Crowdsourcing put to good use in Africa | Madeleine Bunting | Global development | guardian.co.uk

Crowdsourcing put to good use in Africa | Madeleine Bunting | Global development | guardian.co.uk: "Back in 2008, a group of bloggers based in Kenya came up with an idea in response to the wave of ethnic violence sweeping the country in the wake of elections: Ushahidi – meaning testimony in Swahili – aimed to use crowdsourcing to track a fast-moving crisis. Since then, the open source platform has been deployed 12,000 times across the globe, from earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand and Australia to the tsunami in Japan this year. Now it is preparing to launch next week its next big venture, Huduma, which will use crowdsourcing in Kenya to monitor the effectiveness of services such as health and education."