Ushahidi

See the following -

Occupy Research: Methods and Tools for a Decentralized Future

Amelia Marzec | Huffington Post | November 25, 2011

Occupy Research is a highly participatory band of researchers active in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with working groups popping up across the country. Committed to using open methods, they outline different areas of interest in a wiki and share ideas, tools, and information about the movement. Read More »

Online Activity Has Potential To Escalate Election Violence

Angela Odour | Ushahidi | February 4, 2013

Umati, a project of iHub Research and Ushahidi, has produced a pioneering collection of inflammatory speech, posted online by Kenyans in the past three months, as our presidential elections draw near. Read More »

Online, Off The Grid: The Promising New Tech Tool About To Hit African Markets

Jacey Fortin | International Business Times | June 12, 2013

An African tech company is gearing up to unleash a brand new tool that will help people across the continent get connected to the Internet, even in the most remote places. Read More »

Open Source for Humanitarian Action

Brandon Keim | Stanford Social Innovation Review | December 1, 2012

In the days following the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, chaos prevailed. Transportation was limited, if not impossible. Lines of communication were broken. A few radio stations continued to broadcast, but the disaster’s scale was overwhelming. Only one form of mass communication remained relatively intact: cellular phones. Even before the disaster, there had been only 108,000 landbased telephone lines in the country, compared with 3.5 million mobile phones. After the earthquake, mobile communications, particularly text messages, were one of the few means by which people could report their needs and location...

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Open Source Product Development Most Effective When Social

Benetech started out in the 90s without even understanding the meaning of the term open source. They just "needed an easy way to interface with different voice synthesizers" to develop readers for people who are blind and "shared the code to be helpful." Sound familiar? Opensource.com started covering stories like in 2010 and they recur more often than you might think. Stories of people sharing the code to help others—but sharing code to get help developing better code. When code is open, a community has the opportunity to form around it...

Open Source Resources for major Disaster & Emergency Management Situations

As everyone knows by now, the superstorm known as 'Hurricane Sandy' has caused considerable devastation across the East Coast of the United States and all the way up to the Great Lakes region. The effects of the storm will continue to be felt for days and weeks as major portions of the East Coast are without electricity and flooding is expected to continue for days. Under these circumstances, it seemed appropriate to put together a listing of open source applications that have been successfully used in emergencies and disaster recovery all over the world. In times of man-made crises or natural disasters, there is a range of organizations, websites, open source tools, mobile apps, and more that might be of use to first responders and citizens in general. Check out some of the following resources...

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Project Activate - Ushahidi Comes To Town

Robin Hough | The Guardian | November 22, 2010

As part of the Guardian's second Project Activate initiative we open up our doors and our minds to the crisis crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi for a week of creative and technological collaboration Read More »

Real-Time Emergency Response

Jeremy | Mozilla Ignite | March 31, 2013

What problem are you intending to solve? Detection, observation, and assessment of situations requiring intervention by emergency responders depends on high-quality "live" data. Read More »

SA losing to Kenya in tech race

Duncan McLeod | TechCentral | June 9, 2013

South Africa appears to be losing its status as the preferred investment destination on the continent for international technology companies. By Duncan McLeod. Read More »

Series: Introduction To Anti-Corruption Mapping

Heather Leson | Ushahidi | April 29, 2013

This blog series will focus on anti-corruption and transparency mapping. We’ll post about best practices and feature some of the strategies to connect policy and action with online savvy. Our community strategy is aimed to connect topical mappers to build and learn together... Read More »

Session on Ushahidi and Crisis Mapping Write-Up

Staff | Likeaword | January 1, 2012

In early 2008 some Kenyan developers were concerned about the levels of violence following the disputed elections in their country. They wanted an independent source of reports of what was happening and where. They built a platform that allowed people to SMS reports which could then be placed on a map. They called it “Testimony” in Swahili (Ushahidi). Read More »

Should Your NGO Go Open Source?

Catherine Cheney | Devex | February 26, 2016

The open source model of universal access and collaborative intelligence has extended from Web development to global development. NGO leaders can maximize the impact of their organizations either by taking their models to scale or opening the books on their projects and programs and allowing peer organizations to take them and run with them. Whether proprietary information belongs in the business of fighting poverty is open to debate. On one hand, intellectual property can drive competition and innovation, but on the other hand, collaborative models can lead to greater success stories.

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Smartphones, Apps, Students Hackers and Startups Making Revolutionary Technology to Help the Poor at Low Cost

Brian Wang | Nextbigfuture | February 21, 2011

Technology Review - Last year College Senior Njenga and three classmates developed a program that will let thousands of Kenyan health workers use mobile phones to report and track the spread of diseases in real time—and they'd done it for a tiny fraction of what the government had been on the verge of paying for such an application. Read More »

SMS to Map – Using FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to Tell Your Story

Patrick Munyi | iHub | February 11, 2012

Want to know more about using mobiles for social change, crowd sourced mapping, and how the two can combine? Keen to learn more about FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and how these software tools can be used together to enable positive social change?

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Social Change And New Media In Africa

Cathal Gilbert | International Business Times | November 2, 2012

Cathal Gilbert looks at technologies being used by activists and discovers that many of most innovative ideas have come out of Africa. Read More »