Erstellt am: 2. 4. 2010 - 17:15 Uhr
Ushahidi
4636: Demande aide 4636 je suis perdu enbas une maison 2 etage no 147 av christophe chanel cafour Ph. 385XXXXX
# rescuehaiti
An earthquake survivor in Haiti sent this Twitter message nearly two weeks after the quake crippled the country’s capital this January, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving a million others homeless. The message asks for help. The sender is trapped on the second floor of a building in Port-au-Prince.
Ushahidi
Roz Sewell, a Ushahidi volunteer some 2,000 kilometers away in Boston, saw the message moments after it was sent. She was confused: how was this person stuck on the second floor when so many building had collapsed? Roz called the number in the Twitter message and found four agitated Haitians on the other end.
“They were on the second floor of a factory,” Roz later writes, “Unable to leave and unable to get help for their bleeding friend.”
She immediately took their location information, mapped it on Hypercube and Google Earth. Within fifteen minutes, she sent the GPS coordinates of the factory to the US coast guard in Haiti, who dispatched a helicopter to rescue the trapped group.
Ushahidi
This is one message out of thousands sent to Ushahidi volunteers in Boston in the days after the earthquake.
How is it that people all the way out in Boston found themselves responding to “Help me!” SMS and Twitter messages from people all the way out in Haiti?
My Testimony via SMS
It’s called Ushahidi: an open-source project that’s the brainchild of a network of programmers and activists, many of who were based in Africa. It was originally developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya after post-election riots in 2008. Back then, Kenyans couldn’t talk about what they saw without knowing someone might come after them with a machete. So over a single weekend, programmers put together a website where witnesses could tell their stories anonymously, where their words became a shifting map of where the violence began and later intensified.
Associated Press
No one needed a computer or Internet access to do this. They simply sent a text message with a location and description of what they saw.
The web application was christened “Ushahidi”, which is the Swahili word for “testimony” or “witness.”
Sure, some witnesses lie; others exaggerate or give sketchy details. But Ushahidi can live with that because all it needs is the approximate truth that appears when you take the sum or average of all the stories. (For those of you that enjoy the smugness of geek lingo, the word for this is “crowdsourcing.”) It’s like Wikipedia: you can’t 100% rely on it, but you can get a bare-bones picture in a glance.
So far Ushahidi has been used to map all manner of problems and trends: medicine shortages in Zambia, election unrest in India, snowstorm outages in Washington DC - not bad for a small website thrown together by a motley crew of programmers scattered about Africa and elsewhere. What makes Ushahidi easy to apply is that (a) The users need only a mobile phone, and what’s more ubiquitous than the Handy? (b) It’s open source, so anyone can get into the code and rejigger it to suit their needs.
The Number that Saved Lives: 4636
“When we heard about the earthquake in Haiti”, Ushahidi programmer Brian Herbert says, “We had the website, haiti.ushahidi.com up and running in 15 minutes.”
Lisandro Seuro, AFP/Getty Images
Radio stations in Haiti began blaring the SOS texting number, 4636, all over the country's airwaves. Text messages sent to that number would be routed through a dizzying chain of Ushahidi partners, until they were translated from Creole to English and then packed off to Boston, USA, where a group of graduate-student volunteers like Roz Sewell mapped them and sent precise coordinates to rescue workers. It seems a trifle roundabout, but the whole process took minutes.
The reaction to the earthquake happened so fast that no one had time to go to the office or café. Roz and hundreds of other students in Boston spent weeks in improvised crisis centers fueled by pizza and coffee, first in a tiny apartment, and later when the crowd got too big, in a university lecture hall.
“I never thought I’d be working on something so important,” says 26-year-old Brian, who spent days in his apartment in Athens (USA), working out kinks in the SMS translation system. He had CNN and Al-Jazeera on the entire time, and his girlfriend cooking for him, so he didn’t mistakenly starve himself.
A Testimony That’s Spreading
Ushahidi has worked well in places as different as Haiti and Washington DC, but here’s its Achilles heel: it needs government cooperation to a certain extent. If the state runs the country’s telecom, for instance, it could easily shut off the phone service, thereby cutting off the channel to Ushahidi’s servers. If the government finds out about an SOS number like 4636, it could simply block it. Could Ushahidi have helped protesters in Iran tell their stories? I’m not sure.
Martyn Photography
But Ushahidi has given the usually banal SMS and Twitter messages a nice twist – the potential to save lives, to turn helpless victims into witnesses who can broadcast on-the-ground news - and plots them on a single map, so we can see the picture with one eye. It recently jumped in when the Chile earthquake hit, providing the same SMS help as in Haiti.
Will we have our very own Ushahidi map in Vienna anytime soon? I suppose we’ll have to wait for our next snowstorm or violent political upheaval (Fischer versus Rosenkranz? Just kidding) to find out.