Afghan Election Monitoring

Monitoring the 2009 Presidential Election in Afghanistan

FortiusOne collaborated with USAID, NGA, NDU, Naval Post Graduate School, UNDP, Google, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, Stamen, INSTEDD and Development Seed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan to map the 2009 Afghanistan presidential election and events surrounding it.

FortiusOne, in partnership with the Global Development Commons at USAID, worked to collect, map and share data directly from the ground during Afghanistan's 2009 Elections. In addition to the Global Development Commons at USAID, partners contributing to this effort included Google, Stamen, OpenStreetMap, Development Seed, and Alive in Afghanistan.  The project began from the work of SSF (Synergy Strike Force) volunteers.  The Synergy Strike Force (SSF) is a volunteer team that works to support humanitarian relief and stabilization efforts in post conflict environments such as those in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.  The SSF is a private volunteer organization comprised of individuals with various technical skills and access to a wide range of social networks.  The SSF data sharing initiative began as a hard drive set up on the tiki bar at the Taj in Jalalabad.  Anyone could upload their data and receive a beer in return. This collection of freely shared data has been mapped and is now available online to anyone with an internet connection. Since then, SSF’s Todd Huffman has returned to Afghanistan with a laptop full of tools to collect, map, and publish valuable data from the field.

The data collected from this effort is visualized here. http://news.geocommons.com/afghanistanelection09#