Over the summer Jen (my wife) spent three months in Kisumu, Kenya starting a sports-based HIV/AIDs education program. Sadly in recent weeks things have not been looking too good in Kisumu. Kisumu is in a Luo dominated region, the ethnic group of the Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, and experienced significant post-election violence. In the first few days my wife was glued to BBC. What struck me was that my wife faced an informational level of analysis problem. There was certainly news coming out of Kenya, but the news was at a national level. While any information is welcome, what my wife was really desperate to find was information about locations in Kisumu itself. That is, local level information. The information coming in over the mainstream media only mentioned Kisumu in vague one or two sentence blurbs about “violence in the city”. What Jen needed was information on the status of neighborhoods in Kisumu, not aggregate national level news.
So, you can imagine my happiness upon finding out that White African, Kenyan Pundit, and other bloggers got together and launched a site to facilitate the exchange of just such local information. Ushadhidi (Swahili for “witness”) is a mash-up between Google Maps and social networking. Visitors report the description and location of different types of violence over a map of Kenya. This information is then viewable by other visitors.
To my knowledge the earliest major use of a Google Maps mash-up focused on sharing local level disaster information was Scipionus. Scipionus was a much cruder use of Google Maps, but even so was very useful as an information exchange. Interestingly, the year after Katrina I eagerly mentioned the idea of using social networking websites as disaster information exchanges during a presentation for a graduate level international health seminar. The idea was met with almost universal skepticism amongst the students and professor. I knew they were wrong then and I hope projects like Ushahidi changes their mind.
Exploiting “smart mobs” to share information during disasters is undoubtedly part of the future of disaster management. After / during a disaster information is not so much scare but scattered. In Hurricane Katrina, SMS messages from victims sent to family California was not shared with the information from cell phone calls of other survivors to relatives in New York. Thus, information on the disaster ends up resembling a puzzle with geographically and socially scattered individuals each holding one informational piece each. The beauty of Ushahidi is in collecting these puzzle pieces and putting them together. They offer the both the possibility of providing local level information and a more comprehensive snapshot of its national level effects. So good luck Ushahidi, I hope you get some information from Kisumu soon!
Christopher Albon is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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