Close to 3 years ago in December/January 2007/08, Ushahidi was born. The child of innovation born out of crisis – the Kenyan general elections.

Close to three years later, the Kenyan nation is all set for another ballot box day, this time voting whether or not to pass a draft constitution that has been years in the making. Once again, the good people at Ushahidi are providing an outlet for citizen journalists surrounding this event.

Uchaguzi.co.ke has been set up by the Ushahidi team to monitor the events over this referrendum period. Much unlike the first deployment of Ushahidi in 2007/08, this time the team seems adequately prepared and the site itself is not ‘just a mashup’ as the first one more or less was – a rapid response to a crisis situation. Uchaguzi.co.ke (Uchaguzi = Election) is really well designed and has been set up a week before the anticipated polls. No doubt the many lessons learnt from various deployments of Ushahidi since 2007 – especially the Haiti experience - will be valuable to the team.

This time around there will also be another powerful tool to mine the thousands of tweets will probably echo through the twittersphere as many Kenyans have taken to twitter over the past few years – SwiftRiver.

We, at Afrinnovator applaud the efforts of the Ushahidi team but also hope this time around the Ushahidi instance will not show a similar situation to the first time it was used in Kenya.