Free Speech (and business) Made Easy
by Andrew on 10/01/08 at 12:17 pm
2 comments
Mike Stopforth wrote about Ushahidi.com. Read his description, or a summary from their site:
Ushahidi.com is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in these post-election times. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see. We are working with local Kenyan NGO’s to get information and to verify each incident.
What you can do is get the word out about Ushahidi so that it’s utilized to it’s full potential. This especially extends to talking to the people that you know who have seen things in Kenya and getting them to the site as well. You can also help by using the contact form to volunteer to help with the tracking and verifying of each incident.
From a free-speech point of view this is encouraging because it shows how much more difficult it is for atrocities to be swept under the carpet. Cellphone cameras and free hosting platforms have turned everyone into a Derek Watts and Debra Patta.
From a small business perspective this story shows how easy, cheap and accessible it is to launch something and spread it around the world. Ushahidi was developed in a week on top of Google Maps, and is now being marketed around the world via bloggers. Total cost: a few dollars a month.
OK, your "product" probably doesn’t have the emotional pull of a humanitarian crises, and so getting hundreds of a bloggers to talk about you will prove a bit more difficult, but the principle holds – starting and promoting a business is easier now than it’s ever been. The tools are cheap, the market is the whole world, and you’re more nimble and adaptable than a large company.
So why not make 2008 the year you start your own company?
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
hash
Jan 10th, 2008
Andrew, thanks for the post. Ushahidi was really developed in a 48 hour time period. Luckily, it’s a simple concept that could be pulled off easily without too many people trying to muscle their ideas into it.
There are definitely some lessons to be learned from it in the business world. The immediacy of it. That having a simple site that is live is more useful than a complicated site still being developed. etc…
Ushahidi Updates - SMS, Red Cross, Flickr, etc... | White African
Jan 10th, 2008
[...] Activists Find Ways to Help Kenya Ushahidi: What Social Media Can Be Ushahidi.com on KenyanPundit Free Speech (and business) Made Easy More ways to Help – Kenya’s Post Election [...]