I just noticed a post on Mobileactive.org on how technology was used by different organizations to follow the 2011 presidential elections in Liberia. The article focuses on the differences between election monitoring and crowd sourcing and also give some insights in the specific challenges that the organizers were faced with in Liberia. It’s worth reading: Technology in the 2011 Liberian elections: mobiles, monitoring and mapping
As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com. Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi: After all, Ushahidi is just the technical platform and it is the responsibility of others to feed the system information, but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information.
Liberians will go to the polls on 11 October 2011 to vote for a new house of representative, a new senate and – most importantly – they’ll decide who will be the president for the next six years. Ushahidi has set up a website to monitor the elections.
The BBC has now published elements process for verifying social media content, which makes for an excellent read. What emerges is a process that is more like that of a traditional intelligence agency, than what most people had in mind when joining journalism school.
You have probably heard of ”Ushahidi“. Right after the Haiti earthquake, the near impossible to pronounce organization set up a service that allowed people in Haiti to submit reports and requests for help by SMS. Those messages were then geo-tagged, categorized, displayed on a website and distributed to relief workers in Haiti. It’s a really impressive system and it was up and running only four days after the earthquake struck. And what’s more: it worked in the local language, Haitian[...]
Just before I left for my mini break to Prague last week (great city!) I saw “Us Now“, a one hour feature about how collaborative tools can help us make better decisions. The film is public domain and if you want, you can watch the complete documentary below. You can also buy it on DVD, watch it on YouTube or download it as a torrent! In fact, the film project’s website is almost as interesting as the film itself, which[...]
