Somalia is usually in the limelight for crises: civil war, famine, drought, Somalian pirates attacking international shipping... And when the spotlight turns off it's hard to maintain the international community's attention focused on the country.

This is the aim of Somalia Speaks, a project launched recently by a joint team of partners "to catalyze global media attention on Somalia by letting Somali voices take center stage", as Patrick Meier of Ushahidi, one of the founder organizations, explained - and all this via SMS services.

Somalia Speaks is the result of multiple efforts. It is hosted - and publicised - by Al Jazeera; the SMS messaging service is provided by Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization, while Ushahidi - whose role is well-known in crisis mapping - and Crowdflower - a crowdsourcing platform - translate, categorize and map the incoming responses.

Somali citizens in the country as well as from the Somalian diaspora - thanks to the involvement of the African Diaspora Institute - are asked via text message to answer the following question: "How has the Somalia Conflict affected your life?"

The responses, translated from Somali into English and categorized, are posted to the Somalia Speaks map on Al Jazeera for reaching a wide international audience.

Mobile technology is flourishing in many parts of Africa. Souktel's Jacob Korenblum - quoted by PBS's MediaShift - said that in a five-year period leading up to 2009, mobile phone penetration jumped 1,600% in the Somali region; Souktel has been delivering service in the Horn of Africa since 2008 and has a member SMS subscriber list of over 50,000 people.

As MediaShift underlined, Somalia Speaks is a pilot project. The responses help bring attention to unheard voices of the community and on a wider level the project also provides editorial insight as to where Al Jazeera, which has already received story tips and leads from Somalia Speaks participants, should focus in going forward with its citizen reporting efforts.

"We are also looking at how to streamline news gathering workflows to get news directly from the people," Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said, accordingly to MediaShift. "It's like taking citizen journalism to the next level."

Hyder also stressed the important role of the Somalian diaspora which is actively participating. The involvement of the diaspora and of the international audience reached through Al Jazeera reflects the desire to structure the project as a two-way conversation, as Ushahidi's Patrick Meier explained.

"I wanted this project to serve as a two-way conversation, however, not just a one-way information flow from Somalia to the world. Every report that gets mapped on an Ushahidi platform is linked to public discussion forum where readers can respond and share their views on said report."

In our networked world, the geography of knowledge is still uneven, an article on the Guardian titled on January 9.

Despite the fact that the Internet can potentially level out the barriers of knowledge and information, its geographical disposition remains uneven and firmly weighted towards the global north. A profound digital divide is still a reality as the "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" by the Oxford Internet Institute shows.

Meier quoted what Anand Giridharadas of the New York Times wrote last year about Ushahidi:
"They used to say that history is written by the victors. But today, before the victors win, if they win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message, a text message that will not vanish, a text message that will remain immortalized on a map for the world to bear witness. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: I was here, and this is what happened to me ?"

Technologies and their effective use can help to raise attention in less-covered places of the world and spread unheard voices. As Somalia Speaks shows, the positive partnership between mainstream media, crowdsourcing platforms and user-generated content could definitely lead the way.

Sources: the Ushahidi Blog, PBS's MediaShift, Guardian, Oxford Internet Institute, NYT