At Pop!Tech: "Presenting an overview of Ushahidi at Pop!Tech 2008"

Erik Hersman calls himself a “bridger.” He grew up in Kenya and Sudan, the son of missionary parents, and lives with his wife and three young daughters in Nairobi, Kenya, after moving from Orlando, Fla. He aspires, through his work as a web strategist and developer, to bridge the gap between his two “home” cultures — in particular, to convey to the rest of the world the use of and possibilities for technology in Africa, and to bring to Africa the technology of the rest of the world. Hersman is convinced that technology can help overcome widespread inefficiencies in Africa, from inadequate infrastructure to poor governance; mobile phones, computers and the Internet offer a promise of bottom-up change that just didn’t exist a few short years ago.

Hersman is part of the founding team of Ushahidi, one example of technology solutions originating in Africa.

What is Ushahidi, and what was the force behind its creation?

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a free, open-source, Web-based tool for ordinary people to use in times of emergency or crisis. We call what we do “crowd-sourcing crisis information.” The idea for the application was born during Kenya’s post-election violence in early 2008. We asked ourselves, “How can we gather eyewitness accounts and put them all in one place?”

Ushahidi Homepage: "Original Ushahidi.com homepage, showing a map of eye-witness accounts of violence in Kenya"

This is how it works: Anybody with an SMS-capable phone can send a short report of an incident to a specific phone number. More powerful devices can send pictures, audio or video with the text report. All the information is then published in near-real-time to a map that can be viewed on computers and mobile phones.

That early version of Ushahidi kept Kenyans current on the latest information and provided assistance to relief workers aiding those caught in the violence. Since then, the application has grown into a large open-source project that is impacting a number of communities around the world. It has been used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to monitor unrest, by Al-Jazeera in Gaza during the January 2009 conflict, in India and Mexico during their most recent elections, and to gather global reports about the Swine Flu outbreak.

Who do you see being helped most with Ushahidi?

Ordinary, everyday people. Most solutions to emergency situations are top-down, driven by government, the media or aid organizations. Often it’s the people on the ground, the ones directly affected by the crisis, who are the last ones asked about what is happening. The goal of Ushahidi is to make it easy for anyone to send information, even from the remotest of locations, and to make that information free and accessible to any individual or organization who needs it.

We’ve always seen it primarily as a way to inject a change-agent into the established system of crisis management. However, we’ve already seen uses of Ushahidi “in the wild” that we never could have thought up ourselves, such as monitoring power outages in the Philippines and tracking deforestation in Madagascar. These aren’t our areas of expertise, but we’re glad that our idea is versatile enough to meet a variety of needs.

USAID: "With USAID Administrator Henrietta Holsman Fore and other finalists in the Development 2.0 Challenge"

You spoke in your TED Talk about “the next big thing.” How will filtering Ushahidi’s real-time eyewitness reports help paint a more accurate big-picture of a crisis?

Verifying data is a key challenge of crowd-sourced information, and one we’ve struggled with since Ushahidi’s first deployment in Kenya. How do you confirm that any given report is true? Currently, the process is neither efficient nor practical in an emergency — verification is done “the old-fashioned way,” by people tracking down sources and corroborating witnesses.

Our answer to this time-intensive process is called Swift River, which will do two important things. First, it will gather as many streams of data as possible about a particular crisis event. Second, all that collected information will be filtered by both machine-based algorithms and humans. The hope is to combine the powers of citizen journalists (people on the scene) and citizen editors (people who are monitoring and evaluating facts) to quickly make available the most reliable and up-to-date information.

In Ghana: "With fellow developer Henry Addo in Ghana for Maker Faire 2009"

How big of a geek does a person have to be to help?

Not very! Of course, we’re always looking for programmers or designers to contribute their expertise, but even more important than the technology are people who can help us make it accessible to those who need it most. Bilingual English-speakers can help by translating Ushahidi to Portuguese or Mandarin or Farsi — or whatever! Activists of all stripes can use Ushahidi to track the issue they’re most passionate about. Anyone who has a website or blog can help us get the word out by adding an Ushahidi button or badge to their site. And finally, anybody can support our ongoing work by donating through Paypal.