“We’re moving beyond the idea that information is completely true or completely false,” said Patrick Meier, a student at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Medford, outside Boston. He was referring to Ushahidi, the “everyone-as-informant mapping” that is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the world of humanitarians and soldiers. It was written up in a short article on page three of the World in Review Section of The New York Times on Sunday, May 14.
“Ushahidi” is Swahili for Bearing Witness. After the disputed election in Kenya in 2007, a prominent Kenyan lawyer posted an Internet mapping tool that allowed people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Technology whizzes saw the post and built the Uhsahidi web platform over a long weekend.
The site collected user-generated cell phone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths and plotted them on a map. The site played a major role in the Haitian earthquake. From a situation room in the Fletcher School, volunteers instant-messaged with the United States Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search.
During the recent snowfall, the Washington Post partnered with Ushahidi to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers.
“The capital,” says The New York Times, “of the sole superpower is deluged with snow and to whom does the local newspaper turn to help dig it out? Kenya.”
With every new application, Ushahidi is quietly transforming the notion of bearing witness in tragedy.
The new paradigm is many-to-many. Victims supply on-the-ground data. A self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief. Journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.
Surely this is mob rule at its best.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Mob rule at its best is surely the right summary.
I’d say it’s the full flowering of democracy, an indication of the growing capacity of institutions and ordinary people to respond spontaneously, non-bureaucratically and pragmatically in self-reliant non-dependent ways to difficult and complex situations without intervention or direction from the elites.