Crowd-sourcing in Africa
Social media is being used to collect, map and share geographical information in different parts of the world. One site that is leading the way is www.ushahidi.com.
Bloggers set up Ushahidi (which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili) during the violence that followed the elections in Kenya in December 2007 to gather citizen-generated crisis information at a time when unrest was difficult to monitor in real time. People on the ground could contribute to the site via email, or text messaging, providing crowd-sourced data.
I found this example in September’s edition of Geographical magazine. It is fascinating to see how social media tools can be harnessed in a variety of ways to bring together stakeholders without using traditional media. This examples underlines the positive way in which social media technologies can contribute to and help people through life-threatening and challenging situations.
