Ushahidi: crisis mapping of the Haiti earthquake
With all the stuff going on in Haiti, I thought it’d be interesting to look at some of the digital mapping being carried out by Ushahidi.
Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, was originally set up in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan elections to map the incidents of violence that were occuring at the time. It works by crowdsourcing crisis information – users submit reports via Twitter, the Ushahidi website or by SMS – which are then categorised and added to a Google map.
The crisis map for Haiti is really detailed, showing threats, water and food distribution points, where medical equipment is needed and so on and is potentially really useful for the relief efforts.
In the early days, shortly after the earthquake, most of the information came from Twitter and through the report form on the Ushahidi website, but lately, as the mobile phone networks have been coming back up again, through people sending sms’s.
According to a Ted Talks blog interview with Patrick Meyer from Ushahidi, they’ve had a lot of help from UN OCHA Colombia:
We had support from two fantastic individuals from UN OCHA Colombia. They happened to have used Ushahidi in an earthquake simulation exercise a few months ago. They were vital in identifying the necessary categories (or indicators) that you see on the Ushahidi deployment: shelters, damaged buildings, etc. They are disaster response experts and know a few things about earthquakes, so they took the lead directly on the admin side, with the rest of our Ushahidi tech team, in adding information.
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In the paper ‘Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya’s 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis’ (published as part of the Harvard University ‘Internet and Democracy Project’) Ushahidi’s function is described pretty strangely:
“Mashups like Ushahidi [...] desire to demonstrate to the audience the real human meaning being numbers.”
(http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Digitally_Networked_Technology_Kenyas_Post-Election_Crisis : p6)
The narration of statistical information through visual mapping – or maybe even the sidestepping of statistics through ‘personal’ accounts – is no doubt one of the powers of new digital media, but is there maybe more than a simple, neutral ‘mapping’ at play? The narrative is, by definition of its organizational capacity, inherently political, directional, a ‘construct’. For example, how in these maps do we account for class divisions within Haiti? (ie: in Kenya, only 5% of the population have regular internet access; the blogosphere dominated by a decidedly urban minority). Does this really escape the statistics of demography as written into internet usage per-se?
With a similar cynicism it seems that the Kenyan Ushahidi (the original mashup effort) stopped its public based reports in April 2008… as far as I can tell at least. Though all is of course not well in Kenya, police corruption and brutality high, the recent drought, etc. Is there written into these projects a sort of crisis-selection process; certain criteria which work to justify or disqualify crises based on a model of popular media focus and attention?
Just some thoughts.
-josh
Oh yeah, I’ve been planning to read that paper, thanks for reminding me. Strange definition of Ushahidi though, agreed.
Totally agree with your other points – although I guess in the Haiti case anything that can help with the relief efforts is a good thing in my opinion. As far as I can tell the ultimate aim of Ushahidi is to be a resource for relief workers, although from what I’ve seen that isn’t happening yet.
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