CrisisNET is an initiative developed by Ushahidi, a non-profit tech company that specialises in developing free and open source software for the collection, visualisation and interactive mapping of information. The primary purpose of CrisisNET is to provide an easy to use tool which can continuously collect and organise crisis data from a variety of sources, such as social media, sensors or even quasi-real-time data. The hope is that the quick and easy access to real-time crisis data will make it easier for organisations and developers to quickly build their own applications without the need to spend days locating, identifying and processing data, thereby enabling much quicker responses to crises such as Ebola or conflicts.
All of the components in the system are open source and users can contribute to data retrieval, data processing or API.