I’ve been following the progress of ushahidi for a while now, it’s a crowdsourcing platform for crisis information, and was first used in the post election violence in Kenya in 2007. Since then they have taken the platform from strength to strength, and have got some real exposure with the latest deployment covering the Haiti earthquake that happened yesterday. There’s a great blog post explaining what ushahidi has managed to do in an extremely short space of time here: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake/

I take my hat off to the Ushahidi team for their efforts over the last 24hours, you have done a superb job at getting the platform up and running, and by the responses coming in to the system, I know that this project will make a real difference in the relief efforts.

http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ for more details and up to the minute reports from the island itself.

As a side note, it’s the first time I’ve seen google’s ‘Latest Results’ when doing a search for haiti earthquake in their results page. http://www.google.co.za/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=haiti+earthquake

It scrolls real time search results as they are indexed by google, fairly impressive I must say!!