Ushahidi Tracker: Visualising reports using CrisisNET

CrisisNET started with the goal of building an open firehose for humanitarian and crisis data – giving journalists, data scientists, developers, and other makers fast, easy access to critical humanitarian, and crowdsourced information. We have made significant progress towards that goal since its launch in mid 2014. CrisisNET now collects thousands of structured and unstructured data feeds everyday and makes it available via an easy to use API. You can explore some of this data via the API explorer.

One such data feed comes from the Ushahidi Platform itself. CrisisNET aggregates all publicly available data from Ushahidi deployments from all over the world making it easy for anyone to analyze this massive stream of crowdsourced data via its API. In an effort to understand and highlight stories of how the ‘crowd’ is using the Ushahidi platform and what is being reported, we’ve been building an interactive dashboard, which we’re calling Ushahidi Tracker. We envision it to become a definitive place for discovering and analyzing active Ushahidi deployments from around the world. Today we would like to share an early version of Ushahidi Tracker, which you can find here.

With Ushahidi Tracker you can currently explore reports originating from various regions around the world via the zoomable map as well as inspect the top deployments and their reports from the interactive charts on the right. You can for example, select a time period by dragging over the first chart to see which deployments, regions and report categories were popular during that period.

As we develop the tracker, we want to be able to detect and surface critical events in regions around the world and hopefully create a zeitgeist of human condition. We want to enable this kind of detection right into CrisisNET so that it can be leveraged on any data stream and not just reports from Ushahidi.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback and ideas to help us shape this tool and CrisisNET. You can also Sign up for an account and API key to explore CrisisNET to build visualizations or leverage this data in any other way.