This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world these days, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into foreign places with little good information.
One force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label truth.
After Kenya's disputed election in 2007, violence erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had returned to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and decided to return to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Some technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend.
The site collected user-generated reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths. It collected more testimony — which is what ushahidi means in Swahili — with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor. Ushahidi had found a quintessentially 21st-century way of bearing witness.
When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number, 4636, was advertised over the country’s radio waves. Ushahidi received thousands of text messages reporting the location of trapped bodies. The messages were translated by thousands of Haitian-Americans in the United States, and then each was plotted on a “crisis map.”
Ushahidi volunteers at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, ran a situation room from which they instant-messaged with the U.S. Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search for lives. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi redeployed again.
A mind-boggling number of things could go wrong with this model. People could lie, get the address wrong, exaggerate the severity of their situation. But as data points aggregate, crisis maps reveal underlying patterns of relevance. How many kilometers inland did the hurricane kill? Are the rapes broadly dispersed or concentrated near military barracks?
Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work. The old paradigm was one-to-many: Foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they can get.
The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: The victims are reimagined as agents who supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates the text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use this information to focus on the most pressing problems.
But Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has long been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its ecosystem of universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.
And so bright people from Nairobi and New Delhi and Nanjing can today take their place at the forefront of industries from cellphones and car making.
Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it. Because Kenya is poor, with computers out of reach for many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones. Because Ushahidi had no venture capitalists backing it, it had to use open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for their own projects.
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