Ushahidi’s launched a major new update to their platform called Goma. The ICT4Peace Foundation is very pleased to see key features in Ushahidi’s Goma release that had evolved directly from our Crisis Information Management prototype, including in particular a new feature to track veracity and trust of users by the admin and email and SMS proximity-based alerting functionality.
Watch Ushahidi’s David Kobia speak about the new Goma release here.
What the ICT4Peace Foundation is interested in is the development of concepts like Ushahidi’s own Swift River, plus the Foundation’s own information visualisation and crowd-sourcing qualification routines that help decision makers improve the signal to noise ratio during a crisis.
Whereas Ushahidi’s emphasis is on the public display of information, the Foundation’s emphasis is on a platform with similar characteristics that facilitates greater information sharing within networks of UN agencies and their partners. We want to see the back-end of the system providing a database based matrix for the qualification of information entered that can then be manipulated to give decision makers the knowledge they need to respond appropriately from the myriad of information feeds flowing out of a crisis, and into their screens and systems.
We are looking forward to the evolution of Ushahidi in this regard as a tool that helps in the analysis and response to a crisis.