Ushahidi and (RED) Partner for an Aids-free 2015

Wednesday was World AIDS Day, December 1st. In case you missed it, we unveiled a collaboration that had us working with (PRODUCT) RED and number of their partners to launch a campaign that allowed users of social media to participate in a global campaign to ways awareness of that fact that it's possible that by 2015 child will be born with the AIDS virus.

"With over 1000 children infected with HIV each day, over 90 per cent of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the goal of an AIDS Free Generation is one that we at (RED), along with the many organizations in the global health community, are committed to trying to make a reality". "Since launching in 2006, (RED) has generated more than $160 million for the Global Fund to help finance AIDS programs that provide ARV treatment and help fund treatment to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child".

The whole world has been devastated by HIV and AIDs over the past several decades, but in particular Africa is often seen as the continent most affected by it's decimating affects. It's really inspiring to realize how close we are to eradicating the virus from the planet (possibly in the span of one generation). So it was our great pleasure to have the opportunity to work with (PRODUCT) RED to assist them in their efforts and challenge us all to make 2015 our collective goal. The (RED) campaign is marks the most extensive use of Ushahidi's SwiftRiver platform to date. SwiftRiver is an open source tool for aggregating and making sense of real-time data, something we're working on to improve the ability of all organizations to crowd-source information from the public without becoming overwhelmed by the response. So using a new theme we're working on for Ushahidi, SwiftRiver's data aggregation/sorting tools and information from various social media portals here's what we came up with: We were able to pull real-time information from Facebook, Flickr, FourSquare, Eventful, Twitter, YouTube, Meetups.com and (RED) partners like Starbucks, GAP and Nike which allowed people to take actions online to show their for support their campaign: 'The AIDS Free Generation is Due in 2015'. How does it all work?

On Foursquare, users can check-in to unlock a World Aids Day Badge.

On Facebook, users activate an app that changes their profile pictures.

On Twitter users can post messages with hashtag #turnred.

On Flickr users can upload photos with the tag 'turnred'.

On YouTube watching this video marks your support as well.

Users real-world actions can also count by attending (RED) meetups

Each user action helps turn their country and timezone a deeper shade of red on the map above. The culmination of user actions around the world would effectively turn the entire planet red - not to represent total awareness, but rather the support this initiative has from people all around the world. We're happy to announce that this project will live on indefinitely throughout the year (hopefully into 2015), allowing users to continue showing their support far beyond Dec 1, 2010. So what was the result? A (RED) world!