Ushahidi, a non-profit, open-source technology company, has enhanced its Web-based visualization and interactive mapping software with “check-in” capabilities to help human rights workers and others document and make sense of fast-moving crises.

The new “check-in” feature is used by social sites like Foursquare to alert friends to your presence at a particular location. Incorporating it into Ushahidi allows groups like aid workers or election monitors to keep track of one another, note their progress in deploying resources, or enter notes that can be formalized later, without making that information public.

Enabling such tracking requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts. While Ushahidi reports can be news articles, photographs, or other material that are often data intensive, a check-in is a snapshot that says “I’m here” along with maybe a sentence of information.