Last week I was intrigued by this tweet from Craig Fugate:

The link he provided was to a shared situational map and reporting center powered by Ushahidi. This open source project was intaking the crisis information through crowd sourcing in near real time locally. Since there was a lack of a centralized command and control center in Haiti to organize and direct the humanitarian efforts, the Relief Agencies were able to turn to this application to determine where there was an urgent need in proximity to their location. You can see how the Ushahidi Haitian Center may be useful to a foreign relief agency operating in the theater of the disaster.

So just what is Ushahidi you ask?

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

While Ushahidi is an open source project, and therefore free to use, after quickly perusing the source code it will require some moderate to advanced technological knowledge to make it work. Some other places that have deployed the Ushahidi system include MapATL – Visualizing the crime in Atlanta and the Swine Flu Outbreak.

What I really like about Ushahidi is that it centralizes your information into one place that the system updates in nearly real time, and it also offers syndication possibilities with RSS Feeds. I can think of quite a few different applications for that feature set.

For those of you who may not have the technological chops to run a Ushahidi installation, our friends at Depiction have some new software upgrades that may be what you are looking for to create a “Common Operational Picture” for all the agencies involved in an incident. While their video does not address the possibility of crowd sourcing the ability to report incidents, they will be demonstrating these features at a webinar on 1/27/10 @ 1:00pm PST where I am sure they will be willing to answer any questions about how Depiction can be used in that way.

Does your agency have the technological knowledge to install Ushahidi? If not, then what do you think the biggest challenge is to attaining that level of tech independence?

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• Ushahidi Wins an Open Source Award in Kenya! (ushahidi.com)
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• Why Open Source is the New Software Policy in San Francisco (mashable.com)

About The Author

Dave Konig has authored 135 articles for PIOSocialMediaTraining.com

Dave has been involved in Social Media since 2005 through the current major services and some defunct ones as well. During this time he has been able to hone the craft by testing out the theories of others, creating his own philosophies, and gathering a better understanding of the mediums involved through networking and most importantly actual practice.

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