Ushahidi
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Software company Ushahidi uses open source skills to help during Kenya mall siege
...Once Ushahidi team members found out they were all safe from the mall siege, they went to work figuring out how they could make their skills and tools useful during the crisis. Soon they mapped out all the blood drive center locations in Nairobi by deploying a Crowdmap , which is the hosted version of the open source Ushahidi Platform that quickly lets users map crowdsourced information... Read More »
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South Africa losing to Kenya in tech race
South Africa appears to be losing its status as the preferred investment destination on the continent for international technology companies. That honour, increasingly, is going to Kenya, which may be on the cusp of a technology-fuelled era of economic growth. Read More »
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Stigmergic Self-Organization And The Improvisation Of Ushahidi
In late 2007 in Kenya, US educated Kenyan journalist Ory Okolloh had become one of the main sources of information about the election and the violence that broke out soon after... Read More »
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SwiftRiver Throws a Lifeline to People Drowning in Information
There's a problem that constantly plagues us in this day of information overload, and that is the ability to sift the stream of incoming information into the bits that are valuable from those that aren't. It's a tough issue that we've been working on at Ushahidi for a while now. Our solution is called SwiftRiver.
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Tech Giant Kenya Shines Abroad With Little For Local Innovators
As far as innovation in the technology world goes, Kenya stands among the giants, with acclaimed titles that have had a massive impact on the global economy. Read More »
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Technology From Africa Ensures The Cloud Works When Your Connection Doesn’t
The “cloud” is great for places that enjoy uninterrupted power and Internet connections. But for large swathes of the world, where blackouts are common and connections unreliable, accessing files stored remotely on the Internet is a massive hassle. Forget about downloading Adobe Creative Suite. Simply working on a Google doc can be aggravating. Read More »
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Technology Innovations for Humanitarian Assistance
Last month, The Global Journal published a list ranking the top 100 NGOs in the world – an interesting, if ambitious task, with lots of room to quibble...number 10 on the list, Ushahidi caught my attention because it is a newcomer on the scene and relatively unknown.
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TED Video – Ushahidi’s Juliana Rotich Speaks About Brck, An Internet Access Modem Built For Africa
Juliana Rotich is co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi, a nonprofit tech company that develops free and open-source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Read More »
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The BRCK Spins Out
We’re very excited to announce that BRCK is spinning out as a company of its own, as was the plan from the beginning of the year. It’s interesting how Ushahidi has incubated or catalyze a number of things over the last 5 years, from the iHub and BRCK, to helping start CrisisMappers. A pattern that we hope continues. Read More »
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The Charitable Face of Data Use
When a massive earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, the United Nations found that data collected through mobile telephones was crucial to delivering its relief programmes in the region. The UN Foundation’s vice president of communications Aaron Sherinian explains that - as demonstrated in Haiti - processing complex data sets is now vital for non-profit organisations to help everything fro Read More »
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The Global Innovation Competition!
Hosted annually, this competition will tackle a different problem each year in the citizen to government feedback loop in order to improve government performance. It is unique through a crowdsourcing and peer review process and the fact that all finalists will receive expert mentoring by our Jury upon arrival in Nairobi for the Global Innovation Week [...]. Read More »
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The Life-Saving Power Of Crowdsourcing
"The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed." There's a good deal of truth in science-fiction author William Gibson's observation. One of the most interesting and powerful aspects of our future--a tool that has the potential to take us a long way toward distributing information to where it can do the most good--is the phenomenon known as "crowdsourcing." Read More »
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The Public Intelligence Project: Creating A Culture Of Democracy
Freedom of expression is a fundamental civil liberty imperative to democracy. However, in societies throughout the world, it is at risk, and George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four is increasingly becoming more of a prediction of the future instead of far–fetched, fictional hyperbole... Read More »
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This Little Black Box Could Revolutionize Offgrid Internet Access
Most of our readers have no problem getting on the internet every day for communication or research or sharing LOLcats, but if you live or work in areas that don't have reliable internet access due to lack of basic communications or power infrastructure, that simple access that we take for granted can be quite difficult. Read More »
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Three Kids in a Garage
As I think about social enterprises in the developing world, many emerge as responses to market and government failure. M-Pesa in Kenya, for example, emerged in response to unbanked people having no way to safely transfer funds within the country...Unless we pay attention to what’s happening around us, much smaller and nimbler actors will prove that neither access to capital nor knowledge is a sustainable comparative advantage.
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