Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
resources. It was the worst bloodshed since the
end of apartheid in 1994.
using the portal as a central point to bring all the
data together and to help the NGOs to prioritise
their response.
UnitedForAfrica.co.za was designed by a
South African web marketing agency called
Quirk who also manage and maintain it. It is built
using an infrastructure called
Ushahidi
, which
means ''testimony'' in Swahili. The Ushahidi
engine was initially developed to map reports of
violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout
at the beginning of 2008, and has its roots in the
collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists at that
time. It provides a platform that any person or
organization can use to set up their own means
of collecting and visualizing information and it is
available as a free, open source application that
others can download, implement and use to create
awareness of a crisis in their own region.
The core Ushahidi engine is built on the premise
that gathering crisis information from the general
public provides new insights into events happening
in near real-time. It uses direct citizen reporting
rather than depending on experts in the field, and
has been tested with people working on issues
linked to the environment, health, political crises
and human rights. The focus is on crisis situation
reporting, not just human rights, but while the
use of standard event formats and coding has not
been implemented, human rights organizations
with the expertise to do so can filter and verify
the reports to build a picture of the human rights
situation in a crisis.
Since mobile phone ownership rates are
quite high now, even among some of the poorest
members of society, Ushahidi are working with
FrontlineSMS to produce a light version of their
incident reporting form that can be loaded on a
phone. This is free software that enables computer
users to send and receive text messages with
large groups of people through mobile phones. It
enables two-way communication, which is useful
for incident reporting by people in the field.
There were reports on Saturday of other clashes
at a transit camp near Pretoria housing some
2,000 people who have been driven from their
homes. Many were reported to be Somalis. (BBC
News, 2008)
When the issue of xenophopic attacks against
foreigners flared up initially, the mainstream
media used UnitedForAfrica.co.za to get first
hand reports. The portal manager regularly got
approached by a news site and would find himself
mediating between them and someone who was
closer to what was happening on the ground. It
was helpful for the media in South Africa at the
time to get information on attacks very quickly
without having to run around from location to
location. As a result, the issue was being reported
more often and to a wider audience than would
otherwise receive it.
Once published on UnitedForAfrica.co.za,
reports appear on a map-based view for others to
see. The map, which is a “mashup” of the xeno-
phobia incident reports and Google Maps, allows
users to click on a location or incident to get more
information. Mashups, which are the compound-
ing or “mashing” of two or more pieces of web
functionality to create powerful applications, are
just one example of how Web 2.0 technologies
were used in response to the xenophobia crisis.
Another is the Afrigator xenophobia page (http://
afrigator.com/) which aggregated blog posts and
news articles of the crisis.
In the first day after it went live there were 357
site visits to UnitedForAfrica.co.za; on the second
there were 932. The portal was used to provide
information on where the incidents were happen-
ing. This information proved to be quite valuable;
site managers were even linking with NGOs on the
ground that were providing assistance, and were
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