Ushahidi

Ushahidi ('testimony' in Swahili) was built in 2008 by Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia to map eyewitness reports of violence after Kenya's disputed 2007 election. It became the template for crowdsourced civic mapping: people submit reports by SMS, web form, or email; stewards triage, categorize, and publish them to a shared map with workflows for response.

Its famous deployments are large — the 2010 Haiti earthquake response processed ~30,000 text messages, and Kenya's Uchaguzi election monitoring runs on it — but the platform scales *down* beautifully: during Washington DC's 2010 'Snowmageddon,' one resident stood up a neighborhood dig-out map in a day (a story on this shelf).

The nonprofit behind it is headquartered in Nairobi and led by Angela Oduor Lungati, who rose from within its own developer community. The platform is AGPL-3.0 open source with a hosted cloud service, and free accounts for qualifying grassroots groups.

Neighborhood remix: any question of the form 'what's where, according to us?' — third places, accessibility barriers, heat refuges, little free pantries, memory sites. One steward, one map, reports by text message so no one needs an app.

Details

• maker: Ushahidi Inc. (nonprofit, Nairobi)
• hosted: cloud service with free grassroots tier; self-hostable
• license: AGPL-3.0
• ctfg url: https://civictech.guide/listing/ushahidi
• repo url: https://github.com/ushahidi/platform
• image url: https://texakzqqenzpxawktbgx.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/studio-library/tool-screenshots/ushahidi-2026-08.jpg
• remix idea: A local Ushahidi map of a neighborhood's third places, with SMS submissions and a neighbor-steward.
• practice kind: tool