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.
我今天要告訴大家一個非洲的成功故事 在一年半前 有五個人,他們是全職的 “Ushahidi“ “Ushahidi“ 在斯瓦希里話中是「證詞」的意思 其中有四個人 是 TED 的會員 一年前肯亞發生了選舉後的暴力事件 那時候我們花了大約三天 建立了一個系統模式 這個模式能讓任何人用行動電話 把他們身邊所發生的事情報導出來 我們將我們對非洲的認知 透過這個原始裝置 -- 行動電話 -- 當作我們的共同點 用這個共同點來作為出發點 我們收集到的報告如下 這是去年一月十七日收到的其中幾則 我們的系統非常陽春,非常基本 它只是一堆我們從別人那裡收集到的資料 然後放在我們的地圖上
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.
不過,後來我們決定要做多一點 我們要把我們架構的系統 變成一個全世界都能應用的平台 因此我們有了一組開發人員 他們全來自非洲各地 從迦納、馬拉威、肯亞 也有一些是來自美國的 我們要讓它可以給智慧型手機使用 這樣它在已開發國家和開發中國家都能使用
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.
我們瞭解這是可行的 如果它能在非洲運作,那麼它在任何的地方也能運作 因此我們首先從非洲開始 然後擴展到周邊地區 現在它已擴展至剛果民主共和國 全東非的非政府機構都使用這個系統 小型的非政府機構把它用在一些小計畫上 就在上個月它已經 被加沙的半島電視台所使用 這其實不是我今天想談論的主題
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.
我今天要講的是接下來的大事 因為我們在這個過程中發現 我們有能力為我們親眼看到的事情 作出即時性的報導 我們最近在孟買所發生的事件中應證了這個能力 現在做新聞報導甚至要比 閱讀新聞報導容易得多了 現在有這麼多資訊。你如何應對呢? 這是 Twitter 在那三天內 有關孟買的報導 你怎樣決定那一則報導是重要的呢? 你所看到的報導有多真實呢? 我們發現 有太多多餘的資訊存在 因為我們現在所接受的資訊 已經超出我們所能消化的了 我們真正關心的是 最初三小時的事情 我們想看得是這最初三小時的事情 我們如何應付進來的資訊呢? 你根本不明白究竟發生什麼事 在事發現場,還有全世界的反應 人們仍富有好奇心 想嘗試尋找箇中的真相。但是他們不知道
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)
所以我們所建立的 Ushahidi 當然 是為了解決這個資訊泛濫的情況 你們也看到Twitter了,資訊完全泛濫 你獲得很多資訊。這非常好 然後呢? 因此我們覺得有些有趣的事情可以做 我們有一個小團隊正在做 我們相信我們可以建立 一個大眾資訊的過濾網 選一群人,然後讓他們接收資訊 然後給這些資訊評分 給那些提供資訊的人評分 我們就可以取得更準確的結果 和有利的結果 因此我們更可以瞭解 那些資訊有多少是真實的、多少是假的 這是一種創意 有趣的是這創意是來自非洲 它來自一個我們不曾預期的地方 是一些年青頂尖的開發人員 跟他們周圍人,決定要建立這個系統的 謝謝各位 我們很高興成為TED的一分子 (鼓掌)