Ushahidi is an open source software application which utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" – the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geographic information. Ushahidi allows local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the Internet, creating an archive of events with geographic and time-date information. The Ushahidi platform is often used for crisis response, human rights reporting, and election monitoring. Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony", closely related to shahidi which means "witness") was created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence reported by email and text message and placed them on a Google Maps map.
The Ushahidi platform has been used by the United Nations Department of Field Services and Peacekeeping, in response to the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, to monitor the Nigerian elections in 2011, by the Obama Campaign for America 2012, by the Nepalese army to respond to the earthquake of 2015, in and by local activists groups such as Humanitarian Tracker to monitor violence in the Syrian civil war and HarassMap to help women report on sexual harassment.
Successful deployment of crisis mapping applications like Ushahidi benefits from careful attention to how the technology fits into the relevant cultural settings, and focusing on realistic goals.
Products
Ushahidi
Ushahidi v2 was built on the Kohana web framework, a fork of the CodeIgniter framework. It includes support for Nexmo wholesale SMS API and Clickatell SMS Gateway (Budgetsms.net SMS Gateway is planned). Furthermore, the official Ushahidi-hosted websites use the commercial service. Ushahidi provides the option of using OpenStreetMap maps in its user interface, but requires the Google Maps API for geocoding. Ushahidi is often set up using a local SMS gateway created by a local FrontlineSMS set-up.
Ushahidi v3 was released in September 2015. As an improvement to the v2 platform it is built as an API with a web client. It allows for custom survey creation, and the running of multiple surveys on a single deployment, amongst other feature improvements from v2 such as embeddable maps and surveys, analytics, private deployments, and management of roles and permissions. It is built on the Laravel PHP web framework. It is open source under the AGPL license.
Ushahidi v4 was released in 2018, and replaces Kohana with Lumen.
Releases and codenames
1.0 Mogadishu – 10 December 2009
1.2 Haiti – ~22 January 2010
2.0 Luanda – 22 November 2010
2.1 Tunis – 9 August 2011
2.2 Juba – 13 March 2012
2.3 Juba – 24 April 2012
3.0 - September 2015
4.0 - 1 Oct 2018
Crowdmap
Crowdmap is designed and built by the team behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform evolved, so did its users. Crowdmap now allows users to set up their own deployments of Ushahidi without having to install it on a web server. Since its release in 2010, prominent deployments of Crowdmap have documented the global Occupy movement and the 2011 London anti-cuts protest. The original Crowdmap was a hosted version of the Ushahidi v2 open source software platform.
On 31 December 2010, the Ushahidi team announced a new version of Crowdmap, that differed from the Ushahidi v2 codebase: Checkins, a geosocial add-on to Crowdmap that allows users to create a white-label alternative to sites like Foursquare and Gowalla. Rather than filling out submission forms online, checkins allow Crowdmap users to expedite data entry to their deployment, focussing first on location and adding more detailed information later. Ushahidi describes the effort as "checkins with a purpose".
SwiftRiver (discontinued) SwiftRiver was designed as a suite of intelligence and real-time data gathering products that complement Ushahidi's mapping and visualization products. Often referred to as the SwiftRiver Initiative the goal of the project was "to democratize access to the tools for making sense of information". The project attracted a lot of interest from newsrooms.
In December 2014, Ushahidi announced that it would stop development and support and reallocate the resources.