“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.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: disaster response, information gathering, Kenya, mapping disasters, Ushahidi
“We wanted justice and all we got was the rule of law” was the view of some in the Czech Republic who complained about the release from prison of Ludmila Brožová-Polednová. who helped to bring opposition figures to the gallows in the Stalinist show trial against Milada Horáková in 1950. Ludmila Brožová-Polednová had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in 2008 but will now released by presidential amnesty.
This was the comment of the daily paper Mladá fronta Dnes: “Many are complaining that the torturers from the time of totalitarianism are abusing democratic rights.… The crucial thing is that the prosecutor has been tried and convicted. At least in her case it has been shown that the Communist judiciary was guilty of crimes. Whether she leaves prison or not is unimportant. The main thing is that she had to go to jail, if only for a short time. Participation in judicial murder is a crime. An amnesty can’t change that.”
• • • • •
The hanging of Milada Horáková in 1950 was carried out in spite of petitions for her life by Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. She was an exceptionally brave fighter for human rights. As a member of the underground resistance against the Nazis she had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and spent the war in various German prisons. After the liberation in 1945 and returning to Prague, she was elected to parliament. After the Communist coup in 1948 she stayed, against the advice of her friends, and remained politically active. In 1949 she was arrested and eventually accused of being the leader of a plot to overthrow the Communist regime. She was subjected to brutal interrogation, tortured and convicted in a show trial in which Ludmila Brožová-Polednová was one of the judges.
In 2008, justice was done, nearly sixty years later, under the re-established rule of law. She was sentenced to six years imprisonment from which she will now be released after two years, as a result of a presidential pardon.
We who lived far away in time and space should not criticize those whose sense of morality is offended by this act of leniency. However, it may be fitting to remember Portia’s lines in the Merchant of Venice:
Mercy is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Czech Republic, judicial murder, Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, Milada Horáková, show trials, Stalin
