Ushahidi, a N2Y3 Mashup Challenge winner, proves that sometimes unrest and urgency, not funding, can be enough to get a project off the ground.  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 hardest thing about N2Y3 is figuring out which of 21 innovative, creative, and passion-filled projects which will get my vote. (It's a good thing that they'll all receive a share of the $100,000 prize money.)

It's day two and this morning, three of the project teams provided details about their specific plans, their mashups, and their important work.

City of New Orleans Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

As data collection happens block by block in New Orleans after the floods, government is deciding to demolish houses -- and many times the residents are the last to know.

Here's the interview I conducted with Michael Schnuerle, head of the Your Mapper project.

The entire Squarepeg team is thrilled that you online voters decided to feature our work in the Netsquared conference this year. Thank you, thank you, thank you! After months of research, planning, and networking we are finally hitting the switch and moving forward full speed with this venture. We haven't launched a beta site yet, but almost every day now I hear about a friend, or a friend of a friend, or a friend of...etc... who is excited about our work. In the last few weeks, two more great people joined our small, creative team. Jonah and Polly will be helping us get the word out about Squarepeg, and help out the various groups of people who will use Squarepeg when the beta site is ready. 

“Based on the contest's voting guidelines, I voted for projects that would get the most bang for the buck out of combining mashed-up data, exposing it intelligently to the public, and giving communities the opportunity to leverage that information towards change. Many projects provided interesting information, but didn't put a lever into the individual's hand. Alternatively, other projects provided great depth of participation, but not in a way that would scale to multiple communities...”

Thought behind SocialHub: