Ushahidi Announces Changes to Board of Directors

Juliana Rotich
Aug 22, 2012

Ushahidi today announced that its board of directors has appointed three new members, effective September 19th. The new directors are Clay Shirky, David Kobia and Erik Hersman. The current board consists of seven extremely talented and experienced individuals spanning mobile phones, activism, citizen journalism, impact investment, Africa and conflict early warning systems.The board members include Dr. Sally Chin, Dorcas Muthoni, Stephen King, Beth Kanter, Ethan Zuckerman and Juliana Rotich. In addition, Ushahidi announces that the board will be chaired by Ethan Zuckerman, Director of Civic Media at MIT. The addition of these new directors will further diversify the outstanding talents and wide-ranging experience that our directors already bring to Ushahidi. Each is a widely respected and deeply experienced business leader, and together they will provide our board and management team with new insight and perspectives relating to Ushahidi's mission, business and the rapidly changing technology industry. David Kobia and Erik Hersman are part of the Co-Founding team, their presence on the board is one that will ensure that the board has access and direct input to the management team of Ushahidi. About Clay Shirky Pop!Tech 2008 - Clay Shirky Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University (NYU) as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client–server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. You can find him on Twitter at @cshirky. About David Kobia David Kobia David is a co-founder and technology lead at Ushahidi and brings more than 10 years of product development experience and a multidisciplinary background to his work, with a focus on social and emerging technologies. He works in a variety of roles, from designer and coder to strategist. After pursuing a BS in Computer Science at the University of Alabama, he has been a professional software developer and has worked with almost every web technology in use today. In 2010, he was a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award (35 top innovators under 35) and the Humanitarian of the Year award. You can find him on Twitter at @dkobia About Erik Hersman The White African Erik Hersman is a technologist and blogger who lives in Nairobi. He is Director of Operations and Strategy at Ushahidi. He is the founder of AfriGadget, a multi-author site that showcases stories of African inventions and ingenuity, and an African technology blogger at WhiteAfrican.com. As part of Ushahidi strategy he leads the iHub, Nairobi’s innovation hub for the technology community, bringing together entrepreneurs, hackers, designers and the investment community. Erik is a TED Senior Fellow, a PopTech Fellow and speaker and an organizer for Maker Faire Africa. You can find him on Twitter at @WhiteAfrican About Ushahidi Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Ushahidi started as an ad hoc group trying to figure out a way to gather more and better information about the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008. Since then, the organization has released several tools and mobile applications. One such tool is Crowdmap, which has been deployed over 20,000 times. It uses the crowd, maps and mobiles to gather and visualize information. Whether it's a tsunami in Japan, earthquake in New Zealand, or a political crisis in Libya, there is a new form of bottom-up information gathering that is changing the face of the world. In short, Ushahidi continues to show how to leverage technology to impact and create change globally.