Monday, March 28
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When I first started publicly talking about Geeks without Bounds, one guy immediately got my attention: Ethan Zuckerman.
Ethan Zuckerman was a co-founder of Tripod.com – before The Facebook and Twitter, before WordPress and MySpace, Tripod.com was a place where you you could set up your own website for free…in 1995. Ethan later founded the Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that sends people with technical skills to developing countries to assist in computer infrastructure development.
It just so happened that Ethan was sitting in the audience at the 140 Characters Conference in San Francisco where I first opened my trap (publicly) about Geeks without Bounds. Before I had finished talking on stage, I had already received a message from him, and the ensuing advice he’s bestowed continues to guide GWOBorg today.
One of the first people he suggested I talk to was a guy named Patrick Meier. Patrick started a company called Ushahidi. Ushahidi is an open source crisis mapping platform. It’s been used in Haiti, Egypt, Libya, Japan…all around the world to help document and make sense of fast-moving crises. The platform allows reports from cell phones and Web-connected devices to be collected and displayed on Web-based maps. I ended up meeting Patrick, who invited me to be his guest at a conference he was hosting on crisis mapping, called ICCM.
The first time I actually saw Ushahidi demoed was on October 1st 2010…at the International Conference of Crisis Mappers. The above image is my actual Foursquare check-in at the auditorium at Tufts University in Boston where the conference was held. Thanks to the efforts of Heather Leson of Crisis Commons, she cornered George Chamales from the Konpa Group who demoed Ushahidi to me. Immediately I thought…man….this thing looks just like Tweet3po. AND it also reminded me of Foursquare. Even today, when a newbie asks me what Ushahidi does, I often say…”it’s like Foursquare, but instead of pinpointing what restaurant you’re enjoying dinner at, you’re pinpointing which restaurant just got washed away.”
So I guess it makes complete sense to find out that now Ushahidi is adding a concept borrowed from Foursquare and Gowalla…check-ins.
For more check out: Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in – Technology Review.
For more about Ushahidi, you can watch this: How to set up your own Crowdmap Deployment
