While many eyes were on the US election last week, many eyes were also on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, especially those working on Ushahidi.  A N2Y3 Mashup Challenge winner, Ushahidi means 'testimony' in Swahili, but as a web tool it enables citizens to use mobile phones, emails or web forms to report and map crisis information. The first deployment of the new Ushahidi Engine into a crisis zone took place only a couple of days ago as Ushahidi released the platform for the DRC.

Track the reports from the DRC

What's Ushahidi?

• Learn more about Ushahidi 
• Visit the Ushahidi blog
• Join the development team

How can I help?

We need to get the message to the people on the ground in the Eastern Congo that this tool is now available for them to report incidents in on. If you have contacts there, or can help spread the word through some other means, it would be a great help if you did so - even if it’s just point them to the website or telling them about the SMS number.

• Ushahidi DRC site: http://drc.ushahidi.com/ 
• Ushahidi DRC SMS number to report violence: +243992592111
• Ushahidi's announcement on their blog