Things have settled to a bit of a simmer around here at the moment. There is a possibility violence may spark again mid next week, something I am not very excited about. Currently all the negotiations have fallen apart between the contentious parties and rallies and demonstrations have been called to take place on Wednesday next week by the opposition throughout the country. I'm not really looking forward to having to cower down in the house for another week or so if that happens.
Otherwise, Hash, the guy running WhiteAfrican and a number of other Kenyan bloggers have put together a site to try and monitor incidents of violence that mainstream media may not be reporting. Is a very interesting initiative.
And indeed it is. This is the type of Web 2.0 angle I was trying to emphasize as emerging out of the crisis, something that's a testament to citizen journalism as a concept, the Kenyan blogosphere as a group, and Web 2.0 for the ease of rapid application development.
Ushahidi is a simple mash-up of Google Maps' API that was launched as a viral effort to actually get the word out as to what riots or incidents may be happening where, and what peacekeeping efforts may or may not be underway. Ever since the election aftermath, there's been a fair amount of government suppression of information, as well as an official media blackout. As such, the Kenyan blogosphere has been the only source of information as to what's actually going on.
In Kenya, apparently mobile phone penetration is very high, as I've seen many references here and there of mobile voice and text messaging being another of the primary modes of communication, especially during a couple day period when the Kenyan government was allegedly jamming up Internet communications. Likewise, Ushahidi has the ability for incident reporting by way of SMS as well, being of use to folks who live online, but with the ability to be crowd-sourced to the SMS-only set.