During crisis events that transpired in 2018, a number of organizations that had installed Ushahidi TenFour on employees’ phones failed to turn on or use the emergency check-in capability during the crisis. Instead, they reverted to texts and phone calls and other messaging options. It was chaotic and time consuming, those organizations reported back to us. As a team, we were confused. We didn’t understand why those organizations chose not to use TenFour in the precise situation for which it was exactly designed.

An unusual snow storm snarled traffic in Seattle and shut down airports and public transit but it was still a packed house at our second Open Design Jam in Seattle. This is an ongoing collaboration between Ushahidi, Adobe XD, and Designit. This Design Jam was a cross between human centered design, rapid prototyping, open source software development, and a hackathon. In a Design Jam, we take the rapid prototyping and empathy-building components of great product design and apply some of the collaborative tenets of open source software development to create a day long workshop of problem framing, ideation, and prototyping.

Ushahidi is currently building a new public technology product called Dispatcher, which helps communities build resilience through peer-to-peer engagement and machine learning. Dispatcher builds upon our deep experience in crisis response, and is the next chapter of Ushahidi’s mission to understand and improve how communities come together and help each other, both in times of crisis as well as during everyday life.

In order to best design a product that is responsive and thoughtful to the needs of our user base, we will be hosting a community research study at iHub in Nairobi on 1 March 2019, from 08.30am until 18.00pm. We are opening this event up to the public for participation, and would like to invite anyone who is interested to sign up for a 20-minute time slot to chat with us and answer a few questions about your community involvement.

At Ushahidi our team is spread around the world. We’ve written often about how we manage communications and collaboration, from Slack to task management in Github to calls upon calls. But what’s it really feel like? What’s the day to day? This is a Slack thread that gets a bit at what it’s like to work remotely... and some of the good fun we have together at Ushahidi.

Excerpt from Ushahidi Slack thread (names redacted)

10 years ago, a group of Kenyan bloggers came together and built Ushahidi to help ordinary Kenyans share what was happening on the ground and keep people safe. Today, in 2018, Ushahidi has grown into a social enterprise with a global team spanning 10 different countries, and continues to build technology to help marginalized people raise their voice and get the help that they need.

Here’s a few highlights from 2018.