Citizen Reporting in Lebanon

— Annahar’s new venture —

Annahar’s twitter feed has been heavily promoting a new service (myannahar.com) on which they hope citizens will report incidents that get updated live on a Lebanese map.

The website is a simple branding of the Ushahidi platform which we used back in 2009 for Sharek961 to monitor the Lebanese general elections (I was responsible for the visual design and front-end web development). I remember we had a decent success with it.

Will My Annahar succeed? The odds are not so good. These kinds of platforms have proven really good at monitoring specific kinds of incidents and events (like elections). Cheyef 7alak does very well with reporting traffic violations, salwa’s tool for tracking sexual harassment in Beirut is a hit and the ministry of health’s map of places that are smoke-free has great potential for user input.

But I am yet to see a general-purpose incident-tracking website that took off and got critical mass, and the bare-bone implementation of My Annahar doesn’t exactly scream commitment to the service. But one can never know. Here’s to hoping that Annahar’s strong brand can make this an actually useful service.