Since that last announcement two years ago, Ushahidi has grown as a team, a community and an organization. We’ve seen the deploying community come up with amazing new uses of the software, multiple translations and this simple idea of changing the way information flows has now become global, with over 20,000 deployments in 132 countries.

We’re now moving into the next phase of Ushahidi, where we’re exploring ways to diversify funding away from our historically private foundation grant funding, by increasing earned income revenue. This includes direct customer revenue through Crowdmap, B2B revenue through SwiftRiver SaaS offerings and continuing our value added services work on custom deployments of the Ushahidi core platform.

With this focus in mind, we’ve entered into a new agreement with Omidyar Network for the coming three years for $1.9m.

Where this funding goes

The foundation of the platform’s overall ecosystem includes:

* Ushahidi Core is the main Ushahidi platform, as well as the mobile apps that support it.
* Crowdmap is the Ushahidi platform running in the cloud.
* SwiftRiver is the initiative of web services that make up Ushahidi’s real-time data handling and verification process

While Ushahidi has had a good deal of success in many areas, we still believe we are only half way up the mountain

Our goals for Ushahidi are simple; to disrupt the way information flows in the world by providing the best tools for democratizing information with the least barriers to entry. Ushahidi’s primary focus is to maintain the core work we do within our open source software, making sure it is always available for free to end-users. This means that we will double down on cloud-based services, improve platform usability, integrate the three products and understand usage and user needs better.

We see the future of Ushahidi tied very closely to Crowdmap as the front-end for millions of users. Then, taking our expertise in crowdsourcing and live-mapping, and mixing that with the tools and partnerships that we’ve put together over the years to create the most powerful and relevant platform for public consumption of real-time, dynamic data in the world.

On the platform side this requires three things; more attention to Crowdmap, a redesign of the user experience and tight integration with the SwiftRiver web services so it can scale.

Organizationally this means tightening the focus of what we do, putting in place a business plan that brings in significant revenue, and increased outreach and broadening of the user-base.

We believe that technology scales and people don’t. some additional team growth will be required, and most of these changes will come from a need to support a growing user base on our hosted systems, where the need for more specialized roles and team members will have the greatest impact.

Most of all, continued support by Omidyar Network means that everyone benefits, as Ushahidi’s platforms allow all of our voices to revolutionize the world.

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

Uchaguzi TZ is a joint project of Ushahidi and Sodnet from Kenya, as well as TACCEO, which is comprised of a number of local Tanzanian organizations and led by the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) from Tanzania.

How You Can Get Involved

We are relying on volunteers from Tanzania, Kenya, and globally to help us map the incoming reports, and because of the large volume of messages we expect to receive, we are currently in need of volunteers – in Tanzania, Kenya, and remotely – with basic tech knowledge or with previous with Ushahidi to help us map and respond to reports. If you are interested and able to volunteer with us on election day, October 31st, sign up using this Google Spreadsheet!

While we’ve had a wonderful media team working to spread the word about Uchaguzi TZ in Tanzania, we can also use your help in letting your friends and family know to text 15540 with any information about the Tanzanian elections.

• We’ll be updating our Situation Room with reports and updates during the deployment.
• More information in our last blog post on the Uchaguzi deployment.

Here’s our press release on Uchaguzi in Kenya.

News Release:

Contact name: Erik Hersman
Phone: 0729 157 257
Contact email: info@ushahidi.com

TEXT #3018 via PERSONAL CELL PHONES to REPORT FRAUD, VIOLENCE, OR PEACE DURING KENYA’s CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM VOTE

NAIROBI, Kenya (August 3, 2010) —The crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi announces a short code to monitor Kenya’s constitutional referendum on August 4, 2010. This will be the second attempt to give Kenya a new constitution. The first was in 2005, and the motion was defeated. It has been noted that the failure to adopt a constitution was one of the causes of the post election violence in 2008 that killed thousands, displaced 300,000 and affected all Kenyans. The first instance of the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi was created in the midst of the 2008 post election violence as a tool to map violence and react to the crisis.

The Ushahidi platform is able to accept SMS text messages from the “crowd” or any person with a cell phone or computer to record events happening at any location instantly. People are also able to call in reports by voice or via email and Twitter. However, the SMS feature remains one of the most powerful communication tools for developing countries. In Haiti, it was reported that the first thing people would do when they regained power or found a battery was to charge their cell phones.

This election is emotional for many Kenyans as the “Yes” and “No” camps have been parading their colors of green and red respectively at rallies, demonstrations for the last few months.

Since the first deployment of Ushahidi in Kenya, the platform has been used as a crisis map after the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, as an election monitoring service in places like India, Burundi, Mexico and Afghanistan, and by major news services such as Al Jazeera and the Washington Post.

Uchaguzi (“decision” in Kiswahili) is a customized version of the Ushahidi platform to monitor incidences of electoral offences, violence and even peace activities during the August 4th Constitutional Referendum vote. The Constitution & Reform Education Consortium (CRECO) is providing 500 monitors located at various polling stations around the country as well as administrative support. The Social Development Network (SODNET) is offering Uchaguzi its total partnership and the shortcode #3018 that is being used for SMS messages countrywide. With the support of Uraia, HIVOS and Twaweza; Uchaguzi is the most collaborative deployment of the Ushahidi platform to date.

The short code for Uchaguzi has been advertised on the cover of the Kenyan Daily Nation Newspaper, on monitors in grocery stores, on TV and radio. In addition to these media outlets, 20,000 text messages were sent to cell phones around the country alerting the users to their ability to SMS voting concerns to Uchaguzi.

The hope is that the Kenyan referendum vote will be peaceful, but if there is any violence the 600+ Uchaguzi volunteers will be ready to map concerns and fears sourced in the most democratic way possible for this 21st century: personal cell phones.

About Ushahidi
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone. This initial deployment of Ushahidi had 45,000 users in Kenya, and was the catalyst for us realizing there was a need for a platform based on it, which could be use by others around the world. For more information: http://ushahidi.com.

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Random Hacks of Kindness Nairobi Kenya RHoK

Welcome to the iHub. This place was created for hackers to come together and make cool stuff. As you can tell, it’s brand new with construction still under way. However, we’ve had a fair number of events happen here.

I can say that I’ve never been so proud as to hold an event here as I am of this one. You represent the spirit of everything that the iHub and Ushahidi stand for.

Jessica Colaco and Linda Kamau lead the Ushahidi and iHub teams for this event. They, along with David, Joshua, Lillian and Angie put this together and will be available to you over the weekend for any questions.

Thank you for coming.

Pothole theory

Think of this when you build: you care about the pothole on your street, not the one 3 streets over. What fits your needs? What makes sense? What would you and your friends use?

That’s what we did right here in Kenya 2 years ago with Ushahidi. Ushahidi, as we all know means “testimony” in Swahili. It’s a simple web-based platform that allows anyone with a phone, email or the web to send in messages about what’s going on around them in a time. We call this crowdsourcing crisis information.

Here’s a video of how it worked in Haiti recently.

Ushahidi Haiti from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

There’s a problem definition for Random Hacks about human sensing. If everything else looks too simple, take a look at it, and then at SwiftRiver, built to solve some of these same issues.

What is RHoK?

Some of you don’t know quite what to expect today, tonight and tomorrow. It kind of sounds cool, but really, what is this whole thing about?

Let me tell you.

It’s not just you. We’re just the Nairobi pod of this global event that brings together almost 1000 programmers, designers and geeks from 6 nations: Australia, England, Indonesia, Brasil, America and of course Kenya.

It’s not just you. You’ll be teaming up with others in this room to come up with simple solutions to complex problems. A lot can be done in 48 hours, imagine what you can do with a few other people just as dedicated as you are.

It’s not just you. The problems you’re solving are for the world. The best apps and hacks are those that effect millions of people. Because, at the end of the day, Random Hacks is about solving big global crisis and disaster problems, using the power of technology.

You might think that you’re just laying down a simple line of code. This isn’t the case.

You are building applications that saves lives, speed recovery and something that just might make the world a better place.

Problem Definitions:

• WeHaveWeNeed Application
• Information Sharing/Situational Awareness Application
• Haiti AMP
• Coordinated Response/Diaspora
• People-Finder
• Credibility of the Human Sensor
• Near Real-Time UAV Imagery Processing
• CERTS
• The money tracker

Limo Taboi (aka @Bankelele), is joining the Ushahidi team to help with the increasingly complicated area of finance.

As many of you know, he’s a long-time blogger and his popular Bankelele blog on banking and business in Kenya has been a perennial favorite for many years. Like many other Ushahidi members, Limo was a TED Africa fellow, and he has a strong background in banking and finance. His role will be to help us manage incoming funds, work on processes to make it easier to operate the organization and to help with the Kenya-side payroll management.

Linda Kamau (@LKamau) joined us last month, in time for the Ushahidi Annual Strategy Meeting. She’s a pure coder and has been involved with the extended dev community since the end of last year. Linda caught our eye due to her commitment and energy. She’s already proven to be a road warrior, having hit Burundi, the US and Tanzania in just the first month on the job…

Both Limo and Linda will be joining me in Nairobi, so there are now a few of us working out of the iHub and doing our best to keep this train on the tracks in East Africa. Personally, I’m thrilled to have two people with so much energy and experience to work side-by-side with.

• New CSS based design that is easier to skin!
• 5 minute installer
• Automatic version detection and upgrade
• Themes
• Site Statistics and Analytics
• Admin email notifications on emails and comments
• Add custom pages and tabs
• Auto-Geotagged news feeds
• Convert news feeds to reports
• Layer KML/KMZ files on the map
• Numerous bug fixes

KML/KMZ Data Overlays
You’ll note that you can now do multiple KML/KMZ file overlays onto a map with pre-existing Ushahidi data. The above map shows our demo Mogadishu site with a KML file of Somali pirate attacks.

Statistics
If you’re running an Ushahidi instance, just jump into the new “stats” tab and you’ll be able to see the number of unique visitors, report statistics, country breakdown and category impact.

Custom designs and theming
There’s a new default look/feel for Ushahidi. We redid it from the ground up so that it would be a lot easier for anyone who wanted to customize the look and feel of the site could do so just by working with a CSS file. There are also some basic color themes included in the backend so that those who aren’t CSS-savvy can still brighten it up.

An easier installer
One of the Achilles heels of any open source software application is the horrible experience installing it. We’ve taken our first step in making it even easier to do this on your own server. You have a choice of taking two paths when you begin, a basic one and a more detailed one. Whichever you choose, you can still fine-tune the details later once the site is up and going.

Find a bug? Submit it to bugs.ushahidi.com
Have a question? Ask it on the forums
Want to pitch in? Start on the wiki or download the code

Major contributors

Projects like Ushahidi wouldn’t be where they are without the help of programmers who volunteer their time, brains and energy to solving some very difficult challenges. A BIG thanks goes out to all the devs who made this happen. Major contributors included:

• Jason Mule (Kenya)
• Brian Muita (Kenya)
• Max Froumentein (Norway)
• Soyapi Mumba (Malawi)
• Emmanuel Kala (Kenya)
• Henry Addo (Ghana)
• Dale Zak (Canada)
• Pablo Destefanis

Ushahidi Meetup 09 C from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Who is the Omidyar Network and why do they care about Ushahidi

Omidyar has funded Digg, the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, WITNESS and the Sunlight Foundation. Why should they fund us?

A good starting point is their boilerplate, which states:

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, the organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic and social change. To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $300 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including microfinance, property rights, government transparency, and social media. To learn more about Omidyar Network, please visit www.omidyar.com.

Where Ushahidi fits in is their Media, Markets and Transparency section, specifically in the way that the Ushahidi platform can be utilized around the world for greater government transparency. Ushahidi’s innovative use of technology to strengthen democracy by amplifying citizen voices and its ability to connect potentially millions of individuals to information that could transform their lives are what drew Omidyar Network’s interest.

Where is all this money going to go?

Taking on funding like this, for a small organization like ours, isn’t something you do lightly. We sat down earlier this year and worked out a strategic plan that highlighted the main areas that we thought the organization should be going.

These included:

1. Dedicated core development resources for the Ushahidi engine
We needed to move from just two core developers (David Kobia and Henry Addo) so we recently brought on Ken Kasina and Brian Herbert to help carry the load, especially as far working to address issues and feature requests that have been brought to our attention by Ushahidi implementers. Additionally, Caleb Bell has joined the team to work on the front-end, so that the programmers can remain dedicated to the back-end work. Covering everything from the core architecture to visualizations, mobile apps, API, security, translations and plugins these five individuals, led by David Kobia, will be working with the greater developer community to make it happen.

2. Strategic Partnerships and Community Building
A major challenge for Ushahidi in the past year, has been balancing the need to develop a robust core platform, while responding to the needs of the wider community that is looking to implement Ushahidi in various ways. A key focus for us in the coming year is helping nurture the network of Ushahidi implementers who can help us ensure that the platform is having an impact, who can help us make sure that our feet remain firmly on the ground as we scale, and who can share their knowledge and experiences with us. In addition, the Ushahidi platform has seen a surge in demand from international organizations in the media, humanitarian and human rights space this past year looking to understand better how Ushahidi can work for them. Patrick Meier has joined to the team to serve as a point of contact for international organizations looking to implement Ushahidi, to help provide expertise internally on how to respond to the needs of humanitarian organizations, and along with other members of the Ushahidi community help play the role of a “network weaver”, building relationships especially with the academic community.

3. A Kenya Focus
Establishing a physical hub in Kenya is important to Ushahidi for several reasons. First, while we will continue to remain an international organization with staff based around the world, we feel it is important to establish a physical presence in Kenya, the country where the idea of Ushahidi was born. Second, with the upcoming arrival of the undersea cable and the already buzzing tech scene in Kenya, we feel having a presence in Nairobi will expose us to a rich talent pool and give us a great testing ground for building an Ushahidi ecosystem. Erik Hersman will relocate to Nairobi to help manage the hub

The hub will serve as a physical space to host Ushahidi activities and volunteer developers in Nairobi, as well as a community space for the local tech community.

The hub will also service our in-depth testing and deployments in Kenya. Kenya is currently the only country in the world where we will have over a dozen installations of Ushahidi running by the end of 2009. This offers a unique opportunity to track what happens when you have an “ecosystem” of Ushahidi installations in a particular geographic location e.g. Does the potential for early warning crisis increase? Do patterns emerge when the information collected by the various Ushahidi installations is merged?

4. The Swift River initiative
Swift River is an Ushahidi initiative that serves to answer two important problems for us. First, verification of incoming information. Second, dealing with massive amounts of citizen-generated data in real-time. Since we announced it earlier this year, we’ve been unable to commit adequate resources to it. We’ll be bringing on at least one full-time resource to work with the other people and organizations working on Swift.

5. Scaling the organization
This is the mundane, but ultimately critical capabilities that we need to handle the growth. While we’re doing a number of things within the organization itself, the most important item is establishing a Board of Directors for Ushahidi. You can read more about the board here.

The first post and story is on speed.

I’ll update this blog post as I get to stability and simplicity in the coming week.

Erik, Henry and Brian

Ushahidi Meetup Wednesday, Aug 12

We’re having an Ushahidi meetup in Accra at around 6pm tomorrow (Wed, Aug 12th) at Adabraka. Henry is in charge of it, but feel free to call me if you have any questions. My number in Ghana is 026 516 9100.