Mapping violations of human rights with Ushahidi
June 29th, 2009 — 12:09am
One of the points raised by Prof. Nelson Brissac this semester was about the need for appropriation of existing technologies to the collective, breaking with the purely private use. Since then I have thought of how achieving it. Today, Howard Rheingold published a Videocast on Ushahidi project which is an excellent example how to do this. Ushahidi uses Google Maps to map violations of human rights through the collaboration of citizens reporters.
“Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.”