Amidst increasing concerns over the political instability in Madagascar and the safety of local news reporters, citizen media has made an important contribution to the understanding and documentation of on-site based reports. As the crisis has spread out all over a nation whose surface area is the equivalent to France, Belgium and the Netherlands combined, reporters cannot be present everywhere so eye-witness accounts from citizens have become increasingly valuable.
Ushahidi has launched an open source platform for the crisis in Madagascar. The Ushahidi tool will allow Madagascar based individuals to send information on incidents via SMS messages to the geospatial friendly Ushahidi platform. As you may have seen in the current political crisis, especially during the unrest of January 26, when no news from the traditional media were available, information came in through new social media tools. Ushahidi will help gather all the information, confirmed and unconfirmed, and help visualize it on a map. The number for sending SMS to Ushahidi in Madagascar is 00447800000197.
The initial soft release of the platform (web based reports only) was due to concern over our ability to properly receive mobile reports. The concern is now corrected and a steady amount of mobile reports have been submitted for the past week from all over the country. The latest unrest over the past 5 days were heavily reported by citizen bloggers via either sms reports or twitter updates: on average, one update every 3 hours were received.
The twitter aggregation can still be optimized as we are still not collecting all the potential reports available and the cost of sending tweets via mobile is too high.
We are also still very concerned about the safety of citizen media users in this increasingly tense political environment and considering the options to enhance the safety of contributors to citizen media.
[...] FOKO Blog Club: Ushahidi has launched an open source platform for the crisis in Madagascar. The Ushahidi tool will allow Madagascar based individuals to send information on incidents via SMS messages to the geospatial friendly Ushahidi platform. As you may have seen in the current political crisis, especially during the unrest of January 26, when no news from the traditional media were available, information came in through new social media tools. Ushahidi will help gather all the information, confirmed and unconfirmed, and help visualize it on a map. The number for sending SMS to Ushahidi in Madagascar is 00447800000197. [...]
I agree that it’s important to focus on the safety of the citizen journalists. It is a shame that the SMS number for Ushahidi is so long. For those who have submitted reports, how did they find out about the number and are they also aware of the web interface?
I wonder if you could approach one of the local mobile service providers about adding SMS support to open-source http://identi.ca:
http://louisgray.com/live/2008/07/identica-launches-sms-support-sort-of.html
The information that the Foko bloggers have been contributing during such a time of crisis has been truly amazing. I hope that peace returns quickly.
[...] Rakotomalala updates on the Foko/Ushahidi and twitter crisis report initiative: The initial soft release of the platform [...]
[...] on January 26th, when traditional media reports were unavailable to and from many regions, social media played an important role in information relays. Now, crisis reporting is made even more transparent with an open platform developed by [...]
[...] on January 26th, when traditional media reports were unavailable to and from many regions, social media played an important role in information relays. Now, crisis reporting is made even more transparent with an open platform developed by [...]
Twitter is really a good way in keeping yourself updated with the day to day activities of your friends and families members. I update my Twitter and personal blog daily.