Disruptor of the Day: Juliana Rotich & Ushahidi – Proving It's the Use of Technology That Really Disrupts

Introducing Juliana Rotich & Ushahidi – “Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. The volunteer team behind Ushahidi rapidly developed a tool for Kenyans to report and map incidents of violence that they saw via SMS, email or the web. Within a week Ushahidi had gone from idea to live deployment.

Ushahidi now serves as a prototype and a lesson for what can be done by combining crisis information from citizen- generated reports, media and NGOs and mashing that data up with geographical mapping tools. The team behind Ushahidi became an organization that created a free and open source mapping and content management system which can be used by organizations worldwide in similar crisis-related situations. The main goal of the organization is to create a system that facilitates early warning systems and helps in data visualization for response and recovery...

A key component of Ushahidi is the ability to use mobile phones as a primary means of both sending crisis incidents and receiving updates. The Internet can be difficult to access or completely unavailable in some parts of the world, so the platform was created with the mobile phone as a foundational element. Hilde Schwab of Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship says, “Ushahidi is one of the few social enterprises that has, in just a few short years of existence, dramatically changed the face of how individuals and communities can influence democracy and economic development around the world.”...