Erik Hersman: How texting helped Kenyans survive crisis

15,552 views ・ 2009-04-22

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
So I'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa.
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A year and a half ago,
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four of the five people who are full time members
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at Ushahidi,
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which means "testimony" in Swahili,
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were TED Fellows.
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A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence.
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And in that time we prototyped and built,
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in about three days, a system that would allow
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anybody with a mobile phone
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to send in information and reports on what was happening around them.
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We took what we knew about Africa,
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the default device,
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the mobile phone, as our common denominator,
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and went from there.
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We got reports like this.
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This is just a couple of them from January 17th, last year.
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01:02
And our system was rudimentary. It was very basic.
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It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people,
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and we put it on our map.
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But then we decided we needed to do something more.
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01:12
We needed to take what we had built
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and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world.
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01:17
And so there is a team of developers
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from all over Africa, who are part of this team now --
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from Ghana, from Malawi, from Kenya.
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There is even some from the U.S.
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We're building for smartphones, so that it can be used in the developed world,
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as well as the developing world.
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We are realizing that this is true.
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If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere.
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And so we build for it in Africa first
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and then we move to the edges.
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It's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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It's being used by NGOs all over East Africa,
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small NGOs doing their own little projects.
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Just this last month it was deployed by
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Al Jazeera in Gaza.
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But that's actually not what I'm here to talk about.
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I'm here to talk about the next big thing,
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because what we're finding out is that
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we have this capacity to report
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eyewitness accounts of what's going on in real time.
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We're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently,
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where it's so much easier to report now
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than it is to consume it.
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There is so much information; what do you do?
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This is the Twitter reports for over three days
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just covering Mumbai.
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How do you decide what is important?
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What is the veracity level of what you're looking at?
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So what we find is that there is this
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great deal of wasted crisis information
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because there is just too much information for us to
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actually do anything with right now.
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And what we're actually really concerned with
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is this first three hours.
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What we are looking at is the first three hours.
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How do we deal with that information that is coming in?
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You can't understand what is actually happening.
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On the ground and around the world
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people are still curious,
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and trying to figure out what is going on. But they don't know.
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So what we built of course, Ushahidi,
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is crowdsourcing this information.
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You see this with Twitter, too. You get this information overload.
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So you've got a lot of information. That's great.
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But now what?
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So we think that there is something interesting we can do here.
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And we have a small team who is working on this.
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We think that we can actually create
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a crowdsourced filter.
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Take the crowd and apply them to the information.
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And by rating it and by rating
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the different people who submit information,
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we can get refined results
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and weighted results.
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So that we have a better understanding
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of the probability of something being true or not.
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This is the kind of innovation that is,
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quite frankly -- it's interesting that it's coming from Africa.
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It's coming from places that you wouldn't expect.
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From young, smart developers.
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And it's a community around it that has decided to build this.
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So, thank you very much.
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And we are very happy to be part of the TED family.
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03:49
(Applause)
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