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 Today, Ushahidi can provide a model for crowd-sourcing projects elsewhere as the issue of how to process and verify massive amounts of information isn't just an African problem.
 Ushahidi is now being used in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to report on the war that has torn the country apart for the last 15 years.
 Developers plan to adapt the system for use by NGOs and others around the world to use in trouble spots. Its software is now being tested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other places.
A project combining two technologies developed for use elsewhere in the developing world, Frontline SMS and Ushahidi, is enabling people in remote areas of the country to send in reports of incidents or vote-tampering so that they can be plotted on an online map.
 The Ushahidi experiment was extraordinarily successful. Successful in the sense that, for the first time, civil violence was being tracked and monitored and the information shared in real time and in its raw form.
 As it happened, most people who were caught up in Kenya's election violence relied on their own observations, family networks and radio reports to determine which areas were safe and when it was time to leave. But even after the fact, Ushahidi provided valuable information about the patterns of the violence.
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 Ushahidi lets people flag up "crisis" information, such as outbreaks of violence to be avoided.
 Now, Ushahidi is moving to fine-tune its service, setting up mechanisms to help verify the accuracy of field reports.
Jen Ziemke, the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net), describes Ushahidi as "one of the best examples of next-generation crisis platforms."
 Map-sharing portals such as Google Earth and open-source platforms, like Ushahidi, created to help collect witness reports of violence after the disputed 2008 elections in Kenya, have been at the forefront of innovative efforts to visualise conflicts.
 "We're building a platform that makes it easier to gather information around a crisis so that governments, or whoever is trying to hide the crisis, can't do it anymore," says Erik Hersman, Ushahidi's operations director.
 "We took the feedback sent to us by people on the site, and via e-mail and phone calls, to fine tune it. This is the type of process we enjoy, because it forces us to do our best work," - Erik Hersman
 "ICT can transform lives for the better," Okolloh says. "With Ushahidi, we are building a remarkable open source software with a team that is primarily African through an organisation that is primarily virtual. ICT makes this possible." - Ory Okolloh
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