Can Ushahidi be used for business?

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Ushahidi platform is probably Kenya’s biggest export since 2008; I can not think of any other product that has attracted interest from such a cross section of media like Ushahidi has. If the the ministry of tourism was paying for adverts, they would have paid lots of money for the airtime received.

For many people, Ushahidi is mainly a humanitarian tool but that notion is slowly changing. Ushahidi can also be used to generate income, provided of course you do not sell it; its open source :)

What would be a better way to explore ways a developer can benefit from Ushahidi, than a talk with Mark Kaigwa at the October Community meeting. He is a guru is social business!

During the session, Mark identifies ways a developer can earn income by using Ushahidi. Here are some of the tips:

  1. Charging for API access
  2. Consultancy services- e.g when an organization doesn’t want to hire a new person, they can outsource the business to you. Charges will relate to implementation and training.
  3. Creating products on top of ushahidi platform
  4. A developer can develop something for the community and charge premium rate for the service or get a sponsor. Someone cave an example of mapping a popular product and getting a company to sponsor.

So, if you are wondering whether you can use Ushahidi, pop in at ihub.co.ke for the November session tomorrow (Tuesday Nov. 2nd) at 5.30 pm for further discussions and networking.

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  1. I can’t think of anything better for the community — it would be wonderful to have a bunch of “Ushahidi shops” that were contributing code back to core and to the plugin library.

  2. I was quite impressed when a Finnish friend showed me a quote from a best selling novel that had quoted Ushahidi from Kenya as one of the greatest innovations worldwide. The business potential for Ushahidi given it’s open source nature is immense – I only wish the original aim of service to community will not be eroded. That’s what makes it so special.

  3. Premium rate numbers in the UK are extremely bad. The Netherlands is catching up fast! We used to have only 0900-numbers, we now also have 084, 085 and 087 numbers, just like in the UK.

  4. Ushahidi as being elaborated is a Swahili word which means to testify something. For those practicing law, it can be used by them in acquiring clients. However, the owners are still working on it so as to come up with more platform of gathering crisis information in real time. So it won’t be much business oriented.