The Ushahidi core team works from 7 different timezones ranging from Kampala to Louisville, soon expanding to places like Brazil and Korea. One weekend a year we’re able to get together, in-person, to solidify our connections with each other and talk through the big strategic topics that are best done face-to-face. It could be argued that it’s the most important 3 days of the year for us.

The First XV

2010 was a big growth year for Ushahidi, where we got up to 12 core team members – doubling in size from 2009. We’re adding 3 more people this year, which brings us to 15, a fortuitous number for the team as many of us are big rugby fans.

(Caleb decided to have a little fun, putting us all in our positions based on the date that we joined the team.)

12 Months Later

Last year we met in Miami, as we are this year, and a lot has happened since then. To name the big ones:

• Plugins – extensible way to add new functionality without bloating the core
• Crowdmap – maps for non-developers, also a means to quickly collect reports giving deployers time to install their own server
• SMSSync – simple and robust alternative to Frontline and Clickatell
• iOS – rich smart phone experience
• Checkins – opens platform to entirely new uses
• Stand-By Task Force – game changer in disaster response
• J2ME – extending reaching onto older devices
• Community Site – fantastic documentation
• Map Geometry

Looking at the historical record, it’s been a good year. However, there’s a lot more to do. At this meeting, besides drinking a Mojito on South Beach, we’ll get into some of the big future-looking issues, such as:

Visual Reporting: What’s the perfect Ushahidi dashboard? How do we surface “power stats” for Ushahidi deployments and metrics. Swift-Ushahidi integration visuals on the front and back end.

Knowledge Management: How do we come up with a plan to capture information that we know internally, so that it is shared with deployers and developers better?
The inverse, how do we handle and capture information that our *users* know regularly?

Crowdmap Scalability & Migration: Making sure that even the biggest deployments work on Crowdmap. Adding in new a la carte features, etc.

Of course, this is a chance to discuss some of the more mundane items as well, around operations, funds and how we work towards organizational financial sustainability as well. It also means that we’ll be offline from today until about Tuesday of next week. We’ll be a little slower on email and other communications mediums, but bear with us as it’s for a good cause.

Annual Strategy Meeting II from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

What is Ushahidi?

Ushahidi is non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping via the mobile phone and web. We builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We are willing to try, and sometimes fail, in the pursuit of changing the traditional way that information flows.

Though the tech space that we’re in seems to be a moving target, our mission and vision has stayed true to form for the past two years. We took the time to boil it down to the quote above.

Annual Strategy Meeting from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Part of this is to see each other and enjoy being together as a group of friends and colleagues face-to-face. Another is to realign and recenter with each other on the Ushahidi vision, mission and goals. Finally, we’ll spend a couple days talking through the big items on the platform itself, the tech-side of what we do.

Ushahidi Meetup 09 A from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Today is a big day for a number of reasons, one of those reasons is that we’re putting on our first big Ushahidi Usergroup Meeting in Nairobi at Strathmore University (we’re tagging it #UshMeet). It’s a full day of sessions, roundtables and talks by the users of Ushahidi, mixed in with the development community and Ushahidi core team.

Standby for a slew of blog posts, images and video.

Thanks to everyone who has volunteered to make this event possible. I’ll be adding their names/links here as the day goes on.

The Programme

10:00 am: Welcome and ground rules, goals and expectations, introductions 10:30 am: Morning plenary – Presentations of Ushahidi Implementations

* Peace Heroes/ KANCO (Kenya Aids NGOs Consortium)
* Urban Mirror – Vincenzo Carvalho
* Hatari.co.ke – Ken Kasina

11:15 am: First set of breakout sessions for testers

* Feedback Sessions – Rebecca and Juliana
* Round-table on implementation, challenges, tips and knowledge sharing

12:30 pm: Break
1:30 pm: – Speed Geeks and Application Demos

* Demo of the Ushahidi core platform – Erik Hersman (preview of ‘Mogadishu’ release
* FrontlineSMS – Emmanuel Kala
* Demo of Java application – Steve Mutinda & Jessica Colaco
* OpenStreetMap and MapKibera – Mikel Maron
* Demo of Android application – Josiah Mugambi
* Demo of Iphone app – Wilfred Mworia

2:45 pm: Break (15 minutes)
3:00 pm: Open discussion on the tools, possible implementations, considerations and recommendations

* Design (Kwame Nyongo)
* Mobile Strategy – Jessica Colaco & Marten Schoonman
* Internet Marketing – Joshua Wanyama
* Linking up with Advocacy organizations & media (Off-line Strategy)

4:30 pm: Wrap-up/closing plenary

I’ve spent the last couple days holed up in a room in scenic Salzburg, Austria with 20 other people from both traditional journalism and new media backgrounds. Our goal: discuss strategies for more effective engagement and investment in “tomorrow’s media“. Having this mixture of “old school” journalism professionals mixed in with those of us who are only embedded in the blogging and social media fields, but with no classical training in journalism, has led to some very interesting conversations.

Quality

One of these sticking points has been around the journalist’s emphasis on the need for quality in reporting via new media (citizen media, like blogs and social networks). It’s a good point, we all want more quality reporting in any medium, whether it’s by a blogger or a newspaper. There is a stated need for education and training in solid journalism practices.

That might be true. However, it misses one important point, especially when we compare how we talk about the West (US/Europe) and everyone else.

Critical Mass

In the West, there has long been access to computer, the internet and social media tools. There’s a critical mass of bloggers and influencers who use social media tools like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. You have to ask the question then, has access and familiarity with these digital tools led to the vibrancy that allows greater transparency to happen?

Is it due to having access, and your peers usage, that allows self-learning to take place with the new media and social tools which are available to everyone? Kids, students and the general populace tinker in the space and grows the space organically.

Put another way, a statistically inconsequential number of bloggers and social media influencers from the West were trained in journalism. Why are we expecting that training and education, rather than simple, open access to social media tools will make a difference “over there” when it didn’t to anyone in the West?

[Sidebar: Quality and critical mass are not mutually exclusive. As a new medium and new users get comfortable and grow, quality is evolutionary and grows as well.]

We just finished day one of the Ushahidi strategy tech meeting in Orlando. We’re meeting to refine the focus and define the initiatives that we should be putting our limited resources and guidance behind for the rest of this year. Our goal was to get together a dozen of the most involved builders and idea generators behind Ushahidi over the past year, and put their brains to good use for a hard-hitting weekend of decision making and discussion on the Ushahidi platform.

Through the kindness of OSI, we were able to fly in a number of the core Ushahidi devs from around Africa, including Soyapi Mumba from Malawi, Henry Addo from Ghana and Brian Muita from Kenya. On top of that, some of the top subject matter experts from around the US and UK were able to fly in, many on their own dime, to help us figure out mapping, media data and SMS related issues. MindComet have allowed us to use their state-of-the-art meeting room facility, which has made communication amongst us techies a breeze.

The focus on day 1 has revolved around the core architecture. Specifically, what should be included as “must haves” in the workup to a finished Beta in April, and what are just “nice to haves” that we can work on after Beta is released. We’re still defining what that list is, but should have a it fairly well complete by tomorrow.

Other discussions have revolved around future and parallel initiatives, Kaushal Jhalla and Chris Blow are here to talk about Swift River prototyping and implementation. Ping, from Google.org is here to figure out how initiatives like PFIF and offline mapping fit in, along with suggestions and ideas from mapping guru Andrew Turner. Ken Banks is here to talk SMS and Ushahidi’s partnership with FrontlineSMS, while Sean Gourley is giving us guidance on what to do with machine algorithms as they apply to news feeds. Finally, we have Caleb Bell to help with web design mockups, questions and ideas to make everything faster and more user friendly, and Patrick Meier from Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to give us feedback on thoughts from the humanitarian field.

All in all, it’s been a very fast-paced and exciting day full of engaging conversation. We finished it with a dinner at the Nyumbani ya Hersman (my house), where everyone got to relax and enjoy my wife’s fine cooking.

Today and tomorrow, David and I are in New York at the UNICEF offices for the first technical working group meeting of the new Open Mobile Consortium (OMC). The OMC is a group that came about just a month ago at the MobileActive conference in Johannesburg (more here on that).

Items we’re covering on day one:

• Technology Demos: Different organizations briefly describe current capabilities, limitations, and future directions. Where are they working? At what scale? Who are the partners? A balance of strengths and weaknesses.
• Pattern Mining: Work towards collecting proven practices from the field.
• Protocols, Capabilities, and Libraries: Identify common needs and match to implementations.

From the opening introductions, there are representatives from InSTEDD, Cell-Life, Open Rosa, Dimagi, UNICEF, Makarere Univ (Uganda), Southwest Univ (Senegal project), Univ of Southern Maine, Univ of Wash, Google Android, Inveneo and Digital Democracy.

Thoughts

What do you do when you don’t have internet connectivity with some of these devices? Disconnected operations. This applies to web (Ushahidi), and mobile (JavaRosa and Android).

SMS technology is not always sufficient to effectively gather information. (lessons learned from RapidSMS in Northern Uganda outbreak of Hepatitis E)

Requiring users to use a special format for SMS text messaging is a big barrier to use.

UNICEF techs have created the Mobile Hacking wiki, well worth getting into.

Patrick Meier, on our advisory board, was able to attend, and Kwame Nyong’o, the talented illustrator behind the Ushahidi.com artwork showed up for a bit. Amanya Kimathi joined us for the first time and will be helping with the local Kenya pilot project implementation. On top of those new faces, we had Jason Mule, Laban Mwangi, Brian Muite, Steve Mutinda, Josiah Mugambi, Wilfred Mworia, Oscar Otiende, and Tim Kamau present.

Besides good company and good food, we were able to iron out some administrative details. One of which is the local monthly Ushahidi dev meetings that are starting up, being led by Wilfred and Jason. If you’re a dev in Nairobi and want to get an idea of what’s happening on this project, get in touch with either of them. We’ll start posting the upcoming dates for meetings here on the Ushahidi blog.

Lastly, I did short video interviews with everyone who attended, which I will become a video short showing who the guys are behind the Ushahidi.