Welcoming Brian Herbert to the Ushahidi team

Erik Hersman
Sep 11, 2009

I was in Ghana last month for Maker Faire Africa, and for some Ushahidi meetings. While there, I was able to spend time with the devs from Ghana who work on Ushahidi - Brian Herbert being one of them. He's a top-notch PHP programmer who has spent most of the year working in Accra on a fascinating application called eSoko. He's also pulled a stint in Kenya as part of the Peace Corps and worked at CBS Interactive. In the evenings, since 2008, he's been helping push the Ushahidi application forward. Brian Herbert in Ghana We've always had an inordinate amount of programming talent within the volunteers that are attracted to working on the Ushahidi platform. It's what's gotten us so far. When one of those developers really stands out, and we get the resources to bring them on, we try to bring them into the team to help us with some even more challenging problems that take dedicated time. Brian will be leading some really interesting projects within the team. For starters, he's in charge of our new analytics and statistics push, so look for some cool visualizations in the next couple months. I'm really excited about this, it's a big project and will involve us tapping into quite a few other minds in the community to best understand how to use our data in useful ways.