Florida Creatives - Creating a Community of Innovation

Do you all know about Ushahidi? It's a web application that can show real-time mapped data, often sent in by people who have the best information - the guy standing on the street during the disaster, election, or other event.

Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili, and the app was originally developed to track events during a tumultuous election in Kenya. The idea was (partially) cooked up by one of our own Florida Creatives, Erik Hersman, who you may have seen at BarCamp, BlogOrlando or Happy Hour.

They use the word "crowd-sourced" to describe it, but to me, it's really about a network of individuals who act as filters and amplifiers for what would otherwise be a bunch of noise. There is no chain of command, so the information gets updated instantly without getting filtered through news media, government or other organizations.

Here's what Erik had to say:

As usual, there's been a lot of activity around the Ushahidi community. Here are a few of the bigger news items, with links:

We've announced our MacArthur funding!
http://bit.ly/IflIm

We've released the Beta of Ushahidi, and you can download the code at: http://download.ushahidi.com

Two interesting projects using Ushahidi in the last couple months are:
http://votereport.in - used to monitor the Indian elections
http://swineflu.ushahidi.com - used to track the Swine Flu

Erik's short talk at TED 2009 (video):
http://bit.ly/Zzf9h

I talk about a new initiative out of Ushahidi called "Swift River", which you can learn about here: http://bit.ly/ZIsV7 and a video on it here: http://vimeo.com/4067823

For the first time ever, the Ushahidi founding team was able to meet in person (Ory, David, Juliana and Erik). Our friends at Pop!Tech wrote us up: http://www.poptech.org/blog/index.php/archives/3633

Recent examples of our development community's amazing work come on the smart phone side where one of our volunteer developers, Dale Zak, has created the Windows Mobile version of Ushahidi, to be distributed shortly. Look for the Android (by Henry Addo) and J2ME (by Steve Mutinda) apps coming soon as well.

Finally, we had a big meeting of tech experts and Ushahidi devs in Orlando recently. Besides a lot of work getting done, we also made time to enjoy ourselves as pirates at Disney... :)
http://bit.ly/5fzG3

Ory and Erik will be in Nairobi May 24-29 for meetings. If any of you would like to link up, let us know. More big news is always on the way, so keep tuned into the Ushahidi blog at http://blog.ushahidi.com

Thanks again for all your continued support,

Erik (for the Ushahidi team)