Crowd Wisdom
Usahidi, meaning “witness” or “Testimony” in Kiswahili, was first developed in 2008 as a result of a media ban following the contested election of Kenyan President Mwai Kabiki in late 2007, where protests quickly escalated into widespread ethnic attacks and violence across the country. Over 20 software developers and many international citizen journalists contributed to the coding of the platform that for the first time allowed ordinary citizens to report human rights abuses eg death, rape, looting, in real time, submitting reports publically and plotting them on a map. When the conflict subsided, it was considered a huge success and the software was rewritten so that it could be used by anyone wanting to take similar action and crowd source crisis information in the future. Now incorporating Twitter and Facebook, there are many different Usahidi sites active and for many different reasons; there are Usahidi sites for natural disaster responses, including one for the earthquakes in Nepal that was called quakemap.org, (that has currently been withdrawn from active service), there are Usahidi sites used by the UN to track peace keeping efforts, Usahidi software is being used by news company Aljazeera, to gather and report upon a range of topics including Crisis in Haiti (http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/ushahidi-tracking-haitis-crisis), and current Usahidi running to track human rights attrocities in Syria including Syria Tracker ( https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2011/05/24/syria-tracker-crowdsourcing-crisis-information ) which contains a lot of general reports about the situation there and also Women Under Seige, run by the Women’s Media Centre to track and report upon many cases of rape and sexual assault that have occurred there since the beginning of the Syrian Conflict (https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2012/07/18/women-under-siege-mapping-sexualized-violence-in-syria/).
This is just to name a few...... Professor Clay Shirky at New York University Heralded Usahidi as “Liberation Technology”, but there are issues involved with this as well. As use of the software has grown, so too has the need to verify the reports that have been pouring in. This is important because sometimes rumours or false information can be leaked intentionally, and if left unchecked could potentially has long lasting effects on the situation on the ground.
Verifying this information can present challenges; a lot of what an Usahidi Deployer’s job entails actually involves coordinating and training teams on the ground to make sure the information in the reports is as accurate as possible. Ford notes that this can often make the Deployer’s feel like the gatekeepers (usually organised media) that they were trying to sidestep in the first place by creating the Usahidi. The reports that aren’t verified are still visible to the public, but carry less value as they are not considered as reliable.
It will be interesting to see that if the popularity of the Usahidi software continues how the teams deploying these Usahidi tackle these problems, as I can imagine there is a limit to how many people can really be free to verify human rights and emergency information in times of crisis. It doesn’t help that photo and video editing software is becoming so good, so as time goes on it will be more and more difficult to verify reports coming in remotely.
What is clear is that this tool has provided citizens with a powerful tool to relay their experiences and record information and evidence that can be for the most part used for good to spread news and to help with prosecution or social improvement once the conflict or emergency has passed. I also found this blog post interesting, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/blog/tech-human-rights-blog-series-after-ushahidi-using-new-technologies-to-prevent-mass-atrocities.html?referrer=https://www.google.com.au/ which introduces new applications that have evolved from the concept of Usahidi, which not only are designed to record human rights attrocities and disaster, but to also prevent them and to more effectively get help and support to victims of these events.
Source: Ford, H. "Crowd Wisdom". Index on Censorship 41.4 (2012): 33-39. Web.











