It's quite simple really, a story of an ad hoc group of people pulling together to create a rudimentary mashup. At that point in time, the technology to do what we did had been around for 3 years, there was nothing that complicated about it, just no one had done it yet. Here's the rough chronology, and why you should understand the idea of this being a real team effort with no single "lead": Ory came up with the concept of mapping incidents (see related quote from that bullet point in a blog post). However, she couldn't code as she's not a techie.
"Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done [post-election violence] on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something – any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?"
I got in touch with Ory and talked through the concept some more, then called up David Kobia and discussed the idea. That night I shot off some IA and mockups to him. 24 hours later David had created the prototype, after a marathon bit of coding on his part. 2 days later we had a beta of Ushahidi up and going that we released to the world. It was blogged by all of us. At that point, Ory and Juliana (along with Daudi Were and some others here in Nairobi) started gathering reports and administering the system. 4 months later we decided to become an organization. 8 months later we got our first funding (August), and then we were off to the races. That's how we got started. [I'll add an image here from a slide I used in an early presentation to show the visual chronology of events.] Erik Hersman www.ushahidi.com | www.iHub.co.ke www.afrigadget.com | www.whiteafrican.com | @whiteafrican On Dec 12, 2010, at 9:48 PM, Webmaster wrote:
On 12/12/2010 6:13 PM, Tony Likhanga wrote:
And the inspiration continues....
http://gizmodo.com/5712026/sudans-first-sms+powered-voting-monitor-tracks-vi...
Tony.
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That is an Ushahidi deployment, so credit to them. Ushahidi is becoming insanely big! _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
