Well, we’re not the first people to do this: we owe a lot of inspiration to our friends Gaurav Mishra of Gauravonomics and Selvam Vermurugan of eMoksha, and their Vote Report India project, as well as Twitter Vote Report.

On a technical side, we owe a debt of gratitude to a number of amazing open-source and non profit technologies: the entire Ushahidi team – Erik Hersman, David Kobia, and Juliana Rotich – plus Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla of SwiftRiver – for building the platform we’re working with. SMS integration is courtesy of FrontlineSMS and Ken Banks.

We also have to thank our friends at Meedan – George Weyman, Ed Bice, Anas Tawileh and (again!) the versatile Chris Blow – for all their support, promotion, and outreach. Without them, a fully integrated Arabic and English site wouldn’t be possible.

And of course, Mustapha Hamoui at Zanizeal – our patient and talented designer. Without him, we’d just be another fancy map. Mustapha’s a member of the core team, but for all his work he deserves a special thanks.

The Beirut-based Social Media Exchange, and Jessica Dheere in particular – deserve big thanks for their amazing outreach to digitally-minded civic engagement groups throughout Lebanon, as well as their help in translation.

And finally, it couldn’t have been done without RootSpace, a social innovation hub in Beirut, that housed, fed, caffeinated and connected us from the first day of this project. The RootSpace projects – Sawt Ashabab in particular – gave us a model for our own work, and the camaraderie of dozens of people working to make positive change through media and open society kept us going through the late nights.

Oh, and thanks to all the countless delivery men who came with food at midnight, and café owners who tolerated our laptops. We love you guys.