Open Source Technology Saves Lives in Haiti
Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?
The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.
This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.
Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.
The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump.
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/
