| Website | ushahidi.com |
| Blog | blog.ushahidi.com |
| @ushahidi | |
| Category | Mobile/Wireless |
| tips@ushahidi.com | |
| Employees | 5 |
| Founded | 1/08 |
| Description | Crowdsourcing crisis information |
| TOTAL | $2.1M |
| FUNDING TOTAL | $2.1M |
| Seed, 8/08 Humanity United | $200k |
| Grant, 5/09 | $200k |
| Grant, 8/09 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation | $70k |
| Grant, 8/09 Cisco | $75k |
| Grant, 11/09 | $1.4M |
| Grant, 12/09 HIVOS | €100k |
Ushahidi is a non-profit software company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.
Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) created a website (http://legacy.ushahidi.com) in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map.
The organization uses the concept of crowdsourcing for social activism and public accountability, serving as an initial model for what has been coined as ‘activist mapping’ - the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information. Ushahidi offers products that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet, while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.
This video was originally published on Beet.TV
Added: 11/18/10
| Website | swiftly.org |
| Blog | blog.swiftly.org |
| Stage | Beta |
| Launch Date | August 31, 2010 |
| Tags | realtime, data, twitter, analytics, veracity, algorithm, tweet, sms, crowdsourcing, intelligence, insight |
SwiftRiver is a suite of intelligence and real-time data gathering products that complement Ushahidi’s mapping and visualization products. Often referred to as the SwiftRiver Initiative the goal of the project is “to democratize access to the tools for making sense of information”.
SwiftRiver is a free and open source platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. It was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster.
The SwiftRiver platform offers applications which combine natural language/artificial intelligence process, data-mining for SMS and Twitter, and verification algorithms for different sources of information.
SwiftRiver has three primary functions: 1. to structure unstructured data 2. conditional filtering and prioritization of real-time content and 3. adding context (ex. location) SwiftRiver is commonly mistaken to be an application, when in fact it is a platform consisting of APIs. There are several applications powered by Swift, most notably Sweeper which was designed specifically as a complimentary product to Ushahidi’s mapping products.
Interview
| Website | ushahidi.com |
| Blog | blog.ushahidi.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | January 1, 2008 |
