The New York Times has an article about Ushahidi, a platform for aggregating data and plotting it on a map. Ushahidi was created by a Kenyan lawyer after the violence that followed the 2007 Kenya election.
The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on a map, using the locations given by informants. It collected more testimony — which is what ushahidi means in Swahili — with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor.
More recently, Ushahidi has been used in relief efforts in Haiti and during “Snowmageddon” in Washington, D.C.
The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn to help dig out? Kenya.
