I’ve spent much of the past two weeks hanging out with the Ushahidi team in Kenya and South Africa. When the team invited me to join their Board of Advisers last month, I was honored and gladly accepted because Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing crisis information approach is both innovative and promising. The project was figured in Kenya’s leading national newspaper, the Daily Nation, just yesterday.
During this week’s MobileActive conference in Jo’burg, Ushahidi’s Program Director, Juliana Rotich, conveyed to me the team’s strong interest in prioritizing early response after they release Ushahidi 2.0 next month. Juliana described the difficulty they had in convincing NGOs in Kenya to make use of Ushahidi during the post-election violence in order to map human rights abuses and share information. “We’ve got a major coordination problem when it comes to NGOs, not only for information collection but also response.”
I emphasized that the novelty of Ushahidi’s approach vis-a-vis humanitarian early warning is crowdsourcing; meaning I would not place emphasis on NGOs per se. One of the persistent problems with the field of conflict early warning and response is that those most in need of early warning, local at risk communities, seldom have the peer-to-peer, networked communication tools they need to warn each other.
I thus recommended that Ushahidi retain their decentralized approach and apply crowdsourcing to early response. Yes, crowdsource warning AND response. Of course, local decentralized response is not always effective, so warnings must include concrete recommendations for response. These recommendations can be based on already existing preparedness and contingency plans. Indeed, Kenya already had these plans in place to respond to expected violence during the elections, but the plans were not implemented by officials, let alone communicated to local at risk communities.
6 responses so far ↓
Made By Many » Blog Archive » links for 2008-10-17 // October 17, 2008 at 10:02 pm |
[...] Crowdsourcing Warning AND Response « Conflict Early Warning and Early Response (tags: crowdsourcing citizenmedia) [...]
The Past and Future of Crisis Mapping « iRevolution // October 18, 2008 at 3:24 pm |
[...] Second wish: RSS feeds need to be an integral part of mapping platforms, much like they are for Google Reader. If done well, the feeds can automate the process outlined above. For example, local communities should be able to subscribe to Ushahidi in order to receive (and also submit) information via email and/or SMS on specific events, e.g., robbery or to all events within a specific geographic area, say Kibera. This new approach can help us shift away from traditional hierarchical approaches (that characterize the majority of current conflict early warning/response initiatives) and foster a more distributed approach to conflict prevention. For only then will we be able to facilitate the crowdsourcing of information AND response. [...]
Covering the DRC - opportunities for Ushahidi « iRevolution // December 5, 2008 at 8:40 am |
[...] a platform that enables the crowdsourcing of crisis information, then it must also facilitate the crowdsourcing of response. Why? For otherwise the tool is of little added value to the individuals who constitute said crowd, [...]
Fourth-Generation Early Warning Systems « Conflict Early Warning and Early Response // March 6, 2009 at 4:43 pm |
[...] usually employ a sophisticated, proprietary software program. In contrast 4G initiatives draw on crowdsourcing both early warning and early response, and draw on open source, freely available software. Ushahidi is an excellent [...]
Crowdsourcing in Crisis: A More Critical Reflection « iRevolution // March 31, 2009 at 9:24 pm |
[...] The entire point behind the Swift River project is to crowdsource the filtering process, ie, to distribute and decentralizes the burden of data validation. Those organizations that happen to be there at the right time and place do the filtering, otherwise they don’t and get on with their work. This is the whole point behind my post last year on crowdsourcing response. [...]
How Ushahidi Can Become a Real Early Response Platform « Conflict Early Warning and Early Response // June 21, 2009 at 3:16 pm |
[...] crowdsourcing and crowdfeeding by introducing an alert subscription feature. However, the notion of crowdsourcing response requires further develop- ment so that operational protocols can be [...]