| Website | ushahidi.com |
| Blog | blog.ushahidi.com |
| @ushahidi | |
| Category | Mobile/Wireless |
| Employees | 5 |
| Founded | 1/08 |
| Description | Crowdsourcing crisis information |
| Total | $545k |
| Seed, 8/08 Humanity United | $200k |
| Grant, 8/09 Cisco | $75k |
| Grant, 5/09 | $200k |
| Grant, 8/09 Knight Foundation | $70k |
Ushahidi is a platform that crowdsources information. Allowing anyone to submit information through text messaging using a basic SMS-only mobile phone, email or web form.
Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.
The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.
The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US.
