Ushahidi development.
Turning Ushahidi from a static dis[play to a dynamic display
Ushahidi is currently a static display of incident reports portrayed as dots (red)
I propose a tweak to provide three things:
1. Automate the way reports are handled in Ushahidi thus reducing on ground manpower required to run an implementation
2. Allow the dots to change colour indicating their progression to resolution
3. Any dots needing help would indicate this by flashing for assistance. This would occur when they can't automatically find a responder (via sms interaction ) to assist in getting to resolution, or the responder is not able to stick to their estimated timeline
This puts Ushahidi into a new realm of usefulness in becoming more suited to disaster management than just monitoring
Low cost implementation of disaster management system for any developing nation with small disaster office, low resource, low skill level of staff.
Currently Ushahidi is being deployed in Samoa for the purpose of disaster management so needs the additional development, and is being watched with interest by the other Pacific Island nations who also suffer in not having a management tool to assist in times of crisis.
Disaster Management Office monitors the Ushahidi deployment to see the results of a current disaster. As it unfolds requests for help come flooding into the platform.
There are limited staff available to handle the requests so the concept is to let the requests handle themselves.
With responders preregistered on the platform the requests are automatically passed onto those responders that they pertain to (registerd for).
Most requests will be passed through in this fashion and responders can advise the platform via sms what their response times will be.
THese show up on screen as changing colour from an unresolved status to a resolved status
However, some reports cannot be resolved. These ones begin to flash onscreen to indicate they need help.
The office pulls up the information to manually handle the request. They look for someone to respond to the request who may not be on the current responder lists or they divert a responder to the new request.
To become fully automatic the system needs to interact with an sms platform and register the responses. These are simplified as Y or N and time in minutes.
This development can be transferred through to the Ushahidi apps for richer information flow than sms can provide, but sms is a basic communication platform that allows transfer of information in most basic situations
Ushahidi
Frontline sms
Ushahidi is an ongoing development platform which is being continually improved
Comments
Dave, I will talk with the
Dave, I will talk with the Ushahidi Dev team and community about this one. I think it may to large of project for a RHOK hack weekend. Stay tuned for more notes.
Heather
I think this could do with1.
I think this could do with
1. a full specification
2. Some UX input.. There are so many ways this could be built. And so many ways it could go wrong :)
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