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Mar 27, 2010

"The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling." --C. S. Lewis

Africa's Gift to Silicon Valley

After Kenya's disputed election in 2007, violence erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and returned to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend. The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on a map, using the locations given by informants. It collected more testimony -- which is what ushahidi means in Swahili -- with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor.