THE USHAHIDI PLATFORM:
CROWDSOURCING AND
CROWDFEEDING
Anahi Ayala Iacucci
Media Innovation Advisor
aayala@internnews.org
Kabul Innovation Lab
Kabul – January 2012
CROWDSOURCING
CROWDSOURCING: use the crowd to collect
information. The act of outsourcing tasks,
traditionally performed by an employee to a large
group of people or community (a crowd), through an
open call for action. Jeff Howe coined the term in
June 2006 explaining that because technological
advances have allowed for cheap consumer electronics,
the gap between professionals and amateurs has been
diminished.
ADVANTAGES OF USING CROWDSOURCING
Information during a crisis or for early warning
systems is as important as food and water
 Affected communities know what is going on on the
ground in real time
 The ability to collect information is limited by the
availability of sources of information: more sources,
more information
 Affected population get engaged in the process
because they have an interest in the outcome
 Crowdsourcing is relatively cheaper than the use of
selected monitoring teams
 Crowdsourcing allow for triangulation of information
permitting verification and accountability

CROWDFEEDING

CROWDFEEDING: the need for the crowd to share
information with the crowd, ie, not top-down, or
bottom-up, but information from the crowd, for the
crowd; horizontal communication. The act of sharing
information out to a large group of people or
community, through an open sharing system. In the
same time for the international community it means to
share all available information with all stakeholders to
allow better decisions to be taken and better actions to
be implemented.
WHY CROWDFEEDING?

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Local populations are the first responders on the ground so
the more they know, the better they respond
Information increase resilience and is the base for
preparedness
The Crowd is always there
Information sharing is the base for a coordinated
meaningful response
Local population normally knows what to do and has local
copying mechanisms
: CROWDSOURCING, MAPPING,
AND CROWDFEEDING TOOL
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, began as a
one-off deployment for mapping reports of election violence
after the December 2007 Kenyan elections. Ushahidi is a
crowdsourcing mapping system that people to report into
the platform by web submission, SMS, Twitter or e-mail.
The Ushahidi platform is right now being used in more
than 100 countries and 10.000 projects, from electoral
monitoring in Burundi to violence in Congo to Early
Warning system in the Rift Valley.
WHAT IS USHAHIDI?
Platform
Methodology
WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH
 Visualization
of data on a
map
 Multiple layers
 Crowdsourcing from
different sources
 Crowdfeeding
VISUALIZING DATA ON AN INTERACTIVE MAP
MULTIPLE LAYERS
The
categories
The map layers
The static layers
1ST LAYER: THE CATEGORIES
2ND LAYER: THE MAP LAYERS
3RD LAYER: THE STATIC LAYERS
TWO TYPOLOGIES OF STATIC LAYERS
Points (ex. Fixed points like
wells, dams, irrigation
systems)
Areas (ex.Agroecological regions, risk
maps, crop suitability)
CROWDSOURCING FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES

The Ushahidi platform can collect information from
different sources:
•SMS (integration
with FLSMS
•Web-Submission
•E-Mail
•Facebook
•Twitter
•Voice Mail/IVR
CROWDFEEDING
TWO EXAMPLES OF USHAHIDI
PROJECTS
LIBYA
CRISIS MAP
HUDUMA
FEBRUARY 15TH, 2011: LIBYA
FOR THE FIRST TIME UNOCHA REACHED OUT TO
VOLUNTEER TECHNICAL COMMUNITIES
On Tuesday 1st March, OCHA reaches out to
Standby Task Force, CrisisMappers,
CrisisCommons, ICT4Peace, Open Street Map
and MapAction.
 A couple of hours later OCHA activated the
Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) which
quickly launched a Crisis Map of Libya to
support humanitarian preparedness operations.
 The first mandate of the SBTF was to support
OCHA to understand what was going on inside
the country

DAY 6
4 WEEKS LATER
For the first time since Haiti, the humanitarian
community was using new technology, social media
and online volunteers for their work
 1400 report have been uploaded on the platform and
UNHCHR asked to use some of the volunteers to
gather YouTube video to support human rights
violations
 OCHA, WFP, UNHCR, UNHCHR, IRC and the Red
Cross were after one month using the platform

LESSONS LEARNED
If you want to work in humanitarian emergencies you
need to work with responders
 Make sure you advertise your project both with the
local population and with the hum community
 Have a strategy and a precise goal in mind
 Make sure you design a sustainable workflow
 Do not focus on the tool, focus on the outcome
 Engage civil society and local communities
 Make local people own the project
 Give people the possibility to turn your project upside
down 
 Rely on people that have credibility in the
country/community

HUDUMA: FIX MY CONSTITUENCY
CHARACTERISTICS:
Done in collaboration with the Open Data
Project
 Governmental data + citizens data
 Free reporting system for the citizens
 Analysis of the data received
 Monitoring and accountability system of
the money spent by the government

THE PROJECT IS NOT WORKING…WHY?
No media involved
 No trust in bw the government and the
people
 No response
 No expectations managements
 Not easy to navigate
 Not easy to understand
 Not enough training to people on how to use
it

HOW TO USE CROWDSOURCING AND
WHAT TO BE AWARE OF
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CROWDSOURCING IS NOT PERFECT
METHODOLOGY AND IT IS NOT ALWAYS
NECESSARY
CROWDSOURCING AND CROWDFEEDING
PROJECTS NEED TO TAKE INTO
CONSIDERATION THE IMPORTANCE OF
INFORMATION
IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO START WITH A SMALL
PROJECT AND THEN SCALE UP THAN THE
CONTRARY
NEVER CHOOSE A TOOL AND THEN DECIDE
WHAT TO USE IT FOR
RISK AND PROBLEMES OF
CROWDSOURCING SYSTEMS
 VERIFICATION
 STRUCTURE
 IMPACT
 SUSTAINABILITY
VERIFICATION
PROBLEM: when you do crowdsourcing you don’t know who
is the source of your information. The risk is to receive
and use false or bias information that can affect your
work and credibility.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
 Verification can be crowdsourced too (ex. OpenStreet Map
and Ushahidi)
 New systems to triangulate information and create
reliability scores (ex. Swift River)
 Bound and Unbound crowdsourcing is for now the best
solution (ex. Uchaguzi)
STRUCTURE
PROBLEM: people think that a
good tool is enough to make a
good project. This is not the case:
a tool is only a tool, a good
project is much more than that.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
 Planning and strategy design
need to be always the first step
of a project
 Crowdsourcing is not immune to
its own principle: the best
crowdsourcing project is the one
managed
by
the
involved
population
 Sustainability and integration
with local systems need to be
always taken into consideration
IMPACT
Information is power, so if you share information
you are sharing power. Crowdsourcing projects
cannot be detached by their political implications.
 Crowdsourcing projects are bi-directional projects:
the crowd will always modify and affect the project
as much as the project will modify and affect the
crowd.
 Crowdsourcing projects to be effective need to be
adapted to the existing flow of information and
information management systems existing in the
environment where they are implemented.

SUSTAINABILITY
PROBLEM: If running a long term crowdsourcing
project the big problem is how to make it sustainable.
Will people keep reporting on that issue?
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
 Try to have a free reporting system (have a free short
code or phone number from phone companies)
 Give reimbursements to people that reports
 Make people willing to report, because they can see
the results
 Engage the crowd and be ready to adapt your platform
to the crowd needs
CHALLENGES WITH USING USHAHIDI
FOR HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
A.
Protecting affected communities:
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Protecting the source (technical security)
Protecting the information (privacy)
Protecting the impact (local equilibrium)
Possible solution: private instance but will never be 100%
safe
A. Verifying the violations/reports
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Verification of the source
Verification of the information
Possible solution: not doing crowdsourcing, or rely on a
very strong robust local field presence to take care of
verification
THANK YOU!
Anahi Ayala Iacucci
aayala@internews.org