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.

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Socrata claims to be a “social data network”. I’m not sure what this means…data sets never struck me as particularly social events. But jargon aside, Socrata does have its’ uses. With some pretty original data sets (privacy issues not withstanding, see Bernie Madoffs list of clients, including home addresses), and an open API (application programming interface–ie, you can bring the data into all sorts of programs and play with it), add Socrata to the growing list of open data sources out there.