Patrick Meier is an international consultant, who specializes in early warning and crisis mapping projects. He is the director for applied research at DigiActive and member of the Ushahidi advisory board.
Experts and entrepreneurs from around the world discuss what governments can do to promote high-tech entrepreneurship and what the shape of technology entrepreneurship will be in the future.
The use of Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, around the world demonstrates how technology innovation and the new capabilities it brings about can be harnessed for public good. Ushahidi is a free and open source platform that allows virtually anyone to publicly crowdsource [outsource a task to a group of people through an open call on the Internet asking for contributions] and dynamically map vital information that almost immediately can be used to take action.
At its heart, Ushahidi is a Web-based aggregator of information. The user-friendly platform can be used to map online news, email content, Tweets, text messages, pictures and YouTube footage, for example. It has been used to power citizen-based election monitoring in Afghanistan and Mexico; coordinate disaster response in Haiti and the Philippines; promote crime reporting in Atlanta and Nairobi; track the swine flu outbreak and human trafficking.
In response to the Haiti earthquake, student volunteers at Tufts University’s Fletcher School in Boston and the Haitian Diaspora used Ushahidi to map relevant content from multiple media sources and incoming text messages from Haiti in near real-time. Ushahidi worked with several key partners on the ground to set up a phone number where people in Haiti could send free text messages with their location and most urgent needs. Ushahidi volunteers triaged and mapped thousands of incoming text messages in near real time, which provided emergency responders with actionable information to rescue individuals trapped under the rubble and thereby save lives. Several weeks after the Haiti disaster, student volunteers at Columbia University also used Ushahidi to map the post-earthquake needs in Chile.
I am sure that in the future we will come up with more innovative ways to use existing and emerging technologies for public good.
See also Patrick Meier’s blog iRevolution.