ReadWriteWeb

Over several days, I visited three incubators in Nairobi devoted to startups in the social space. Given the emphasis in Kenya on mobile - as many as 60% of Kenyans pack mobile phones but as few as 5% have Internet connectivity via laptop or desktop computers - the development also focused on mobile, though not exclusively.

If in the United States and other more conspicuously developed countries nerds are considered rather ridiculous - right up until they're worth $10 billion - they are possibly even less well regarded in Kenya, where both government officials and the representatives of large companies largely downplayed their importance in the country's, and Africa's, future.

Wikipedia pages about big news events are edited so fast and furious it's hard to keep track of why decisions were made, to make sure the editing is really optimized and to ensure that the most trustworthy sources get trusted and cited. A new experiment with crisis mapping organization Ushahidi is looking to change that. Ushahidi announced this morning that it has launched a new project called WikiSweeper, a new version of its open source hybrid of Tweetdeck and Google Reader called Sweeper that's built for Wikipedia editors.

Sweeper aggregates all kinds of multimedia streams into an analytics-rich, real-time curation interface. As Wikipedians use the tool, analytics will be gathered to help Wikipedia study how high-pressure editing is being performed and to help Ushahidi further build out Sweeper.

The situation in Egypt has colored much of our coverage today, so it's only fitting that we send you into the weekend with some relevant tutorials: an introduction to Ushahidi for developers, tips for optimizing CouchDB and how to create a Tor relay.

Let's say you've got a whole pile of free-form text content and you want to determine what geographic locations are discussed in it. And let's say you want to do that while you're rushing to respond to a catastrophic earthquake. What would you do?

Disaster response network Ushahidi has been using software called Yahoo Placemaker for this function, as many other developers do. But this week the organization announced that it is adopting an open source alternative called GeoDict. GeoDict, which was created by ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden, detects, standardizes and returns coordinates for text regarding 2.7 million locations around the world. As a part of the deal, Warden has officially joined Ushahidi parent organization SwiftRiver.

Most of the time we only get one view of a disaster like the floods ravaging Queensland, Australia. Media organizations convey the news but seeing people in harms way posting reports for a crowdsourced map is a new form of reporting that gives immediacy, a sense of connection and a fast way to assess the magnitude of a disaster.

Over the past several weeks, the Australia Broadcast Corporation (ABC) has been doing something a bit different by using Ushahidi to create a data visualization of the Queensland floods that have left the region covered in water. The crowdsourced map is powered by people in the region and professional journalists covering the disaster. It's an encompassing view of the disaster, evoking a sense of real-time drama and a full context about the flooding's impacts.

"Location" was one of the buzzwords of 2010, but arguably some of the most interesting developments weren't how people checked in via Foursquare and the like. Rather, they were the ways in which people used mobile phones and mapping to report other things. The most notable example of this is crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi, which enables people to contribute reports during crisis situations either via SMS or the Internet. This real-time data is used for mapping and visualizations in the service of humanitarian response efforts. And to that end, Ushahidi has been described as "check-ins with a purpose."

According to Ushahidi, "check-in" - the sort of action more readily associated with location-based networking apps - via its platform has really been "only a metaphor." But that's changing now that Ushahidi is launching a new tool, Crowdmap:CI, that will make noting your location (and making location notes) easier.

Has "snowmageddon" 2010 got you down? Did that snowplow make a wall of snow, ice and grime as tall as your SUV and you don't have a shovel? Or are you just sick of sitting around the house?

Ushahidi, the crowdmapping tool originally developed to track elections in Kenya, has created two websites for both New York City and Boston to help with the clean-up, dig out stuck vehicles, and assist with impromptu snowball fights.

Even blogging, often done on supported platforms and with reasonably intuitive interfaces, can throw up apoplexy-inducing technical obstacles on occasion. If that's the case with a blog, how much more so with something like the Ushahidi platform? Ushahidi deployed its crisis-mapping platform in the violent aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan elections. Now it's introducing a version it says is much less technically demanding: Crowdmap.

"All it takes to get started is filling out a simple form with your password, a valid subdomain, name and tagline for your deployment and you're good to go."

In early December a Supernova session entitled, How Startup Companies Can Change the World had presenters brainstorm ways to connect the technology industry with policy makers. Coupled with many of the discussions already taking place in the Gov. 2.0 movement, the session looked at how technologists can contribute to projects they might not normally be associated with. This morning we received news on how one initiative is taking this collaboration further by applying the labor-on-demand service model so common to startups and putting it to use for disaster relief.

Relief agencies, companies and volunteers came together and built a global network of systems and people to coordinate emergency aid operations for the Haiti earthquake victims.

This piecing together of a jigsaw of different organizations and technologies with one common goal serves as a testament to what is possible using cloud computing and may serve as a template for disaster relief operations in the future.