Haiti Tracker is a platform that helps curate reports from Twitter that are then forwarded on to Ushahidi, which has been overwhelmed by their uncurated feed of news. Ushahidi manages reports of incident during a crisis and with haiti.ushahidi.com, the organization is helping to match displaced families, pass on messages to separated loved ones and provide logistical information to people helping on the ground. Haiti Tracker has been put together in the past few days, thanks to a number of volunteer contributions here in Uganda, Kenya, the United States and all around the world.

A number of similar, incredible efforts have been created including Haiti Stream (which arose out of CrisisCamp a few days ago) and InSTEDD’s EIS, all of which could also use additional volunteer support. Their contact details appear below.

Ushahidi/Swift/HaitiTracker – jon@ushahidi.com

InSTEDD/RIFF – nditada@instedd.org

Crisis Camp/Haiti Stream – crisiscommons@gmail.com

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Sometimes people (groups, companies) just come up with similar ideas.

So I understand that Microsoft’s development team probably weren’t even aware of the location based crisis reporting tool, Ushahidi, and to innovate in the social networking space, they went to the next logical step…location based micro-messaging. If anything, they probably heard about the general idea at a press conference (or in a TED Video or something, maybe this little news network called Al Jeezera) and they decided they (being one of the world’s largest software companies) could reinvent the wheel and make it better with Vine. Nothing wrong with that.

The really disappointing thing is that Microsoft, true to form, want to ‘own’ such a system. The difference between Microsoft Vine and Ushahidi is that with the former you have to wait for some execs in Redmond to crunch some numbers and authorize updates or new features. With Ushahidi, you’ve got a large amount Kenyan developers as well as other guys from around the world contributing to an open source platform that no one really owns, the company Ushahidi just supports and configures installations. The whole point of the software is to be decentralized so that it can be deployed beyond the scope of a few individuals or one company.

Why is that so interesting? Because I don’t quite get the motive. Is it some market potential? How in the world would Microsoft expect to begin to monetize such a service? It’s like trying to monetize 911 or the EBS. Maybe next they’ll make proprietary Air Raids next. Microsoft Air Raid 2009 Live Professional Service Pack 1.

Crisis reporting is something that wants to be free. It needs to be free, community owned, a service that just exists. No one should know where it comes from, it’s just there. I don’t really see what Microsoft locking down such a system ads to the company or the product. In this way, Jason Paczkowski of All Things D is right, Vine is the Zune of Social Networks, all the things that would make such a service cool (even useful) have been left out.

My point is, Microsoft can’t have it both ways. If they want to offer something like this to the world, the real utility is in the openness. I don’t need to pay a premium to know my mother’s house is on fire in Atlanta, Ga, I don’t want to see contextual ads about pacemakers when my grandma reports she’s having a heart attack.

Bottom-line, if they don’t plan to monetize it, then there’s no need for it to be proprietary. They’d offer the world much more if it wasn’t.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

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LINKS FROM THE SHOW

Audacity of Hope in Chinese
Yamli: Phonetic Arabic Search
Legoland Inauguration
Microsoft Photosynth
Ericsson Lays off 5,000
MTN and Verizon talk Merger
Souktel

Photo by Josa Jr

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

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.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Ory Okolloh made an announcement this morning that Ushahidi has relaunched it’s website and has laid out a bold vision for future growth and integration of existing technologies. On her blog KenyanPundit she has this to say about Usahidi’s new funding, new ideas and plans:

So I’ve tinkered in a lot of activism / tree-hugging / save the world type endeavors in the last few (or more) years most of which have not achieved the notoriety of Mzalendo or Ushahidi…largely because I’ve been unable to clone myself, sometimes inertia, and then there’s that pesky problem of paying the bills. I’m also paradoxically risk averse (hello..I’m a lawyer) so I think the challenge of starting something from scratch rather than jumping on to an existing initiative was something I tried to dodge.
….
This is a very long-winded way of saying please check out the relaunched Ushahidi website, learn about the work we will be doing, and read more about the grant funding that we have secured from Humanity United, which has allowed us to build a talented team that will focus on growing Ushahidi

Via the Ushahidi website, they’ve made the following call for developers:

We are in the early stages of developing the Ushahidi Engine as a free and open source platform. The core team is made up of developers from around the world, but especially Africa. The constraints and usage of technology in Africa provide the best testing ground for Ushahidi, and we’ve been extremely happy with the amount of input that has come from this region.

If you would like to take part, we have a complete development environment, where we are working on many features, plug-ins and extensions to the system, some of them listed below:

* Timeline and Map work
* FrontlineSMS integration and extension
* Geocoding Accuracy
* Bayesian Modeling: for use in automatic classification (finding the right category) of reports
* Sahana integration
* Heatmapping: Depending upon the elevation view of the map, heat-mapping (polygons) will be used instead of point data
* News and Incident Clustering: figure out how to cluster both citizen reports and mainstream news reports.
* Charts and Graphs: Beyond mapping and timelines, data should be able to be seen in charts and graphs
* Authentication: Background credibility scores based on past information/reports sent in by individuals. Ability to manually set this in the admin panel.

To join the Ushahidi development team visit them here.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

The GIS service for tracking incidents of unrest in violence in Kenya, Ushahidi, has been featured in MIT’s Technology Review as on of the Top 10 Start-Ups to Watch…

In the chaos that followed Kenya’s disputed presidential election last December, 1,200 people were killed, and several hundred thousand more fled their homes. Skeptical of the accuracy of official reports, a group of Web developers and bloggers with Kenyan ties cobbled together a Web application that could receive citizen incident reports via text message from any mobile phone in Kenya and display them as a Google Maps application.

Cofounded by Erik Hersman, an American son of missionary parents who was raised in Kenya (he is author of the blog Whiteafrican.com and now lives in Florida), the group called the creation Ushahidi–the Swahili word for “testimony.” They have formed a nonprofit company and are finalizing funding with a large foundation to turn Ushahidi into a platform that can be deployed easily and rapidly in areas of crisis. Already, a version of Ushahidi is being used to track anti-­immigrant violence afflicting South Africa.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.