Taking a page from playbooks here in the US, as well as similar projects in Gaza and Iraq, the Alive in Afghanistan project is crowdsourcing information in the Afghanistan elections:

Alive in Afghanistan is an independent, non-partisan project, formed in response to the huge success of Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Gaza and the result of the hard work and collaboration of many partners and individuals. Alive in Afghanistan empowers Afghan citizens to participate in society by reporting on their political process. Alive in Afghanistan is launching in time for the August 20th presidential elections so that people across Afghanistan can report fairly on the elections and related events through SMS, email, and the web.

We recognize that, given limitations of access to technology, it may be a limited subset of the privileged who will be able to use Alive in Afghanistan’s open system to report on the election. Despite the limitation we feel that, as long as recognition is given, the potential impact of the project is still such that we should go forward, doing our best to provide access to all.

We have partnered with Pajhwok Afghan News in order to combine citizen reporting with focused, concise reports from professional journalists throughout Afghanistan.

The site is full of useful information, largely submitted by citizen journalists, focusing on incidents surrounding the election. Incidents are coded by type (voter fraud, intimidation, etc…) and graphed and mapped.

For those of us following the elections closely, it’s a must-read site.