The “Runet Award”  is sponsored by Russian Federal Agency of Mass Communication . It is defined as the national award that granted for significant contribution to development of Russian Internet and has been dubbed “the Internet Oscar.” The ceremony of Runet Award took place in center of Moscow and was covered in live broadcast by Russian state TV.

The award was received by the head of the “Help Map” Moscow based coordination center Anastasiya Severina and two co-founders of the project – Alexey Sidorenko and Gregory Asmolov. A number of volunteers and activists who worked with “Help Map” also attended the ceremony and joined the celebration.

Gregory Asmolov thanked the award committee for the prize and said that first of all the award belongs to thousands of volunteers who took part in fighting wildfire and providing help. The “Help Map” demonstrated that Russian network society is not a passive audience, but it has an active core with high degree of social accountability. Gregory also thanked the worldwide network of amazing volunteers: software developers, moderators and coordinators who worked with “Help Map” and promised that the platform will continue its work and modification.

Granting the “Runet Award” to “Help Map” has special value since it is the first time when the award was given to networked organization. The regulations of the award say that only a recognized organization with a budget can take a part in competition. As consequence, according to the rules of the award, the “Help Map” project couldn’t even be considered due to its networked nature. However, at the last moment the award committee decided to make an exception and allow “Help Map” participation in the competition.

In sum, the “Help Map” participation and achievement is a symbolic precedent. It is the first time that the most prestigious Russian Internet state sponsored award recognizes that network society can be as important as traditional hierarchical organizations. To some extent this strategic shift is even more important than receiving the award itself.

It should also be mentioned that while almost no one knew about Ushahidi in Russia a few months ago, today Ushahidi is often mentioned in discussions among the Russian Internet experts, the NGOs and the e-government communities, while the number of Ushahidi based projects continues growing.

Huge congratulations to the Help Map Team from everyone here at Ushahidi!

Ushahidi wins the Weblog of the Year Award

I’ll say here what I said there yesterday. Ushahidi’s blog is an extension of the community. Many of the blog posts here are written both by our team and by those who use Ushahidi all over the world. A lot of time is spent writing and coming up with the blog posts to educate and share the experiences of how to better crowdsource information in very trying times.

The list of winners from the different languages and categories was stunning. I had a chance to speak with a couple of the other winners and was struck with just how fortunate we were to win this award, as any one of them could have as well.

A big thank you to Deutsche Welle for putting this event on and honoring us with this award. An even bigger thank you to the Ushahidi community that earned this award with us.

Asante.

Here is a video of Henry Addo’s interview:

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.

Dale started my talk off with a fake “alert” that there was a tsunami hitting South Beach (Miami). We had decided to start with this because we wanted to show the power of using the Ushahidi platform anywhere in the world, not just in Africa.

Recently, I had a long discussion with a Reuters senior correspondent on the changing media landscape. I’ll be the first to admit that I know little about traditional media from an academic or professional sense. I’ve been a consumer of that media instead. However, there was one comment that stood out to me, when he said that services like Ushahidi provide a much quicker route to information. If you know anything about the wire services, speed is of the essence.

This is true, but it’s not the whole truth.

What is more interesting is if you take a look at a study done by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative on media during the post-election violence in Kenya. They compared Ushahidi data with bloggers and traditional media. Here is a screenshot of that. What you see is that while many times bloggers and traditional media focused around the same areas and echoed each other, while Ushahidi had information coming in from places well off of “the media grid”.

In effect, Ushahidi was not just providing a way to get information quicker, but what we had stumbled upon was a way to gather information from areas where media wasn’t.

I think that is the true power of tools like ours. That they allow anyone, with the most rudimentary of devices, to send in a report or story of what is happening around them in near real-time. Then, that report is made public and others can act upon it.

Top 10 Netexplorateur of the year 2009

Last week was a busy week for us. We were at the Netexplorateur Forum held in the Senate, Paris. Netexplorateur, is a team which has setup a rigorous original process for indentifying pioneers who are creating or thinking up future digital applications. Every year, they invite the most innovative among the identified innovations around the world to present and discuss their approach with the French decision makers.

Netexplorateur award

Ushahidi as unique and innovative as its, was part of the top 10 Netexplorateurs of the year 2009 including amazing inovations such as( not in any particular order )

1. Wizzit – South Africa
2. Sekai Camera – Japan
3. Auditude – USA
4. CarrotMob – USA
5. Edison SmartConnect
6. Google Flu Trends – USA
   
7. Aka Aki – Germany
   
8. Shop Savvy – USA
9. New Songdo City IBD – South Korea

We are very excited about this award because its the first time an African innovation has been so impressed and recognized by the French. Two innovations so far came from Africa. Ushahidi and Wizzit; a mobile banking application that uses cell phones for making person-to-person payments, transfers and prepaid purchases.
Viva Ushahidi, viva Netexplorateur.

The same applies for our proposal into the USAID mobile phone challenge happening on NetSquared. We submitted the new Ushahidi push into even more mobile work, and before you knew it we were topping the charts on stars and comments.

Community is Drives Ushahidi

The takeaway from this for us is just a re-affirmation of what we already were aware of through beginning stages of building Ushahidi back in January and February in Kenya. That is, the community support is what makes it move, sink or float.

The developers are the part of the community that donate their time and brain power to solving some fairly difficult challenges and making the platform actually work. They are experts in everything from Java to PHP, mapping to API development.

The designers make it look good, and ensure that the user experience is both simple and useful.

There are content and branding experts who help us write content, and force us to refine the message and branding.

Finally, there are the great number that I call our greater community of support that are fervent followers and champions of Ushahidi in their circles of influence. They are the ones who open doors to conferences, meetings, partnerships, media and funding that we never could have done on our own.

In truth, Ushahidi does not belong to me, Ory, David or Juliana – it belongs to you. In a way, we’re just the curators. There is a reason why it’s a free and open source project… not just the software either.

To YOU, the community, we say a heartfelt “thank you”.

[Update: Just got word that a podcast interview that I did with Clark Boyd of The World/BBC is up. My part starts about 1/3 of the way in.)

“Four bold, savvy projects – including Web sites that reveal corporate whitewashing of Wikipedia entries, help people map political violence in Kenya, separate fact from falsehood in the 2008 presidential campaign, and deliver hyperlocal coverage of development in the District of Columbia’s most neglected quadrant – are finalists for the Grand Prize in this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.”