Ushahidi platform deployed by Al Jazeera to monitor the Gaza war
A great news in the field of social media research: data collected through the Ushahidi platform during its main deployments so far are now available on the Ushahidi community website. “Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Swahili. That’s where the name of the event mapping website comes from. Ushahidi.com was created to monitor the riots following 2008 elections in Kenya, where 45,000 users registered on the website as citizen journalists. Since then, it has evolved into a set of crowdsourcing tools (basically, interactive mapping tools) to be deployed in many situations when efficient monitoring and quick response can make the difference, including natural disasters, dubious elections, wars and zombie invasions.