Ushahidi

*Ushahidi, Inc. is a non-profit software company that develops free and open source software (LGPL) for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") created a website (http://legacy.ushahidi.com) in the aftermath of Ken Ya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google Maps map.[2]

The organization uses the concept of Crowd Sourcing for Social Activism and public accountability, serving as an initial model for what has been coined as 'activist mapping' - the combination of social activism, citizen Journalism and geospatial information. Ushahidi offers products that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet, while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi

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