Welcome to Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, where we are building a platform that crowdsources crisis information. Allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

One such deployment of the Ushahidi platform was used to monitor Indian elections from March to May of ‘09. Let’s take a closer look at just what Ushahidi allowed its users to do, and the role the software had in participatory voter monitoring.

Vote Report India marries a basic GIS (geographic information system, in this case courtesy of google) with Ushahidi’s SMS reportage system.

Incidents reported via SMS are graphed on the site, with a proportional symbolism for the dots representing the number of incidents reported. Clicking on any dot reveals the exact nature of the incident.

You can see that details about the events taking place in particular regions, and another click on the event gets you more detail on what happened. The first event, “Mobile Report”, reveals that Sheela witnessed a “voting machine problem”. There’s no further data (such as GPS coordinates of the person who texted the event, or more details about what the problem was).

I could go on, but go check out Ushahidi for yourself, and then see some real world examples of its deployment.