Since then it has been a crazy ride…from producing an incredible open source platform and working towards scale, to building and working with an incredibly talented team, to seeing multiple uses of Ushahidi around the world, to numerous awards and press mentions.

For me, what has always been the most important aspect of the work we do has remained simple, building a tool that makes it easy for individuals and groups to tell their stories, and making it easy for these stories to be mapped/visualized.

Ushahidi has grown to be that and much more, thanks especially to the wider community – which saw potential uses beyond crisis reporting and who largely shaped our growth and direction to date be it through translation efforts (Ushahidi now available in 10 languages!), or custom themes, or pushing for a hosted version (Crowdmap), or challenging us to address the shortcomings of the platform (through tools like SwiftRiver and our community resources page).

Beyond the growth of Ushahidi as a platform and an organization, I always tell people that I am most proud of the fact that the Ushahidi story has provided an inspiration to other techies in Kenya and Africa – an example of the kind of talent the continent holds, but also a reminder that we have just scratched the surface. And so after 3 years, I feel it is time for me to take on the next challenge. Those of you who know me well know I’ve got a 1001 ideas floating in my head that I need to get out☺

Where I am headed? I will be joining Google in the new year as the Policy Manager for Africa. The role will involve developing policy /strategies on a number of areas of relevance to Google and the Internet in Africa and will involve working with different parties including government leaders, policy makers, regulators, industry groups and so on. It is a huge opportunity to bring Google’s resources to bear as far as the growth and development of the internet in Africa (and hopefully a reminder of why I went to law school in the first place!). I’m very excited about the move and I hope I can continue to lean on your support and insight in my new role.

To my co-founders – the ride continues! To the most amazing team, I am watching this space! To our Board of Directors, thank you for your insight and guidance! To our partners, especially those who took a risk on us in the early days, most grateful! To the wonderful readers of Kenyan Pundit, whose stories and willingness to share in those dark days of 2007-8 – you were my inspiration, thank you! To the wonderful wider community of Ushahidi – volunteers, translators, crowdmappers, critics (yes I love you too!), journalists, people who supported us in the early days when people asked Usha-what?, THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Need to reach me….you all know I live on the internets right…find me @kenyanpundit or kenyanpundit-at-gmail

- O

Image from UN Photostream on Flickr

Just a quick update adding more context to the work Ushahidi is doing in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

Our general policy is to rarely get involved in launching a crisis related instance by ourselves due to capacity /expertise limitations, but we do have exceptions and this has been one of them – largely facilitated by the fact that that we have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

So far our work has been covered by various international media outlets including the Washington Post, the NYTimes Lede, AFP, BBC and NPR’s Marketplace. We have received over 400 reports so far (sadly none via mobile due to communication challenges) and almost 40,000 unique hits in three days, and continue to work hard to improve our outreach efforts and address some of the technical challenges that have come up.

Already we have learned a lot about working to respond quickly to a major crisis and about the areas that Ushahidi needs to improve on technically and otherwise.

For regular reports on what is going on you can track the Ushahidi Situation Room http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/ on your RSS feeds.

Our current challenges going forward are:
- Putting up a rudimentary version of Swift River to help curate the Twitter feeds: there’s lots of information in Twitter but no way to make sense of it. Jon (our new Swift project lead) has been working hard on that and we should have something ready by Monday.

- Getting more tech / dev volunteers on board to address bugs and feature requests: there are a couple of Crisis Camps / hackathons being held this weekend and we have shared our needs with them, there’s also a hackathon being held in Nairobi today by Erik & Ken and the team of volunteer developers based there.

- Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be done especially with the bigger humanitarian organizations who have so far not been very responsive or communicative (e.g ICRC has refused to allow external parties to crawl their people finder database and coordinate reports) and with the local organizations who have been hard to reach /identify.

- Get a local SMS shortcode /line going so that people can text in information: we are coordinating this with several groups on this under the umbrella of the US State Dept – hopefully this should happen by the end of the weekend.

- Begin to work on a handover plan: the Ushahidi team has been working on this around the clock, but this cannot be sustained for too long – it’s been intense for us even with volunteers helping, and there are a number of big ticket items on our plate internally that we cannot afford to ignore for too much longer,…so we have started having conversations about a strategy to hand the general oversight of the instance to someone else once things stabilise.

If you are interested in ways to help, here’s how you could be of assistance:

- continue to help us get the word out about the instance as a resource to your networks

- if you have any contacts with local or diaspora Haitian media or NGOs, please send them our way

- if you have contacts with the bigger humanitarian organizations, please encourage them to add us to their “information pool” and get in touch with us if they have information to share.

We are honored (and absolutely thrilled) to be recognized as one of the 2010 class of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers.

The selection process is quite rigorous with 26 companies being selected from more than 300 applications from around the world. Other members of the 2010 class include Twitter, ESolar, and Collabnet,.

To be selected as the Tech Pioneer, “a company must be involved in the development of a life-changing technology innovation and have the potential for long-term impact on business and society. In addition, it must demonstrate visionary leadership and show all the signs of a long-standing and sustainable market leader – and its technology must be proven. Previous Technology Pioneers include 23andme (2008), Amyris Biotechnologies (2006), Dr Reddy Laboratories (2001), Google (2001), Gridpoint (2008), Kaspersky Lab (2001), Mozilla Corporation (2007), Nanosolar (2007), Recyclebank (2009) and Silver Spring Networks (2008).”

I feel that above all things, this award speaks to Ushahidi’s potential – something that keeps members of the Ushahidi team and community working hard around the clock to fulfill – working to have an impact; working to demonstrate that a world-class platform can grow out of Africa; working to maintain our model of being open and responsive; and most importantly working to build something that has staying power.

So we will take a brief moment to revel in the news, but we are also very that the recognition we have received to this point is only part of journey – we now have to make sure that we do not disappoint and continue to focus on the very important (dareIsay monumental tasks ahead).

The most recent edition of Participatory Learning and Action journal has been posted online and all articles are available for free. The theme is – Change at hand: Web 2.0 for development.

Here’s a summary:

Web 2.0 tools and approaches are radically changing the ways we create, share, collaborate and publish digital information through the Internet. Participatory Web 2.0 for development – or Web2forDev for short – is a way of employing web services to intentionally improve information-sharing and online collaboration for development. Web 2.0 presents us with new opportunities for change – as well as challenges – that we need to better understand and grasp. This special issue shares learning and reflections from practice and considers the ways forward for using Web 2.0 for development.

The articles cover various tools from video-blogging to twitter and have been written specifically with practitioners in mind.

Ushahidi is featured as a tool for crowdsourcing crisis information.

Stop Stock-Outs is a campaign to ensure access to essential medicines by using Ushahidi and Frontline SMS to map the availability of essential medicines at public health facilities in several African countries. These are medicines used to treat common diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, HIV, TB, diabetes and hypertension. Ken Banks of Frontline SMS has a nice post up describing how the campaign works.

Researchers visit public health institutions countrywide and check on the availability of a list of 10 essential medicines. These are medicines that should be readily available in public health facilities. The researchers then report on the results through short messaging services (SMS) to a common site, and the data is reflected in a map a that shows areas where medication is out of stock. After a pilot phase, the reporting has now been opened up to patients who are visiting public health facilities.

One of the interesting things about the Stop Stock-Out campaign is the great offline community outreach they are doing with their campaign. They have also reach out to traditional media e.g. TV and radio stations to publicize their campaign. In contrast, most of the Ushahidi deployments to date have mainly relied on online and viral marketing efforts (Peaceheroes is another exception), which has its limitations when trying to get reports from people on the ground. Here’s a clip of a feature a local Kenya TV station (K24) did on the campaign and what it hopes to achieve.

We also recommend reading the blog of one of the Open Society Fellows (Michael Ballard), who helped get the technology portion of the campaign up and running.

Ushahidi is extremely excited to be one of the Knight News Challenge Winners for 2009!

We have received a grant in the amount of $70,000 to allow us to focus on testing and building partnerships in Kenya, where the idea of Ushahidi was born.

We at Ushahidi have undertaken to maintain a special commitment to Kenya, not just because of the origins of Ushahidi but also because we believe our long-term involvement in implementations and testing in Kenya will allow us to continue to improve the platform both technically and in terms of its on the ground impact.

In addition, we will be able to test what opportunities Ushahidi as a platform can unlock when there are multiple iterations of Ushahidi operating within a particular geographic area and when familiarity of Ushahidi within a specific community begins to grow over-time.

We have adopted, Ken Bank’s mantra’s of “If we build it, they will come” to grow Ushahidi, it is now time to move to the next level – we are building, they are coming, are they getting what they need from us?

By gutter via Flickr

When we started out with the rebuild of Ushahidi, we made a strategic decision to leave the implementation of the tool to the particular organization or individual who wanted to use it.   Implementation includes the marketing of the site, addressing issues of validation, building partnerships, and working to make sure that the feedback loop (as far as how the information is actually used) is closed.   

The approach is similar to lets say, WordPress or Blogger as a tool.   The only exception to this rule will remain Kenya, where will continue to be actively involved in installs there because that’s where the idea of Ushahidi was born and because we need to “get our hands dirty” somehow in order to continue to make Ushahidi a better tool.    There are several reasons why we took this decision.   First, we can’t be everywhere at all times in terms of resources.   Second, we can’t even begin to match the levels of local expertise that would be required to implement Ushahidi well.  Third, we did not anticipate the creative ways in which people would want to use Ushahidi and we wouldn’t want to mess with that.

Are there risks with this approach?  Yes, the most common one that gets thrown our way is how do you stop Ushahidi from being abused e.g. by a particular group during a civil war.   The truth of the matter is we cannot.   And there is nothing wrong with that (is there?).   This is a problem facing any medium of communication.   The same thing was said about – the printing press, radio, TV, mobile phones, blogs, twitter, [insert other media here]…should we ban radio because we there are radio call-in shows that we find inflammatory on the airwaves?   You cannot control what people end up doing with any particular medium of communication.  Will there be cases of abuse?   Probably, yes.  But just like with anyone other medium, the expectation is that the positive uses of Ushahidi will vastly outnumber the negative ones, and the outliers will quickly be apparent and ignored.

That being said, it is not possible (nor desireable) for us to take a completely hands-off approach to how Ushahidi is being used. When approached to assist with a particular implementation, we do offer advice on the best way to go about.  And we will showcase implementations of Ushahidi that we think are good models.

Some of our tenets:

1. Be open!  At the heart of Ushahidi is the idea of liberating information and avoiding the information silos and data-hugging disorders (copyright Juliana!) that tend to occur especially during crisis events.   This does not necessarily mean opening up all instances of Ushahidi to citizen reporting – perhaps it could be encouraging your field staff to share reports internally, or it could be sharing expert-filtered information with the general public, or getting relief agencies working in a long-term crisis situation to share information with each other.   Also be open to criticism and self-reflection.
2. Seek partnerships/build community This is important, particularly when using Ushahidi to generate citizen reports, both in terms of getting the word out and to help with filtering the reports and providing context.  You must remember that installation is just part 1, getting content is hard and time-consuming work.   Vote Report India is a great example of building partnerships and collaboration (even though the didn’t do as well in getting the word out to the general public…a whole other blog post, especially when it relates to one-time events like elections). Sharek 961, which is reporting on the just concluded election in Lebanon is another great example especially on the content partnerships side.
3. Be clear on your objectives and on the kind of information you are displaying.
4. Try and close the feedback loop.   Why should people send reports to you?  What happens next?
5. Find ways to get the word out beyond the internet.  Yes, bloggers and twitter helps generate interest, but that’s not enough – partner with radio, get on the local newspapers, make use of the mobile alerts, if you can afford it get a mobile short-code that’s easy to remember.

Also,  if concerns about a particular implementation are shared with us, we do raise them.   We are also actively working with experts and organizations in the field to better understand and address the shortcomings of the tool, and more importantly to encourage them to use the tool themselves and help us come up with creative ways to address some of the challenges (see e.g. ICT for Peace).

It was the first time that the core founding team that is myself, Erik, Juliana and David,  had met together in person – can you believe it?!

It is a bit ironic that it happened in Silicon Valley…I hope that portends well for our future.

There was lots of catching up, scheming, planning and reflection.   And it felt good.

Yep, we had been building an organization and a platform – virtually via skype, chat, email, twitter across States and continents for over a year without ever having a single sitdown to chart our path.

If I might say so myself, that’s a remarkable piece of Ushahidi trivia

I think it just goes to show what as it the heart of the Ushahidi community – a sense of partnership, trust, commitment, and some uber-selfstarters (hehehe).

We have resolved to do this more often.

In California Erik had the opportunity to give a short (four minutes, very hard to do!) TED talk on the roots of Ushahidi, where we are going, and how Swift River fits in.  You can catch the talk below.

Erik TED talk on Ushahidi

While the post-election violence was the genesis of the idea of Ushahidi, the TED community (specifically the TED Global Arusha community) in many ways helped mid-wife the idea into a reality by providing a sense of familiarity and more importantly trust among the initial core group of volunteers who worked on the idea.  Without this, Ushahidi would almost certainly not have been built in a few days by a virtual team…just goes to show you that there are some conferences that are more than just talk shops!

This is so important, because it will help us both in our efforts to continue to build the organization and in our fundraising efforts from foundations and from individuals.

In Kenyanese, we are now SI-RI-OUS.

The process for applying for 501c3 status is very arduous and tedious – we could not have done it without the support of Covington and Burling who helped us with the application on a pro bono basis.