Support $ Engagement

Last week we had the pleasure of virtually communicating with one interesting brilliant young mind by the name of Arushi, a grade 5 student who loves space and trees. She used Ushahidi platform for her project which was to “Develop creative solutions that use Earth observations to address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and foster sustainable development worldwide.''She is one of the reasons we do what we do and that is to help us achieve our goal and mission, to build tools that we believe have palpable meaning for our users and making our world a better place to exist in. Meet the brain behind this project . Goodluck at the global round Miss Nath!

Mozilla Festival 2019

At Mozfest 2019 we conducted two different sessions, one led by our Design and QA team members and the other by our development team.

  • The Design and QA team focused on a session around community resilience and how complex, nuanced cultural contexts inform the machine learning and automation algorithms that we build into our technology. This was building from work done of a previous project funded by Rockefeller called ‘Dispatcher’. Interesting conversations about culture, inclusion and safety came up with the audience as well as some key conversations about decentralisation of community led software. You can view the slides on slide share here: TBC
  • The development team talked about the challenges of building an inclusive, well functioning chatbots that actually improve the lives of users. It was a small group so we were able to do a roundtable kind of setup with everyone sharing experiences and frustrations about chatbot related technology. Learn more about our Ushahidi Facebook chatbot
  • The team also attended sessions on the Grant for the Web (https://grantfortheweb.org/) and the Mozfest Science fair. Our Executive Director Angela Oduor Lungati was part of the opening circle at Mozfest weekend 2019, as she took the main stage as part of the opening keynote. She gave a 5 minute speech outlining the value of being a part of the mozilla community over the last 10 years, and how it has helped contribute to a healthier internet. She also talked about Ushahidi's strategic shift towards open source, and providing support and expertise to communities looking to achieve high impact in crisis response, transparency and accountability and human rights. A link to the video is here.