I recently did a project paper on appropriating technology for social change in Africa and this is the same conclusion I came to.

Thanks for sharing.

I’ve got to say I agree with Erik on this one. Looking at the context and the case he’s put forward, it must be said that maybe the comment section may not be where these points should be presented. And the thing with Ushahidi, it’s defining principle is the community element. The ability for us to look at where we’ve gone wrong and improve it.

You may certainly have a point on the citizen reporting vs. election monitoring but I’m afraid you’re link isn’t working either to read more or to see your viewpoint on it all.

Information isn’t worth much unless it’s shared and learnt from. That’s what we’re here to do as a community and cheers to Erik for candidly sharing Ushahidi’s challenges.

Onwards & upwards.

Your comments here are clearly meant as a way to spread dirt and be a dissenting voice for more attention, your first comment itself is nebulous enough that it was clearly meant not as constructive criticism, but as a way to get a rise out of me. In short, you’re trolling.

If I wasn’t clear in the post itself, the title, or the comments, this was a talk about how we built the Ushahidi platform and the organization and the lessons we learned along the way, not about the uses of it by other organizations.

You know me and all the members of the Ushahidi team. You were an advisor for 1.5 years until we dissolved that due to needing to create a Board of Directors. If that offended you, I’m sorry, but all but Ethan Zuckerman were not included on that Board. It’s not like you weren’t around when all of these deployments were happening (as they all happened 1+ years ago).

You have our emails, our phone numbers our Twitter contacts – you can easily contact us in a non-public space if your goal is to really provide feedback or constructive advice.

Seeing the examples you selectively chose to share, I can tell many of them are issues that we talk about all the time on the Ushahidi blog, around how to pay attention to messaging, community growth and administrative needs before it happens. After all, the tech is only about 10% of a solid and well-run deployment, which we’ve said for a long time now.

I’d like to highlight our community resources page, the communications we have with people in the forums, or the myriad blog posts on lessons from Haiti, Chile, etc…

Finally, if you really want to help the deploying organizations, you can always suggest additional resources by sending an email to support@ushahidi.com. I’d also challenge you to come up with ways to support tech tools, seeing as you claim to be a driver of community support.

In addition to numeric data, we asked the following questions:
1. Were you satisfied with the number of submissions to the Ushahidi platform?
2. Were you satisfied with the quality of submissions to the Ushahidi platform?

Some answers included (quote):

No. We were expecting more but due to “political issues” and/or mistrust due to lack of knowledge of this kind of systems some NGOs back off and did not use the system however we already talked to them (after elections) and they agree to use it in the upcoming elections. (Mexico)

“No. 1) we launched late, would like to have seen more submissions but recognize that was in part a failure of marketing on our part and are working to rectify this.
2) we would like more integrated submission channels. web and email feels redundant, twitter was poorly integrated, and would be great to see voice submission (speech recognition)
3) signing up for a mobile ‘rss’ of submissions was not enabled, so we didn’t benefit from the critical user feedback loop. (Lebanon)

The software did what it was supposed to. We didn’t have a network of volunteers, or the time/ budget to promote the project, to get enough submissions. (India)

No. The number of submissions could have been better, the main reasons could have been to do with the speed of deployment and getting the word out to locals about the platform and the SMS number. Although we did put it on air, maybe it could have been repeated more. Other factors could have been electricity being cut, people being bombed not having appetite or time to watch News etc. (Gaza)

In addition, we received some useful comments re. technical improvements such as accepting structured data as one key desired feature.

I am reading the Ushahidi blog religiously but I am not seeing any discussion of some of the comments we heard from implementers. You might not see that as the role of Ushahidi as a tech platform. Is there a list of users/implementers? The greater emphasis you have recently put on the time it takes to promote an instance of Ushahidi is helpful and is certainly reflected in the experiences of the implementers quoted above.

Regards,

Katrin