Gentlemen, Ladies of Ushaidi. As a fellow technologist and enthusiast on tech and code developments, I'd like to share this with you. I've been reading various news stories on Libya ever since the issues started there. Whilst the crowd-sourcing platform may even helped saved lives in various natural disasters, after reading an article from IRIN today, I hope that you can understand that social networks should not be integrated into the platform. SMS based system helped to ensure that Ushaidi remained an accurate crises management tool in many ways. As far as I've been reading the news etc, Libya internet access is still restricted and so I was a bit shocked by this paragraph in the IRIN article : The idea was to map out social and traditional media reports from within Libya. That led to the creation of LibyaCrisisMap.net. "Given that the UN had virtually no access to the country, we now had situational awareness," Verity said. "And, within 48 hours, we had 100-plus response activities collected and compiled - the same amount of data [that] took about four weeks in the Philippines, two weeks in Haiti, and two weeks in Pakistan to be made available." http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92686 -The first thing that came to mind was the claim within 48 hours there was 100+ responses. I'm assuming this input of data was based on social networks like twitter etc. -Youtube stopped working in Libya around the 24th of Jan 2010 -Facebook and the rest were being filtered. Now, this video on youtube has been there with so many various headings and was created sometime in 1st Week of March. Obviously the video has its own agendas etc however please ignore the header and comments, and focus on the social media aspect. Until today there are tweets from libya even from places that are in the war zones which don't have internet access, yet you read people are tweeting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB6WF3B6DQ8 Whatever the system of social networks, I think Ushaidi Team must prevent any social networks as a source of input data. The SMS based system is the only way to validate the data inputs. My amateur view, critisms and opinions welcome. Rgds.