Ushahidi's Facebook Messenger bot
Founders:
At Ushahidi, our software is always built on the idea of “meeting people where they already are.” We build software for crowdsourcing, and while we have our own mobile app, we firmly believe that our mobile app or our website shouldn’t be the only way someone can submit a report to Ushahidi. The key is to reduce the barriers to get someone to report. As such, , or the means by which people can submit to Ushahidi. The datasources we currently have are SMS, Twitter, email, embeddable web forms, , we have been wanting to integrate Facebook as a datasource, but the privacy structures around personal pages made this difficult. Over this past few months, we crossed the chasm. For the Kenyan 2017 election we ran the Uchaguzi election monitoring program, and working in partnership with Facebook, we built a Facebook Messenger chatbot that integrated into Ushahidi. There are over 7 million Facebook users in Kenya, so this was a huge opportunity to engage a big part of the electorate.
Parent organization:
