Ushahidi Goes Worldwide

You may remember Ushahidi, winner of this year's NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Ushahidi was created to address the post-election crisis in Kenya. By aggregating information from text messages and other instant communication, Ushahidi presents a clearer picture of the violence taking place than is otherwise available either to Kenyans or to the rest of the world. According to Ushahidi's NetSquared proposal, "Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don't want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of 'moving forward' — for us to truly move forward, the full story of what happened needs to be told. Ushahidi is our small way of contributing to that."

Today, Ushahidi announced that they'd secured a grant of $200,000 from Humanity United, an organization dedicated to stopping human rights abuses around the world. The grant will allow Ushahidi to rebuild their engine to track atrocities worldwide. The new engine will be open source and other organizations will be encouraged to customize it for needs specific to their regions. It's great to see an organization using such innovative tools in ways that would have been impossible even a few years ago.

I recommend adding Ushahidi's excellent blog to your RSS reader. In the past few days, the blog has featured some lessons from the Gustav relief efforts and an inspriring talk from co-founder Ory Okolloh.