Emmanuel Kala (@ByteBandit) joins the Ushahidi team today! He’s been an important part of the Ushahidi volunteer dev community for a long time, and he’s a well respected coder in his own right here in Nairobi. He’s worked on some of the offline mapping work we’ve been working on, especially with our friends over at FrontlineSMS. He is the rare individual who has delved deeply into both platform’s code.

Emmanuel’s role is going to be focused on Ushahidi core architecture work, but with some time split on helping with major deployments in East Africa (much like Linda Kamau). It’s a challenging role, mixing the ability to sit behind your computer custom coding plugins for real-world deployments with the need to understand and build what works into the core platform as well.

In typical Ushahidi fashion, he’s traveling his first week on the job, giving some training sessions to groups in Uganda on how to use the platform. This is normal… poor Henry was sent to France to give a talk and Linda was sent to Burundi in their first couple week on the job.

Please join us in welcoming Emmanuel to the team!