Ushahidi is the name of both the organization (Ushahidi Inc) and the software. This sometimes leads to confusion. So lets elaborate on both. Ushahidi Inc. is a non-profit tech company. We’ve always been a non-profit tech company. We are not a humanitarian, human rights, media or development organization. Please see our “About” page. The word Ushahidi is Swahili for “witness” or “testimony.” This was the name of the mapping platform we launched to document human rights abuses during the 2007/2008 post election violence in Kenya. We chose to keep this name for future versions of the software and adopted the same name for the company when we incorporated. Ushahidi Inc.’s core mission is to continue developing the free and open source mapping platform so that it becomes a world class piece of software. To this end, we do not take the lead in deployments since this is not our comparative advantage—as recently demonstrated in Haiti. I launched the Ushahidi platform at The Fletcher School (where I am a PhD candidate) and where many graduate students (not Ushahidi employees) created a “live” map of the disaster. Yes, the Ushahidi tech team provided invaluable support around the clock during that time but it was a partnership led by The Fletcher team. So while we occasionally partner on select projects, we do not take the lead in said projects. Why partner at all? Because it's important for sustainability and allows us to gain better insights into the needs and challenges that end users face when they deploy the software. But what is this software all about in the first place? The Ushahidi software is a platform used to map information. To this end, the software is obviously not a methodology for information collection. The methodology that users choose to collect the information they map has nothing to do with the Ushahidi platform. These methodologies can include representative sampling, non-probability sampling such as crowdsourcing, etc. In other words, the information mapped on Ushahidi is not always collected using crowdsourcing. Nor is Ushahidi restricted to mapping crisis information. A wide range of events can be mapped using the platform. Non-events can also be mapped, such as football stadiums, etc. Here’s an analogy: Microsoft Word won’t tell me what methodology to use if I want to write a paper on the future of technology. That is up to me, the author, to decide. If I don’t have any training in research methods and design, then I need to get up to speed myself. MS Word obviously won’t provide me with insights on research methods. MS Word is just the platform. Coming back to the Ushahidi platform, if an organization does not have adequate expertise, staff, capacity, time and resources to deploy Ushahidi, that is obviously not the fault of the software. In many ways, the use of Ushahidi platform will only be as good as the organization or persons using the tool.