More on Ushahidi

Patrick Meier of iRevolution recently wrote a blog post clarifying three common misconceptions that people and organizations have about Ushahidi and the work its platform enables:

Here are three interesting misconceptions about Ushahidi and crowdsourcing in general:

1. Ushahidi takes the lead in deploying the Ushahidi platform
2. Crowdsourced information is statistically representative
3. Crowdsourced information cannot be validated

Lets start with the first. We do not take the lead in deploying Ushahidi platforms. In fact, we often learn about new deployments second-hand via Twitter. We are a non-profit tech company and our goal is to continue developing innovative crowdsourcing platforms that cater to the growing needs of our current and prospective partners. We provide technical and strategic support when asked but otherwise you’ll find us in the backseat, which is honestly where we prefer to be. Our comparative advantage is not in deployment. So the credit for Ushahidi deployments really go the numerous organizations that continue to implement the platform in new and innovative ways.

Please see “Three Common Misconceptions about Ushahidi” for the entirety of the post.

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