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.

Last month Ory announced a grant that Ushahidi received from the Knight Foundation. This grant was specifically aimed at Kenya, where the organization was born last year, and where we are most at home. It’s also where we choose to “eat our own dogfood”, applying the platform we built into the real world so that we’re users of the same tool that we create and can better improve it for other users. To do that we need more dedicated Ushahidi team members, people who could pour their time and energy into our deployments and partners in Kenya.

Ken Kasina

Ken Kasina

In Kenyan programming circles Ken Kasina (@kasina on Twitter) needs little, to no, introduction. However, to the rest of the world it should be noted that Ken won the Global Achievement Award for Open Source in Kenya this year. He is also heavily involved in the Ubuntu GNU/Linux project, working on translations and Linux-based utilities.

Ken will have a couple roles: to assist on deployments in Kenya, to work on core architecture and finally to be the go-to guy for the Ushahidi community of programmers in Nairobi.

Rebecca Wanjiku

Rebecca Wanjiku and Juliana Rotich

Rebecca will be responsible for reaching out to end-users, gathering feedback, and reporting on the use of the Ushahidi platform in Kenya. She will work closely with assigned researchers and help us document any issues and areas where users require technical assistance.

Team Kenya

Rebecca and Ken represent a new phase for Ushahidi. Where we were once an ad hoc group of volunteers acting as an NGO in Kenya in January of 2008, we are now an international technology non-profit with roots in Africa…we look forward to expanding our footprint, especially in Africa.

As we grow, we use the additional funding to bring on smart, dedicated and talented people to fill the roles where we have specific needs. When these opportunities open up we always look to our community first, the people who have put in the most time and effort with great results, then we open it up to the larger extended community. If you’re interested in joining our team, get involved with the project first, see how we work and get a feel for the project as a whole.

This is really an award for the Kenyan developers in Nairobi. A recognition for all the hard work and volunteer time that guys like Jason Mule, Laban Mwangi, Brian Muita, Wilfred Mworia, Amanya Kimathi, Jessica Colaco, Josiah Mugambi and Steve Mutinda (and others) have put into the platform.

I’m about to start an Ushahidi meetup in Nairobi. It’s going to be about 30 people, including developers and users. A big thanks!

Ushahidi Wins Kenyan Open Source Award! from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

That same team has built a major campaign, Hope Phones, to gather unused and discarded mobile phone handsets and convert them into funds for use in their mobile health campaigns in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa.

“Hope Phones will make use of the nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the US. HopePhones.org allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers.”

This is a fundraising campaign, one put in place to promote a project that already has a track record of working.

Get involved:

1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word:

• Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
• Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
• Tell the world on Twitter – use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
• Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.

3. Contact info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.

Preferred Futures for African IT Projects – Erik Hersman from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.

Myself and David have been at SXSW Interactive (South by Southwest) in Austin, Texas this weekend. It’s a strange mixture of conference, parties and meetings. David and I were here to talk on the “Emerging technology for emerging markets” panel. With us was Jon Gosier of Appfrica, Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora and Rose Shuman of Question Box. I’ve been on a number of panels, and I have to say that this was one of the better ones, if for no other reason than everyone here really knew their stuff.

It was interesting to see how Ushahidi has become an example of how Africans can develop their own projects and products for their own needs. At the same time we see Jon Gosier setting up the Appfrica Lab in Kampala, Uganda where he is developing products for groups both inside Uganda and others from the outside.

We’re coming into a new age in the African tech space, where there are now enough quality developers and enough business internally available in Africa, that the number continues to grow. That, on top of the growing need for mobile and web technology products by organizations in Africa, means that developers will be working at capacity for the next few years.

Lastly, like we always say, Africa is a tough and trying environment to work in. For technological, environmental and bureaucratic reasons. However, that also makes it a great place to build, for we know if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Matteo from UNIDO and Daniel from Crabgrass have been doing a training program with Youth Crime Watch of Liberia (though there were reps from Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Guinea also present). I was invited out to give a demo of Ushahidi. I did this by setting up a Liberian demo site, and then running through the FrontlineSMS install and sync to create what we call our “local tech hub“. It worked like a charm.

[One takeaway: Ushahidi's main page loads like a fat pig on these connections, the guys have already cut that down by half, thank goodness! Can't wait to try the new build.]

One of the guys present was Alie, a local ASP and .NET developer who does a lot of front-end development. When he saw what Ushahidi could do he got very emotional, saying, “we have needed a tool like this in Liberia for so long.”

That quickly led me to handing over an instance of Ushahidi to him, loading up FrontlineSMS on his laptop, and showing him where to get started with the wiki and code repository. Over the next 30-minutes he was invited to the Ushahidi Dev Skype channel, and everyone there started pitching in to get him started on his new PHP learning path and into the development community. It was truly amazing to see devs from Kenya, Ghana and the US all chatting to him at once.

So, welcome Alie to the Ushahidi team, and the rest of the Youth Crime Watch in Liberia. I hope to see great things out of them!