Ushahidi, a non-profit technology company started in Africa, specializes in developing free and open-source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. It seeks to build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. It started as an ad hoc group trying to work out a way to gather more and better information about the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008. Since then, it has gone open source and is now being deployed all over the world.