Instead of trying to put this all in my own words, I just ripped this off from the web designer's blog:
"So what’s Ushahidi.com about… (for those who don’t know Kiswahili, ushahidi is the Swahili word for witness). The website was mainly set up to document incidents of violence, looting etc. during the crisis (and soon to follow - information about ways to help on a micro-level). The website is still very much a work in progress and will be updated as we go along.
We believe that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also don’t think we have a true picture of what is really going on - reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are much worse than what we have heard in the media.
We also (in my idealist world) hope that we can begin to put names and faces to the people who have lost their lives in this mess.
What’s the point of all this you might ask? Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of “moving forward” - for us to truly move forward, the truth of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidi ( www.ushahidi.com) is our small way of contributing to that.
We will be relying primarily on input from guys on the ground (NGOs, individuals, journalists), so please circulate this widely to your networks and help us witness."
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