verify eyewitness testimony. The site was later also used to facilitate donations from abroad. On 23 December 2010, Ushahidi Co-founder and Executive Director
Ory Okolloh announced that she was stepping down from her role to become Manager of Policy for Africa at
Google.
Post-Kenya crisis uses Soon after its initial use in Kenya, the Ushahidi software was used to create a similar site to track
anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, in May 2008. The software has since been used to map violence in eastern Congo, beginning in November 2008. Ushahidi is used in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia in June 2009 to track pharmacy
stockouts in several Southeast African countries. Finally, it was used to monitor elections in Mexico and India, among other projects. It was also used by
Al Jazeera to collect eyewitness reports during the 2008–09
Gaza War. The post election violence in Kenya was the subject of a Harvard Humanitarian Institute study and mentioned in a Berkman Center report.
2010 Haiti In 2010, due to the
earthquake in Haiti,
Patrick Meier launched a joint effort between Ushahidi, The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University,
UN OCHA/Colombia and the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net) to start the Haiti implementation. A few hours later many humanitarian/tech workers joined this initiative. Nearly 40,000 independent reports were sent to the Ushahidi Haiti Project of which nearly 4,000 distinct events were plotted. The project instance was an impressive proof of concept for the application of crisis mapping and crowdsourcing to large scale catastrophes and a novel approach to the rapidly evolving field of crisis informatics.
Chile Only a month after the Haiti earthquake, the
2010 earthquake in Chile prompted Patrick Meier to launch Ushahidi-Chile within hours of the initial quake. The Chile site is co-managed with the
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in the United States, supported by
Chilean Americans.
Louisiana, U.S. On 20 April 2010 BP's offshore
Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded killing eleven workers and precipitating the
largest accidental offshore oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. On 3 May the
Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB) publicly released the Oil Spill Crisis Map, the first application of the Ushahidi platform in a humanitarian response in the United States. In the years since the BP oil spill, LABB continues to use the map (now the iWitness Pollution Map) as a repository of eyewitness reports and photos documenting the impacts of petrochemical pollution on human health and the environment. Reports to the map come from cities all over Louisiana, including Baton Rouge, St. Rose, and Chalmette. Since 2010 LABB has collected over 14,000 reports, making it the largest and longest-running deployment of an Ushahidi instance.
Washington, D.C. In the wake of
winter storms,
The Washington Post and the web development company PICnet used the software to create a site mapping blocked roads and other information.
Italy Elena Rapisardi, together with Giovanni Lotto, launched the first Italian crowdmap Open Foreste Italiane in order to list and map information to prevent and manage forest fires; the meaning of this project has been reported on the Ushahidi blog. Though OpenForeste did not completely achieve his goals, it showed importance for two reasons: (1) unlike previous instances, the platform was utilized in absence of an acting crisis or emergency to collect, map, share and spread information in order to manage future and potential emergencies, thus joining the awareness of the possibilities of
Web 2.0 and a different approach to natural risk prevention; (2) it brought to Italy the knowledge and potential of Ushahidi,
crowdmapping and social use of
crowdsourcing, which was then used in following years in several instances, both private and public, especially from local Civil Protection structures and based on the new approach to the Ushahidi platform (see here a non-complete crowdmap of Italian Crowdsourcing Projects).
Russia Ushahidi was used in Russia to set up a "map of help" for voluntary workers needed after the
2010 Russian wildfires.
2011 ;Christchurch Using Ushahidi, the
Christchurch Recovery Map website was launched less than 24 hours after the February
2011 Christchurch earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. The site maps locations of services such as food, water, toilets, fuel,
ATMs, and medical care. Information was gathered via Twitter using the #eqnz hashtag, SMS messages, and email. The site was founded by a group of web professionals, and maintained by volunteers. ;Middle East This software allowed pro-democracy demonstrators across the Middle East to organise and communicate what was happening around them in early 2011. On 2 March, the UN
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) requested that the Standby Volunteer Task Force be activated for Libya. The Task Force's Tech Team set up a password protected Ushahidi platform almost immediately and several days later launched a public version at OCHA's request. This allowed users to contribute relevant information about ground conditions as they occurred. ;Italy In July 2011, Giuseppe Calamita had created the first crowdmap to monitor a WIMAX/LTE Internet Service Provider to answer the issues not due to the ISP (jammer, etc.) ;India India Citizen Reports has been using Ushahidi since 2011 to collect and disseminate reports in various categories like civic problems, crimes and corruption. TelecomMap.com uses Ushahidi to map
3G network quality and Wi-Fi hotspots. ;Australia
Australian Broadcasting Corporation used Ushahidi to map the
Queensland floods in January. ;United States The MightyMoRiver Project used Ushahidi's hosted service Crowdmap to track the
Missouri River floods of 2011. ;Macedonia Transparency Watch Project is using the Ushahidi platform to track corruption reported cases in the Republic of Macedonia. PrijaviKorupcija is a joint project by Transparency International and the Center for International Relations allowing citizens to report cases of corruption via
ONE by sending SMS from their mobile phones, sending an email, using the web form, the hashtag #korupcijaMK on Twitter or by reporting via phone call.
Nigerian Elections Ushahidi was used to monitor the Nigerian 2011 elections under the project Reclaim Naija. A published article in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics by Catie Snow Bailard & Steven Livingston showed that, "Controlling for a number of factors, we find that the number and nature of crowdmap reports generated by citizens is significantly correlated with increased voter turnout (by 8%) in the 2011 Nigerian presidential election as a result of providing officials with improved information about the functionality of local polling stations."
2013 Kenya Elections Ushahidi helped run the Uchaguzi partnership to monitor the 2013 Kenyan elections. The deployment gathered over 8000 reports, a report "Uchaguzi: A Qualitative and Quantitive Analysis of ICTS, Statebuilding, and Peacebuilding in Kenya." showed that 75% of reporters said their report was responded to.
2014 Kenya Ushahidi announced Ping (now called Rollcall) in response to the attacks on Westgate Mall in Nairobi.
2016 Ushahidi created USAelectionmonitor.com to monitor the USA 2016 Presidential Election. After the election Ushahidi set up Documenthate.org to monitor the spike in hate crimes against minorities in the USA post election. Ushahidi partnered with journalist and activist
Shaun King and non-profit journalism group Propublica. The New Yorker covered the story, saying: "Now Shaun King, a writer for the
Daily News, is working with the open-source software company Ushahidi to create a map of post-election intimidation. 'Thousands of people have emailed me incident reports over the past seven days,' King wrote me in an e-mail. 'The team at Ushahidi is helping me go through them, verify them the best we can, catalogue and then map them, then share them.' The aim is to raise awareness of politically motivated violence and help people stay safe, report it to authorities as needed, and create a database of such incidents."
2017 Ushahidi ran the Uchaguzi partnership to monitor the 2017 Kenyan elections, the fourth country-wide election monitoring effort for the organization. Ushahidi integrated a Facebook Messenger bot to allow the 7 million Facebook users in Kenya to report via Messenger. The platform received over 7000 reports on election day. As of 2017, the platform reported that it had been deployed over 125,000 times in over 160 countries, although most of these were for evaluation, training or curiosity. ==Awards==