In today’s NYT :
… everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation…
{It helped} in Washington, D.C., where The Washington Post partnered to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers.Think about that. The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn to help dig out? Kenya.



2 Comments
I am a Kenyan Living in DC and it never happened
It’s amazing the way user-generated content has evolved on the web over the last 5 years. First, user-submitted information creates one of the most used information sources in Wikipedia, then the real-time aspect of Twitter becomes everyone’s go-to source for news, and now a company like Ushahidi combines this concept to aid communities in times of disaster & hardship. I’m looking forward to seeing how this trend develops into the future.
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