Ushahidi Wins Global Adaptation Index Prize

Nathaniel Manning
May 21, 2012

Ushahidi was honored to receive the 2012 Global Adaptation Index  (GAIN) Prize for our work developing and democratizing digital tools for crowdsourcing and visualization information. Our community has created fantastic maps such as energyshortage.org, thaifloods.com, and costofchicken.crowdmap.com, to map energy flows, flooding, and food price fluctuation. The problems created by climate change can surface in many ways, from rising tides to desertification, from food shortages to malaria outbreaks. We at Ushahidi are constantly amazed by the limitless creative use of the Ushahidi platform to address topics that are important to their communities. This prize comes at an exciting time for Ushahidi. We are pleased to announce that we will use this prize to help develop version 3.0 of the Ushahidi platform. Building upon the work done at the Water Hack, version 3.0 will be able to integrate sensor data as a channel into Ushahidi. This will allow you to compare water level sensors with crowdsourced testimonies during a flood for instance. We hope that this new capability will expand the creative potential of our deployers. Being able to integrate and compare structured sensor data with crowdsourced testimonies will allow researchers of climate change to compare quantitative data with qualitative testimonies.  Integrating sensor data will also help with crisis and first response; an alert system could be built to send an SMS each time a water level sensor reached a certain height. This could be a useful tool for adaptation response. Thank you GAIN for this honor, we at Ushahidi are passionate about combating climate change and are grateful to be doing our part.