Egypt Presidential Election 2012

[Guest post by Farid Boushra: a web developer with over seven years of professional experience in the design industry. As the the owner of New Generation Development Center, a civil society organization promoting human development company, he specializes in creating custom web sites for NGO's and Elections monitoring, focusing primarily on custom Ushahidi and WordPress design and development.]

As a result of the revolution, and for the first time in the history of Egypt, the Egyptian people stood in long queues to vote in the first presidential election in the country. After many sacrifices of young people for this nation, we’re finally able to witness and live such an event After years of suffering from security interventions and prosecutions for any project to observe the elections. Today, after regaining freedom our we’ve worked on our largest project monitoring elections: “Egypt Elections project” with the cooperation of a civil organization. New Generation for Development has provided the idea of managing an interactive site using the same technology previously used in Ushahed project in 2010. Mr. Farid Boushra- first to use this technology in Egypt- to run, translate, and localize the current version. More than 15 trainers and 75 coordinators were trained to work in the “operation room” supporting 2200 trained observers scattered all over Egypt. More than 17000 reports, Up to 25000 short messages were sent by the observers and shown on Ushahid’s interactive map. Although most reports received shown a minimum amount of serious violations, and most of them were indicating the success of the electoral process, our biggest joy was being able to monitor freely and to report the whole process with full transparency. Millions of users have logged into the site to check the outcome of the electoral process and to express their gratitude to the Ushahid technology. Which led the national TV – formerly dominated by the old regime- to have a personal interview with Mr. Farid Boushra to brief the viewers about the project and how it works. We’ll continue to use Ushahidi technology monitoring all sort of electoral processes whether it’s for localities, unions, or students. New Generation for Development team would like to give thanks to everyone who has supported and helped us during this distinctive project. Special thanks to the Ushahid team who deserve our acknowledgement and gratitude.