So I'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa. A year and a half ago, four of the five people who are full time members at Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, were TED Fellows. A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence. And in that time we prototyped and built, in about three days, a system that would allow anybody with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them. We took what we knew about Africa, the default device, the mobile phone, as our common denominator, and went from there. We got reports like this. This is just a couple of them from January 17th, last year. And our system was rudimentary. It was very basic. It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people, and we put it on our map.
在这里,我要跟大家分享一个在非洲的成功故事。 一年半以前 在这里的5个人 是Ushahidi的专职委员 “Ushahidi”在斯瓦希利语里的意思是“证据” 其中4个人是TED的同道中人 一年前在肯尼亚的一次选举后发生了一起暴力事件 而在那个时候我们利用短短三天 建造了一个系统平台的雏形 这个系统平台允许任何人通过手机 发信息和报告那些发生在他们周围的事情 我们把我们所认识的非洲 默认装置 手机,作为我们的共同点 信息就是来源于那里 我们收到这样类似的报告 这只是在去年1月17日众多短信里的几条 那时候我们的系统平台发展还未成熟,非常基本的 我们从人民那里收集数据,这是一个混合模式 然后我们把它标在在地图上
But then we decided we needed to do something more. We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world. And so there is a team of developers from all over Africa, who are part of this team now -- from Ghana, from Malawi, from Kenya. There is even some from the U.S. We're building for smartphones, so that it can be used in the developed world, as well as the developing world.
但是那时我们意识到我们需要做更多东西 我们需要更好地利用这个已经建立 和创造好的平台,以便它能够在世界其他地方中应用 于是产生了一个开发人员的团队 现在,团队成员有来自非洲各地 来自加纳、马拉维和肯尼亚 甚至有一部分是来自美国的 我们正在开发智能手机,以便于它不仅能够在发达国家里使用 也能在发展中国家里使用
We are realizing that this is true. If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere. And so we build for it in Africa first and then we move to the edges. It's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's being used by NGOs all over East Africa, small NGOs doing their own little projects. Just this last month it was deployed by Al Jazeera in Gaza. But that's actually not what I'm here to talk about.
我们渐渐意识到这是正确的 如果它在非洲管用的话,那么它在任何地方都管用 于是我们先在非洲建立它 然后再向外发展 现在已经在刚果民主共和国做好系统的部署 东非很多的非政府组织也有使用 小型的非政府组织做他们自己的小项目 就在上个月,我们把这系统应用到 加沙的半岛电视台 但是实际上这不是我在这里要讲的东西
I'm here to talk about the next big thing, because what we're finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what's going on in real time. We're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently, where it's so much easier to report now than it is to consume it. There is so much information; what do you do? This is the Twitter reports for over three days just covering Mumbai. How do you decide what is important? What is the veracity level of what you're looking at? So what we find is that there is this great deal of wasted crisis information because there is just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now. And what we're actually really concerned with is this first three hours. What we are looking at is the first three hours. How do we deal with that information that is coming in? You can't understand what is actually happening. On the ground and around the world people are still curious, and trying to figure out what is going on. But they don't know.
我在这里要谈论另一件重要事情 因为我们发现 我们有能力 根据目击者所叙述的真实情况进行实时报道 就像最近发生在孟买的几起事件让我们意识到这点 现在在那里,报道消息比隐瞒消息 变得容易多了 有这么多的信息,你要怎么做呢? 这是三天以来Twitter的消息 仅仅关于孟买地区的消息 你如何决定哪一条消息才是重要的呢? 而你所看到的消息,它们的真实性又有多高呢? 我们发现 充斥着大量多余的危机信息 因为对于我们来说存在着太多的信息 需要马上处理 而实际上我们真正关注的 是头三个小时 我们在头三个小时所注意到的 我们如何处理那些流进的信息呢? 你不可能知道到底正在发生什么事情 无论是在现场还是世界各地的 人们都是很好奇的 并尝试去了解清楚事情的进展。然而他们并不知情。
So what we built of course, Ushahidi, is crowdsourcing this information. You see this with Twitter, too. You get this information overload. So you've got a lot of information. That's great. But now what? So we think that there is something interesting we can do here. And we have a small team who is working on this. We think that we can actually create a crowdsourced filter. Take the crowd and apply them to the information. And by rating it and by rating the different people who submit information, we can get refined results and weighted results. So that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not. This is the kind of innovation that is, quite frankly -- it's interesting that it's coming from Africa. It's coming from places that you wouldn't expect. From young, smart developers. And it's a community around it that has decided to build this. So, thank you very much. And we are very happy to be part of the TED family. (Applause)
那么当然在Ushahidi我们所建立的 正是要把这些信息人肉资源化 你在Twitter上看到的情况也是一样的。你得到超负荷的信息。 那么你得到了许多资信。那实在太好了。 但是现在接下来呢? 于是我们想到我们能够做一些有趣的事情 我们有一个小团队做这方面的工作 我们觉得我们实际上能够创造 一个人肉资源过滤器 吸纳这些群众以及把他们应用到信息上 然后通过把它分等级类别 把提交信息的人分不同等级类别 我们能够得到精确的结果 和衡量过的结果 以致我们有一个更好的了解 这些信息的真实程度 这种革新 十分直接——有趣的是这个革新来自非洲 来自一些你意想不到的地方 来自一群年轻有为的开发者 有一个围绕着它的共同团体决定要建立它 最后,非常感谢大家 我们很高兴成为TED大家庭的一份子 (鼓掌)