I just realized that it’s been 2 days since we won the NetSquared challenge and I forgot to post that here at the Ushahidi blog. My apologies. You can, however, see my original post on my own personal blog on our surprise and happiness about this turn of events.

(Photo by Schipulites)

The response from the community has been overwhelming, and we’re so glad that it’s this same community that has helped get us here and which will take us to the next level. We’re already receiving a number of emails from people wanting to help build the next iteration of the Ushahidi Engine, so thank you, and we will be in touch.

Both Ory and myself (Erik) will be in Kenya next month. If you would like to meetup there, let one of us know and we’ll schedule some time to do that. We particularly want to meet with:

• NGOs who would like to use Ushahidi’s engine
• Mobile phone experts
• PHP developers

Thanks again for everyones support in getting us here. We don’t think of ourselves as “owning” Ushahidi, we see ourselves as the team that manages it for the greater Kenyan and African community.

A couple items from David and I being at NetSquared N2Y3 Conference. We’re in day 2 of the event, and we’ll find out today if we win some of the prize money for further development. We’ve both been interviewed a few times, and I’ll add those links as the go live.

We’re also proud to announce a brand NEW logo! David created this for us, and you can see why we used it by looking at this short logo visualization.

Short interview at NetSquared of me. I’ll add the one of David when it is posted. (video)

Ushahidi covered on the TED Blog

The Ushahidi engine is now being used to track reports of xenophobia in South Africa at a site called United for Africa. This is the first instance of the tool being used outside of Kenya, so we were happy to get the website up and running in just 36 hours. David did a crack job of it as usual, with the help of Tim Shier of Quirk in South Africa.

If you’re in South Africa, or have friends and family there, then please help get the word out. SMS, email, call your friends and family all over South Africa and get them to tell their friends so that more reports come in. The more that come in, the better the tool.

Read more about it at Quirk and Rafiq’s blog.

During the month of March we appealed for your help with Ushahidi’s entry into the N2Y3 Mashup challenge. It is with your support that we are delighted to announce Ushahidi’s participation in the last phase of the mapping challenge. We could not have made it without you and we sincerely Thank each and every one of you for your votes, your encouragement and most of all for your ideas.

David and Erik will be going to San Fransisco next weekend to participate in development sessions with other technical experts, product managers, and engineers. It will be a great opportunity for Ushahidi to get some funding towards further development of the Mashup.

We just wanted to thank you again for your support. A big part of Ushahidi is your participation, and with that, we are looking forward to making this project an even bigger success.

Asanteni Sana!!

The team behind Ushahidi (Ory, David, Juliana and myself) have all been quite busy over the last couple weeks. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been up to.

• Juliana, David and myself met about a week ago to discuss what an Ushahidi 2.0 might look like. We’re exploring creating a free, open source version, rebuilt from the ground up that anyone will be able to use around the world.
• Ushahidi is a finalist in the NetSquared Challenge, a competition amongst mashup applications to win some money for further development. David and I will be going to San Francisco in just over a week to represent Ushahidi. Thank you all for helping us get this far!
• I gave a talk yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference where I gave some of the history behind what we did, and explained why tools like Ushahidi are needed.
• Ory and I have been working to create Ushahidi as an organization so that we can start to receive funding and do more work on the project. We’re looking for more developer/programmer types who would like to pitch in on this too!

We’ll keep you posted on any other news, and there’s some big news coming…