Ushahidi: Watching Global Collaboration in Real Time

Published March 23, 2009 @ 10:02AM PT

Ushahidi team hard at work in Orlando this weekend (via White African)

One of the best ways to learn about global collaboration today is to watch the development of Ushahidi in real time.

I've often written about Ushahidi, the crowdsourced crisis-mapping project, including calling them one of the five social entrepreneurship projects you haven't heard of yet but will. 2008 was a great year for them, as they won NetSquared Year 3 Challenge, received a terrific grant from Humanity United, were honored as Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows, and generally built a lot of buzz and support.

The idea behind Ushahidi is simple: build aggregation tools that allow people on the ground in natural or man-made disasters to use SMS messaging to share vital information and create a living timeline. So far, the tools have been used in Kenya, South Africa, Gaza, and Madagascar.

From the perspective of someone who thinks about how to inspire discussion and help social entrepreneurs learn from their peers in order to create more sustainable, impacting projects, Ushahidi is a gold mine. Check out this recap of a development weekend they just had in Florida.

Their tools are build by paid and volunteer staff on three or four continents, they're constantly using Twitter to share the articles and ideas inspiring them and teaching them new things, and use blogs (most notably co-founder Erik Hersman's White African blog and the official Ushahidi blog) to share their thinking and recap their meetings as they're happening.

Whether you're interested in conflict, technology, or simply the process of global collaboration, these are must reads (or must follows, as the case may be):

White African: project co-founder Erik Hersman's blog that ranges from his work with Ushahidi to trends in development technology and Africa more broadly.

The Ushahidi blog: the main development blog of the Ushahidi development team

And on Twitter (in no particular order): @ushahidi, @whiteafrican, @ksjhalla, @afromusing, @dkobia, @patrickmeier, @mrayyan, @meryn, @soyapi, @eyedol (and probably many more)

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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.