Ushahidi: Mapping Violence

We’ve talked recently about the collaborative web and about neocartographers. In most of the examples it’s fun and casually useful, but what if theses technologies could save lives?

Fringehog points us to Ushahidi, a site created by a group of Kenyan bloggers that visualizes real time violence occurring in Kenya (since the disputed December 07 presidential elections). Users can text incidents to the site and once confirmed they’re tagged by location and subject.

Fringehog reports:

Why is this important? With all of the famines, wars, floods and other crises in the world today, what good will visualizing the chaos in Kenya do? Friend and fellow blogger Erik Hersman, one of the founders of Ushahidi, answers this question in the most eloquent way I’ve seen yet. In this post he suggests that a digitally connected world not only grants us a front row seat to the rest of the world, but also the power to influence events and create change in a way that was impossible just a few short decades ago. So that events that may occur thousands of miles away are in fact - quite literally - in our digital backyard. Which makes it a lot harder to just sit back and watch.

Ushahidi: Creating a Cartography of Crisis