Ushahidi

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-03/to-report-election-violence-in-kenya-text-ushahidi

While looking for an article to review, I was lucky enough to stumble across “To Report Election Violence in Kenya, Text Ushahidi.” I have a philosophy of non-violence myself. I do not believe violence is the answer, and I do honestly think that with enough persistence and the right conversations, all situations can be solved through conversations over actions. Of course, violence does happen and many people believe it solves issues, however, the people of Kenya are trying to put an end to such solutions. With the new election, spirits are high and people are passionate to elect a better official than before. With heated souls, comes at times violence, and so a small group of volunteer programmers decided to get together and wrote software to map people’s reports of crimes sent by witnesses either by phone of online. This project has shown to provide as “tens of thousands” of people have used this method to track the trouble in order to warn and protect others. “Ushahidi” is Swahili for testimony. This program was initiated in order to stop events of the past from occurring again. In the last election, rival ethnic groups fought for almost two months before the dust settled and a prime minister was finally chosen. To avoid these events reoccurring, the group put up ads all over Kenya promoting the service and asking all to text 3002 to report any and all incidents. The great thing about this program is that it started out as a way to track problems, but it grew into a way for people to get help. Not only can people report issues, but they can also get to the authorities and stop trouble happening before it even occurs. A truly great program to help the community.