Ushahidi Being Used To Assist Kenya Carpools

Ushahidi, a Kenyan non-profit organisation specialising in free and open source software, has aided the Kenyan carpool Twitter surge by creating a crowdmap to capture, categorise, geo locate and visualise as many tweets as possible.

The strike by the matatu (taxi) operators in Kenya left many of the country’s people stranded without transport and brought the country’s public transport system to a standstill. As a result many people took to Twitter under the hashtag #CarPoolKE to encourage carpooling in order to alleviate the transport problem.

The Ushahidi team’s software has helped to create an archive of what happened online in response to the strike and debilitating state of mobility in Kenya. According to Angela Oduor, a developer at Ushahidi, the aims of creating this crowdmap were to reduce the noise to signal on the Twitter hashtag so the information could be visualised and organised easily. She added: “Kenyans on Twitter embraced the idea and are using the hashtag to offer and request for rides. Civic compassion at work!”...