Highlighting 2010's Extraordinary Volunteers

Erik Hersman
Jan 2, 2011

Ushahidi creates open source platforms, which means that we rely heavily upon the community of practitioners, coders and fans in order to make things work. There have been a couple times this year where volunteers not only stepped up, but they took over and excelled in the management and success of the Ushahidi platform deployment. In particular, a special thank you goes to the students and volunteers at Tufts during the Haiti earthquake aftermath, and to the SIPA students at Columbia for their work after the earthquake in Chile. You stunned us all. Thank you. It would be difficult to thank everyone who has helped this year. Instead we wanted to highlight the people who have gone out of their way, sacrificing much of their time and resources so that everyone around the world could benefit. They made the Ushahidi community a better place, and we're grateful to them for it. We came up with 8 main areas that we wanted to celebrate, and then the team decided on the people who stood out the most. Core Web Platform: George Chamales Mobile Apps: Dale Zak Deployments: Anahi Ayala Iacucci Design: Chris Blow Community: Gregory Hill Translation: Elena Rapisardi SwiftRiver: Vladimir Ermakov iHub: Joshua Musau To the 8 listed here, thank you for your time, your effort and your consistent willingness to help make a better product and community. We're sending you something special as a thank you, an Ushahidi rubik's cube with our 4 products on it (Ushahidi, SwiftRiver, Crowdmap and the iHub): This post wouldn't be complete without mentioning Jessica Heinzelman, who interned with us in Nairobi, and Melissa Tully who spent most of a year working directly with the team and deploying organizations in Kenya. Finally, the iHub interns Angela Oduor, Lillian Nduati, Edwin Nduati and David Ngugi. To all volunteers, we want to thank you. You give us the inspiration to keep going and provide us the support needed when we get stumped or are overextended. We greatly appreciate your commitment to helping change the world.