Under the command of International Criminal Court-indicted war criminal Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army has run amok in remote Central Africa for more than 2 decades, their murderous attacks sometimes going unreported for months…or forever. The LRA Crisis Tracker melds archaic high-frequency radio technology with the latest mapping and social technology to tip the balance of power in favor of the good guys against the terrorists, torturers, rapists and child kidnappers of the LRA. The LRA Crisis Tracker - a combination of high frequency radios, information aggregating cloud computing software, original mapping technology, websites and social networking tools - empowers isolated Africans to share LRA information with specialists in the region and the globe at large, in near-real time, to let the guerillas know 'the world is watching'.

High-frequency radios in remote African villages send reports of LRA activity to a central reporting area, where they are transcribed and entered into a cloud computing enterprise Salesforce database. Then a newly created agency-proprietary Drupal program pulls information from the Salesforce database, populates it in an interactive map and attaches media to each incident. The map itself is a custom-created, first-of-its-kind interactive map of North Africa by compiling geographical data sourced from the human rights group Invisible Children, African communities, and other non-profits and NGOs, via TileMill, a digital cartography software. The map has precise details on roads, maps, rivers and village boundaries, with a clean design and custom interface allowing for a clear and effective visual display of incident data. The interactive map encourages sharing of the information it holds across a variety of social networks via the web and a mobile app.

The LRA Crisis Tracker has literally shifted the balance of power in Central Africa against the LRA.  It has become an indispensable resource for government and NGOs, endorsed as both 'innovative' and 'impressive' by Don Yamamoto, U.S. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, October 25. There has been a 600% increase in LRA reported activity, while reported attacks are down 35%. There has also been extensive worldwide media coverage of the LRA Crisis Tracker, raising awareness of the human rights group Invisible Children that primed the media for the breakout viral success of its 'Kony 2012' campaign.