Ushahidi to map conflict in Jos, Nigeria

I’ve been interested in Ushahidi for some time now but had never gotten around to installing it. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Ushahidi is a web-based, community-oriented tool for mapping events. It has been used for tracking civil unrest, events related to the recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and so on.

I finally did set up a test installation a few weeks ago, just in time for the latest outbreak of violence around Jos. You can see it at here. The killings this week were south of Jos. I still have not figured out how to connect email to the Ushahidi server, so it is not receiving alerts or sending them out. Also, there is no mobile phone connection so it’s not receiving text alerts. Anyone who wants to help set these up would be welcome.

I have also set up a news feed to gather from many sources news stories related to the conflict centered in Jos. I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to pull in the headlines from CNN, Reuters, al Jazeera, AllAfrica.com, and so on, then extracted the ones dealing with the Jos situation. You can view the stories or use the (RSS) news feed to put the headlines into your favorite news viewer such as Google Reader.