Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili) was originally a website that was quickly developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.

The new Ushahidi Engine incorporates the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that can be deployed by anyone to collect and visualize information, especially crisis information.

As of November 2008, Ushahidi is being implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to collect and aggregate information about the crisis unfolding in that region.

Ushahidi is a powerful citizen reporting tool that helps monitoring and networking between groups working in crisis situations and was originally deployed in Kenya during the post-election violence in January 2008. Since then the platform has been deployed succesfully in South Africa as well to help gather stories of xenophobic attacks.

Ushahidi is also being tested by partner organizations to manage data received via SMS and web.

The data on http://DRC.Ushahidi.com is available publicly, and is updated by incidents submitted either by SMS text messages sent to +0992592111 or submitted on the Ushahidi website. Every incident is then verified by an administrator.

Aggregated information enables NGO's, the press, diaspora and the general public to have the latest information during a crisis. SMS incident reports allows incidents to be reported from areas with limited web access.

There are public instances of Ushahidi such as in Kenya and in South Africa

Note: Other instances of Ushahidi implemented by NGO testers may be private or public as per their request.

Reports can be submitted via SMS, web and email.

Reports generally useful are:

• Humanitarian Actions
• Peace Efforts
• Riots
• Deaths
• Property Loss
• Sexual Assault
• Government Forces
• Civilians
• Internally Displaced People
• Armed Conflict

Also, any information that may be related to a crisis, with specifics that would be useful to others.

In the DRC, please send an SMS to +243992592111. Please include your location for example 'In goma:many wounded…'

The team running the hub may send a text back to you to ask for more information to verify the incident reported.

For a behind the scenes view on how SMS system works please visit this link

Click on on the 'Submit an Incident' tab on the man site, or follow this link http://drc.ushahidi.com/reports/submit

Please fill in all the fields:

1. Provide a title for the incident
2. Select a location from the drop down menu
3. Provide a detailed description of the incident
4. Enter the the exact time that the incident if known or an estimated time.
5. Add additional information, including a link if the information was sourced from elsewhere

Your name and email address are optional, however may be useful for followup in case of discrepancies Ushahidi protects your confidentiality by not making your name and email address visible on the mapping.

Please send an email to DRC [at] ushahidi [dot] com if you would like to email in an incident report related to the DRC crisis. It will be reviewed by the team verifying the reports and will be entered into the mapping.

If you have further questions please email info [at] ushahidi [dot] com

These functions are only available to the admins of the mappings.

After logging in, on the right hand side of the mapping, click on the settings tab.

On the site settings tab, you can change the title of your mashup, the tagline and the site email address. You can specify the number of items Per Page that the admin will see, You may allow or disallow Users from Submitting reports. You can allow users to submit comments to reports in a style similar to blog comments.

On the map tab of settings, you can set the default country view by selecting the area on the map. There is an option for you to select which the type of mapping you would like to use. You have four options, Google, Virtual Earth, Yahoo and Open Streetmaps. Once you select the map provided, you will be provided with a link to enter API key. Save the settings once you have completed.

To see the effects of the changes made, click on the link to the main site e.g http://demo.ushahidi.com

After logging in as admin, click on the the Manage tab, this will display an option for you to add or edit categories for your mapping. You can also change the color of the category button.

After logging in, click on the 'Reports tab' On the left hand side, click on the check box to select the messages to approve or publishing them on the site, click on approve button. This will make the incidents visible on the main site.

On the right hand side of the reports tab, you have the option to delete an incident report, select it by checking off the box against the message to be deleted, then hit the delete key.

To create reports from SMS messages received through SMS, click on the Messages Tab, select the message, then click on the create reports link on the right hand side. This brings up a pane with a map and incident reporting fields. Please note that this capability is dependent on a set up of Frontline SMS to handle SMS-to-mapping capability. Please send an email info [at] ushahidi [dot] com if you have further questions.

In the admin section of your Ushahidi installation, click on the settings link on the right hand side, then select the SMS tab. Enter the phone numbers you have connected to FrontlineSMS then copy the “FrontlineSMS HTTP Post LINK” provided.

In FronlineSMS, open the Keywords tab, select the ”<BLANK>” keyword in the list on the left. Please note that with FrontlineSMS version 1.6.11 ”<BLANK>” has been renamed to ”<NONE>”.

then click on the “click here to go to advanced view” link on the right below the “Keyword Actions” section.

At the bottom of the screen, click on the button labelled “Auto Reply” and in the menu that pops up select the “External Command” option then click the edit button to the immediate right.

In the window that opens, select “HTTP Request” as the execution type, paste the url you copied from your Ushahidi installation above into the command text field that is in the “Execution Details” section and select the “Do Not Wait For Response” radio button. Leave all the other fields untouched, click on “Done” and that is it, any SMSs sent to FrontlineSMS will also be forwarded to your Ushahidi installation.

NOTE: If you're setting up Frontlinesms on Ubuntu Linux, it mounts the phone/modem on /dev/ttyACM0 which is not detected by Frontlinesms since it wait a /dev/ttyS0 device (port com). This can be solved by issuing these commands

1. sudo ln -sf /dev/ttyACM0 /dev/ttyS0
2. sudo wvdialconf to reconfigure all tty com

• FrontlineSMS will not retry the HTTP Request if it fails for whatever reason. Consequently, any SMSs that come into FrontlineSMS while your Internet connection is down will not be automatically sent to your Ushahidi installation. For a quick fix to this while this issues is being sorted out, sync.py is a script that can read the FrontlineSMS db directly and be run from a cron job to do the sync and does retries if the sync fails. If you are running FrontlineSMS on Mac OS or Linux:
  1. Grab a copy of the “sync.py” script from here. sync.py.zip
  2. Edit the sync.py script and assuming you have it saved in /home/me/frontlinesync/sync.py…
  3. Set the WORK_DIR variable to the directory where you saved the sync.py script e.g. '/home/me/frontlinesync/'
  4. Set the USHAHIDI_URL variable to the location of your ushahidi installation. E.g. 'drc.ushahidi.com'
  5. Go to Settings → SMS and copy you “Ushahidi sync key” and set the USHAHIDI_KEY variable to this velue.
  6. FrontlineSMS has a database in a folder called 'FrontlineSMS' in your home directory. Set the FRONTLINE_DB variable to the location of the FrontlineSMS database as follows assuming the logged the logged in user's home directory is '/home/me' E.g. '/home/me/FrontlineSMS/frontline.db'''
  7. Add a crontab entry by running 'crontab -e' from your command line.
  8. The above command will start your default editor and open the logged in user's crontab file. Add the following '*/5 * * * * /home/me/frontlinesync/sync.py' in a new line at the end of the file then save and exit.
  9. The sync.py script will now be run every five minutes, posting any new messages to your ushahidi installation.
• Your phone may freeze occasionally or the connection to the phone may be lost. Keep an eye out for this and restart the phone and/or the computer to fix this.

In the admin section of your Ushahidi installation, click on the settings link on the right hand side, then select the SMS tab. On that page, click on “Option 2: Use a Global SMS Gateway”.

*This is for OUTGOING messages only*

1. Sign up for Clickatells service( Their Clickatell Central product ) by following the link on the page or click here
2. Enter your Clickatell API number which you should get after signing up for Clickatells service.
3. Enter your Clickatell Username. You should get it from Clickatell
4. Enter your Clickatell Password. You should get it from Clickatell
5. Click on Save Settings button to save the entries.

*If you want to use Clickatell to receive SMS messages, you need a 2-way number from Clickatell.*

Once you have your 2-way number, you need to make three changes to /application/controllers/frontlinesms.php and then register that as your callback URL in Clickatell.

- Change $_GET['s'] to $_GET['from'] - Change $_GET['m'] to $_GET['text'] - Add your Frontline key to the top of the script

You're set!

Current Version of Ushahidi: Within the dashboard, click on settings, email. Follow the instructions indicated, do make sure that IMAP is enabled in your settings, be it with gmail or with other accounts. The Mail Server Username typically refers to the email address.

Note: The implementation of the IMAP protocol is in application/libraries/Imap.php

The instructions below are for older versions of Ushahidi (Eldoret & Goma releases)

1. Determine the email address for the public to send reports to. For example, for the DRC instance of Ushahidi, emails were sent to DRC [at] ushahidi [dot] com. Make sure that the email address has IMAP capability enabled in the settings. You may also create a new email address using GMAIL.

2. Using FTP, browse to the location of Ushahidi application files. Locate /application/config/email.php

3. Edit using your favourite text editor:

Fill in the information between the double quotes as follows, remember to retain the double quotes.

<?php / Config Mail Server

Some providers require a full email address as username /

$config['username'] = “enter email address here”;

/Config Mail Server/

$config['password'] = “enter the password here”;

/ Config Mail Server

Common Ports: 25, 110, 995 (Gmail POP3 SSL), 993 (Gmail IMAP SSL) /

Enter the appropriate port number, leave it as 25 for Gmail accounts

$config['port'] = 25;

/ Config Mail Server Type - pop3 - imap /

Decide whether you would like to use pop3 or imap for email.

$config['servertype'] = “imap”;

/ Config Mail Server /

Please note the email server configuration options. For sites its typically “mail.yourwebsite.com” The example below is if you are using a gmail account to receive incident reports (recommended so as to utilize gmail's spam filtering before the information is synched with an ushahidi instance)

$config['server'] = “imap.gmail.com”;

/ Enable or disable SSL /

Change the setting below to true if you would like to force ssl.Note that if you selected imap above, change the setting below to true

$config['ssl'] = false; ?>

4. Save the file.

NOTE: Give the application time to fetch the messages to the dashboard. The default amount of time is currently set at 1 hour.