On September 21, 2013, a group of suspected al-Shabab militants stormed Westgate mall in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, killing at least 61 people, six security personnel and injuring hundreds of innocent men, women and children.
Following the horrible attack, Ushahidi has come up with two tools for emergencies. Ushahidi is a non-profit technology company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.
“Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.
The Ping app is a binary, multichannel check-in tool for groups. The tool will help families, friends and companies to quickly check in with each other:
The Ping App – a group check-in tool for emergencies. Photo source: Ushahidi blog.
This is how the Ping works:
When a disaster happens, you send out a message for everyone to check-in. The admin sends out a 120 character message that always has “are you ok?” appended to the end.
This goes out via text message and email (more channels can be added later).
The message goes out three times, once every 5 minutes. If there is a response, then that person is considered okay. If no response, then 3 messages get sent to their other contact.
We file each response into one of 3 areas: responded (verified), not responded, not okay.
Every message that comes back from someone in that group is saved into a big bucket of text, that the admin can add notes to if needed.
Another tool is Blood Donation Kenya, which is a crowdmap of all locations of blood drive centers. The map matches blood location centers with people willing to help with donation, medical instruments or medical personnel.
A screenshot of a crowdmap showing blood donation sites in Kenya. Image source: Ushahidi blog.
Erik Hersmann explains the logic behind the map:
How can this be managed better, so that people aren’t turned away from some places and so that they know where to go for their type?
We set up a crowdmap deployment to map our all locations of blood drive centers, in an effort to match these areas with those willing to help at BloodDonationKenya.Crowdmap.com, either through blood donation, medical instruments or medical personnel.
Originally published on Global Voices.
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