#1301 2008 · Ushahidi (Ory Okolloh, David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich) · Civic technology / crisis response
When Kenya's media went silent on election violence, a blogger crowdsourced the map
问题
A broadcast ban on election violence coverage cut off Kenyans' usual channel for tracking where danger was and wasn't
背景
After Kenya's disputed December 2007 election, ethnic violence broke out across the country, and the government imposed a ban on live broadcast media coverage to try to contain panic, which instead cut off the ordinary way citizens, aid workers, and journalists tracked where violence and displacement were occurring. Lawyer and blogger Ory Okolloh had been using her blog to piece together scattered, unverifiable reports from readers, but a single blog with manually compiled comments couldn't keep pace with events unfolding simultaneously in dozens of locations.
On January 3, 2008, Okolloh posted an open question to her readers: would any programmers be willing to build a simple mashup mapping where violence and destruction were occurring, using Google Maps. Developers David Kobia and Erik Hersman answered within days, building a site that let anyone submit a location and description of an incident by SMS text message or web form, plotted automatically onto a public map.
换别人会怎么做
The available options were to wait for the broadcast ban to lift, rely on scattered and unverifiable social media and blog comments, or send professional reporters and aid workers to investigate each area directly — all far too slow to match violence spreading across dozens of locations at once.
他们看到了什么
Okolloh saw the missing resource wasn't information, Kenyans were witnessing events directly, it was a channel to aggregate it once media was blocked. She just needed witnesses to submit it themselves.
那一手
The team built Ushahidi (Swahili for 'testimony'), a website where any Kenyan with a phone could text in or submit online a location and short description of violence, safe havens, or aid needs, which the platform plotted onto a public map in near real time, bypassing both the broadcast ban and the reporting capacity of any single news organization.
为什么管用
Letting anyone submit a location and description by SMS meant reports could come from areas too dangerous or remote for a reporter or aid worker to reach, and because submissions plotted automatically onto a shared public map, the resulting picture updated continuously rather than waiting on any single organization's investigation cycle. The mechanism scaled with the number of witnesses on the ground rather than the number of journalists or field staff employed, which is why it worked precisely where professional channels had just been cut off.
值了多少
The site logged roughly 300 reports in its first month; by 2013, the same open-source platform had grown to 2 million users worldwide.
什么时候会失灵
The approach depends on enough people having a basic phone and being willing to report despite personal risk, and on some minimal ability to filter or corroborate submissions so the map isn't flooded with rumor or deliberate misinformation; in settings with very low phone penetration, or where a hostile actor can cheaply flood the system with false reports, crowd-sourced incident mapping loses the reliability it needs to be useful.
后来呢
Ushahidi became the reference platform for crowd-sourced crisis mapping, spawning deployments including Syria Tracker, HarassMap in Egypt, and UN-coordinated crisis mapping in Libya, and establishing citizen-submitted incident reporting as a standard tool in disaster and conflict response.
资料来源
- [1]Ushahidi: The African Software Platform Helping Victims in Global EmergenciesKnowledge at Wharton, 2013knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu