Key Deployments and Lessons Learned - Part 1

Ushahidi
Mar 21, 2011

Recently we began conducting research into the use of our various products around the world, assessing impact and use, apparent successes, perceived and critical failures, as well as qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the data collected from each platform. What's perhaps, different about this particular document is that it also looks at non-crisis deployments like Vacant NYC. Because we rarely deploy Ushahidi, this data was volunteered by the owners of each deployment. We wanted to publish a series of findings from this study, including the material used to present it (the slides). The research reports in this series were written by Sarah George and Dragana Kaurin with a lot of help from the Ushahidi staff and various deploying individuals and organizations. You can find the raw datasets and collected research in full at http://community.ushahidi.com. We're sharing these findings with our community, researchers interested in our platform, journalists looking for such information and to anyone else who finds this useful. Note: Numbers are as accurate as possible but there are some obvious gaps: Downloads does not include some methods of downloading the software. For instance, from github or third-parties, and obviously not downloads that have been shared locally once downloaded. Unique views is data that was collected from some deployments but that was a small minority so the actual number there is likely many magnitudes higher and is not conclusive. For the purpose of this study, a report is any message received by the respective deployment, whether by Twitter, SMS, Email or Web feed, approved or not.

Key Deployment Report (2008 to 2011) by Sarah George 14 pages. Excerpt. Download the full report. From the first quarter of 2009 to the present, Ushahidi, SwiftRiver and Crowdmap products have been deployed in a variety of scenarios such as human & natural disasters, elections monitoring & observation, tracking incidents of crime and civil unrest, promoting peace initiatives, documenting the impact of the “Deepwater Horizon” oil-spill disaster, crowdsourcing citizen response to Russian wildfires, visualizing the urban landscape in Prague and New York City or mapping the disruptions caused by the London tubestrikes. To date Ushahidi has received over 7,761 requests to download the software from organizations and individuals around the world and over 10,521 mobile application downloads. This is a testament to the adoption of the platform worldwide. The platform is easily customized and localized for use in different contexts: it receives inputs from multiple sources (SMS, Email, Web, Twitter), provides online data visualization, and enables users to subscribe to alerts via SMS, Email or RSS. There are currently 4,980 externally hosted Ushahidi sites that have received more than 50 unique visitors, 6,462 cloud-hosted Crowdmap instances and 47 sites are hosted on Ushahidi servers. In all, externally hosted sites have received over 2,102,959 unique visitors and 190,439 reports. Since launching in August 2010, Crowdmap instances have tracked 539,622 uniques and 35,332 reports. As of December 2010 sites hosted by Ushahidi had received more than 705,734 unique visitors (600,000 attributed to the Haiti and Chile deployments) and 20,804 reports. There have been more than 11,000 Ushahidi deployments to date (see chart below).

The full document is embedded below.

Ushahidi Key Deployment Report (Q1 2011)

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Below you'll find the slide deck that accompanied this report.

Ushahidi Campaign Summary 2011

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