Ushahidi, the application that ‘crowd sources crisis information’, entered public Alpha testing a few days ago….

The Ushahidi community is excited to announce the alpha release of the Ushahidi engine, that our developers have been hard at work on these last few months. The release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in Ushahidi v1. As this is a development-release, we do not claim it to be perfect, and includes the following features:

* Creating new crisis reports tagged by location
* Adding images, video and news links to reports also tagged by location
* Visualizing reports using an interactive timeline and heatmaps
* Allowing users to participate by adding information to reported events
* Credibility/Ranking of reports
* Subscribe to alerts via email or sms that alert you to reports within the proximity of a specific location

View the companies official statement here. The original ‘mash-up’ version of Ushahidi is available here.

About the Author: Jonathan Gosier (Founder) is an American-born software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he is working on two fronts: to encourage western businesses and investors to engage African entrepreneurs and to encourage the adoption of computers, programming and use of the internet in the developing regions of Africa. He is a huge advocate for promoting the ways in which a semantic web will benefit emerging economies in the world.

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