Ushahidi held a hangout earlier this week on ethics and data collection. This was a follow up to June’s hangout on ethics and research, and was convened by Chris Albon, Ushahidi’s new director of data projects.

That distinction between data and research is an important one. “Data” captures research outputs and relates to research processes. It also covers all of the information that advocacy can collect and generate without thinking of it as research, indeed without realizing it’s being done at all (think of the data built into a tweet, or associated with signatures to an online petition). This is especially relevant for Ushahidi and the kind of data crowdmapping generates.