The Ushahidi platform is a collaborative project created by volunteers and managed by a core team. Most of the development team comes from different countries in Africa, including Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Malawi. We also have contributors in the US and Europe. The core team is made up of Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, David Kobia and Juliana Rotich who originally started Ushahidi in Kenya in their free time, and have since moved to work on the platform full-time. (links to bios)

Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili) was originally a website that was quicly developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to collect and visualize information, especially crisis information. The core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs.

Ushahidi was originally deployed in Kenya during the post-election violence in January 2008. Since then the platform has been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by Al Jazeera in Gaza, in India to monitor the 2009 elections and as a way to monitor the Swine Flu epidemic. There are approximately two dozen organizations around the world that have been testing the platform since October 2008.

The Alpha version of the software was made available in late October 2008 and it was used by a number of select organizations for testing. In May of 2009 the software reached Beta phase and was released as a free and open source software application for anyone to use around the world.

The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is also expected to help organizations marshal efforts to assist areas that are not well covered in the mainstream media.