Ushahidi's Ory Okolloh

"I was in a space where I saw that my country, quite possibly was falling apart. I didn't know what was going to happen," said Ory Okolloh, executive director of Ushahidi.

Okolloh is taking about Kenya in 2008, where post election violence was wreaking havoc in the country and a news blackout meant citizens didn't know what was going on in their country. "I saw the flood of comments coming in on my blog and there was this feeling that surely there must be a lot more information out there that people are not tapping into. The idea was to at the very least capture the stories and offer witnesses a place to tell their stories. That is where the name Ushahidi comes from, it's Swahili and it means testimony."

Ushahidi has become a lot more than a place where people could bear witness to what was going on in the post-election violence in Kenya. It has become the example of world-class crowd source technology to come out of Africa, and has been lauded by the likes of Internet guru and author Clay Shirky, and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. It's been used to map flooding in Pakistan; to help find earthquake victims in Haiti and help with relief efforts there; to map the BP oil spill catastrophe as well as other major events that have rocked our world.

In South Africa, the software was used very effectively to monitor and map incidents of xenophobia, while more recently a lighter version of Ushahidi (called Crowdmap) is being used to track opinions and incidents in the media freedom wars.

While Ushahidi requires the downloading of software and some technical expertise, Crowdmap is quick and easy to use. "Because of the popularity of the platform and because Ushahidi was being picked up by the media, we're being flooded by e-mails asking for help and support regarding the use of the tool," said Okolloh. "We wanted to get to the point where Ushahidi as a platform was viewed in the same way as Microsoft. A suite of tools that will help you achieve whatever it is you need to achieve. You don't ask Microsoft when you want to create a PowerPoint presentation or draft a Word document. We wanted to get to the same level of simplicity and empowerment for our users. We wanted to do the same thing for crowd sourcing."

Crowdmap is basically as simple and easy to set up as a blog or an online e-mail account. All you have to do is sign up, set up the parameters and away you go. Okolloh says the hardest part is finding the crowd to populate your site, however, past experience shows Ushahidi is propelled by common cause and motivating people to participate in issues that are important to them.

We really try to be responsive to the people who are using our tool

Ory Okolloh, co-founder and executive director, Ushahidi

Crowd sourcing is not difficult if you are a media house with a ready stream of viewers. Ushahidi has already found acceptance by Al Jazeera, which used the platform when it was very difficult for reporters to get into Gaza. "They used Ushahidi to allow citizens to report on what they were witnessing in Gaza, and did follow-up stories based on the reports they got," said Okolloh. Ushahidi also works in partnership with Internews in Kenya and Haiti. "Here Ushahidi is used to complement the citizen reporting that Internews is engaged in with its readers."

"Ushahidi is a good way for media houses to crowd source, but the reason why we haven't seen bigger uptake is that a lot of media houses have already invested in their own citizen reporting tools. CNN has CNN iReport, BBC News has BBC Have Your Say and News24 has its own blogging outlet, while a lot of media companies are using Facebook."

However, when a crisis or big event happens, Ushahidi comes into its own, enabling media houses and news stations to access information they may otherwise not have access to. "During the earthquake in Haiti a number of media houses linked to the Ushahidi site and pulled reports from that. For the bigger media houses, use of Ushahidi depends on the newsworthiness of the event it is being used for, but we are seeing growing interest from smaller community news groups."

Ushahidi expects a lot more interest in the future, given that the technology is relatively new and steadily getting big endorsements. "We have talked to a lot of media houses about Ushahidi and some are experimenting with it. I am sure a lot more will look at Crowdmap given that's so much easier to deploy and use."

Looking back over Ushahidi's growth path, Okolloh sketches out the big happenings along the way. "A major milestone was when we first released our code into the wild, we released the alpha version of Ushahidi a couple of months after we got started. At the time we had no idea what we were doing, and we were just figuring out how to build an open source community. It is not just a matter of putting the code out there, the repository has to be correct, and you have to ensure you check on the quality of the contributions." Okolloh said the learning curve in terms of what it took to build an open source tool was steep, but that what has been achieved in a relatively short space of time has been a big accomplishment.

"A beta version went into effect a year later, which was a huge landmark because it had so many features. We are probably 90% or more driven by end-user feedback so we don't just think up new features. We really try to be responsive to the people who are using our tool."

Ushahidi has gained respect in the open source community by testing constantly, and surveying people about what they want to see from the crowd source tool. "If you look at the awareness and why people like us, it is not because we have done something brand new. It is because it is a simple tool that is really focused on the end-user," said Okolloh, who added that Ushahidi is currently available in seven languages.

Up next from Ushahidi is Swift River, a veracity and verification tool that will help users sort and rank information. "When you have tons of messages coming in at the same time, how do you sort out information? Swift River helps sort the wheat from the chaff," said Okolloh.

Ushahidi is also refining applications for mobile phones so they are easier to use, including applications for Android, iPhone and other Java type applications so people with smart phones can use Ushahidi on their phones.

Okolloh said being mentioned by the likes of Shirky and Clinton is "huge and humbling", but that it was not Ushahidi's driving force. "We are mainly driven on building a tool that is easy to use and allows people to tell their stories."

It appears that by staying true to the founding bedrock of their Swahili name and by continuing to allow the crowd to bear testimony during big events and in times of crisis, Ushahidi has a north star that will continue to steer it to even greater success.