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3 episodes with Ushahidi
2 episodes with Ushahidi
4 episodes with Ushahidi
2 episodes with Ushahidi
2 episodes with Ushahidi
3 episodes with Ushahidi
3 episodes with Ushahidi
Pamoja na chapisho lililotolewa leo na Shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la hali ya hewa (WMO) kuangazia ushahidi unaoongezeka kwamba tabaka la ozoni kwa hakika liko mbioni kurejea katika hali nzuri, Katibu Mkuu wa Umoja wa Mataifa Antonio Guterres kupitia ujumbe wake maalumu kwa ajili ya siku ya leo ya Kimataifa ya Uhifadhi wa Tabaka la Ozoni amesisitiza mataifa yote ulimwenguni kuidhinisha na kutekeleza maazimio ya maboresho ya Itifaki ya Montreal yaliyozaa Marekebisho ya Kigali kwa lengo la kupunguza gesi chafuzi zenye nguvu zinazoongeza joto duniani. Katika ujumbe huo, Bwana Guterres ameeleza kwamba Marekebisho ya Kigali ya Itifaki ya Montreal ambayo yanalenga katika kupunguza hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) ambazo ni gesi zinazoongeza joto duniani yanaweza kuchangia katika kuendeleza juhudi za kukabiliana na tabianchi, kulinda watu na sayari. “Na hilo linahitajika zaidi kuliko wakati mwingine wowote kwani rekodi za joto zinaendelea kuongezeka.” Akasisitiza.Itifaki ya Montreal ilikubaliwa mnamo mwaka 1987 huko nchini Canada na kuanza kutumika mwaka 1989. Maboresho yake yalifanyika mwaka 2016 mjini Kigali Rwanda na marekebisho hayo ya Kigali yakawa sehemu ya Itifaki ya Montreal kuanzia mwaka 2017. Hadi kufikia Aprili mwaka huu 2024 ni nchi 158 pekee zimeidhinisha marekebisho hayo.Guterres anaendelea kueleza kwamba, “iwapo yataidhinishwa kikamilifu na kutekelezwa, Marekebisho ya Kigali ya Itifaki ya Montreal yanaweza kusaidia kuepuka ongezeko la hadi nyuzi joto 0.5 za Selsiasi duniani kufikia mwisho wa karne hii.”Anasema “wakati ambapo ushirikiano kimataifa uko chini ya shinikizo kubwa, Itifaki ya Montreal ya kusaidia kulinda tabaka la ozoni inajitokeza kama ishara yenye nguvu ya matumaini. Ni ukumbusho kwamba nchi zinapoonesha azimio la kisiasa kwa manufaa ya wote, mabadiliko yanawezekana.”Ushahidi wa mafaniko ya Itifaki ya Montreal pia uko katika ujumbe wa Mkuu wa shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la Mazingira (UNEP), Inger Andersen alioutoa leo kwa njia ya video akisema,“hatua zilizochukuliwa chini ya Itifaki hii ya Montreal ziliondoa gesi zilizokuwa zinatumika viwandani, gesi ambazo zilikuwa zilizoharibu tabaka la ozoni na ziliongeza joto duniani.”
Subscriber-only episodeSend us a Text Message.Using AI to identify threats to human rights and political activists Political activities such as hustings, campaigns and voting are well underway in many countries, but alongside these come incidents of reprisals and voter intimidation in certain regions. Ushahidi is an NGO based in Kenya that maps these incidents. They've collaborated with major AI companies specializing in global risk detection. Dataminr utilises public data through its platform to identify risks in advance. Their AI system processes trillions of computations daily, analysing billions of public data inputs from nearly a million sources. It processes various forms of data including text, images, video, audio, and other real-time information. Dataminr has helped develop new AI tools for Ushahidi that focus on helping the collection of data, improving geolocation and real time translation into local languages – all of this is leading to improved safety for individuals. Jessie End, VP, Social Good at Dataminr and Angela Odour Lungati, Executive Director Ushahidi are on the show. The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Wairimu Gitahi.More on this week's stories: Dataminr: AI for GoodLeveraging Citizen‑Generated Data In The Age Of AI - And How We're Making That HappenEditor: Ania LichtarowiczProduction Manager: Liz Tuohy Recording and audio editing : Lansons | Team Farner For new episodes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or via this link:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2265960/supporters/newFollow us on all the socials: Join our Facebook group Instagram Twitter/X If you like Somewhere on Earth, please rate and review it on Apple PodcastsContact us by email: hello@somewhereonearth.coSend us a voice note: via WhatsApp: +44 7486 329 484Find a Story + Make it News = Change the World
Send us a Text Message.Using AI to identify threats to human rights and political activists Political activities such as hustings, campaigns and voting are well underway in many countries, but alongside these come incidents of reprisals and voter intimidation in certain regions. Ushahidi is an NGO based in Kenya that maps these incidents. They've collaborated with major AI companies specializing in global risk detection. Dataminr utilises public data through its platform to identify risks in advance. Their AI system processes trillions of computations daily, analysing billions of public data inputs from nearly a million sources. It processes various forms of data including text, images, video, audio, and other real-time information. Dataminr has helped develop new AI tools for Ushahidi that focus on helping the collection of data, improving geolocation and real time translation into local languages – all of this is leading to improved safety for individuals. Jessie End, VP, Social Good at Dataminr and Angela Odour Lungati, Executive Director Ushahidi are on the show. The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Wairimu Gitahi.More on this week's stories: Dataminr: AI for GoodLeveraging Citizen‑Generated Data In The Age Of AI - And How We're Making That HappenEveryday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AICan't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the Show.Editor: Ania LichtarowiczProduction Manager: Liz Tuohy Recording and audio editing : Lansons | Team Farner For new episodes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or via this link:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2265960/supporters/newFollow us on all the socials: Join our Facebook group Instagram Twitter/X If you like Somewhere on Earth, please rate and review it on Apple PodcastsContact us by email: hello@somewhereonearth.coSend us a voice note: via WhatsApp: +44 7486 329 484Find a Story + Make it News = Change the World
The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to Postgres. Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:PostGIS: https://postgis.net/ FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/ Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/ Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/ OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/ Regina Obe's books: https://locatepress.com/book/pgr Regina's book “PostGIS In Action”: https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-third-edition?experiment=B MobilityDB: https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278 OSGeo: https://www.osgeo.org/ Simon Willison's presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/ QGIS: https://qgis.org/en/site/ QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/ PostGIS Workshops: https://postgis.net/documentation/training/#workshop Locate Press: https://locatepress.com/ FedGeoDay 2023: https://www.fedgeo.us/about-2023 Schedule of FOSS4G NA 2023: https://foss4gna.org/schedule.html#schedule FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-2024-has-been-awarded-to-belem-brazil/ Paul's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xyXA4-0wmNX7WfiLeH9h10bIkZxrej278-mMaClagys/edit?usp=sharing
Semaine folle sur le terrain des réseaux sociaux : Meta, la maison mère d'Instagram lance Threads, un réseau social qui pourrait déstabiliser Twitter. De quoi aller jusqu'à un combat de catch entre Mark Zuckerberg et Elon Musk, le propriétaire du réseau au petit oiseau bleu ? Au départ une plaisanterie, la perspective de ce combat affole la toile. Plus discrète, Ushahidi, une plateforme née au Kenya en 2008, permet de sauver dans des situations extrêmes, à Haïti, en Libye ou encore en Europe.
The Ushahidi Platform helps communities turn information into action with an intuitive and accessible crowdsourcing and mapping tool. By enabling the rapid collection, management and analysis of crowdsourced information, Ushahidi empowers everyone—individuals, community groups, governments, activists, organizations—to create meaningful change. In this episode, we spoke to Daniel Odongo from Ushahidi. Daniel is the director of implementation at Ushahidi. We spoke to Daniel about their development and growth in civic tech in Africa and across the world
Katika makao makuu ya Umoja wa Mataifa kunafanyika maonesho yaliyopatiwa jina Simulizi za Manusura na Kumbukizi: Wito wa kuchukua hatua kuzuia mauaji ya kimbari. Katika maonesho haya vifaa mbali mbali vinavyohusiana na mauaji ya kimbari, mathalani ya Rwanda au kule Bosnia Hezergovina na Srebenica vinaoneshwa, yakiwemo mavazi ya wale waliokumbwa na mauaji hayo. Mauaji ya kimbari nchini Rwanda yalifanyika kwa siku 100 kuanzia Aprili 7 hadi Julai 15 mwaka 1994. Hadi leo hii manusura na wale waliopoteza ndugu na jamaa zao bado machungu yako moyoni mwao na wanatumia maonesho haya kupata sauti. Hicho ndio msingi wa makala hii kama ilivyoandaliwa na kusimuliwa na Assumpta Massoi.
Umoja wa Mataifa unasema robo tatu ya migogoro mikuu ya ulimwengu ina uhusiano na masuala ya kitamaduni na kwa hivyo kuziba pengo kati ya tamaduni ni jambo la haraka na la lazima kwa ajili ya amani, utulivu na maendeleo. Makaburi ya Kiyahudi huko Fez, Morocco ni ushuhuda wa utamaduni tofauti kuishi pamoja kwa amani.Wakiwa katika safari ya kikazi huko Fez, kuangazia Mkutano wa tisa wa Jukwaa la Umoja wa Mataifa la Muungano wa Ustaarabu, UNAOC, May Yacoub na Alban Mendes De Leon kutoka Timu ya Mawasiliano ya Umoja wa Mataifa walikutana na Johanna Devico Ohana, mzaliwa wa Fez, ambaye anatunza makaburi haya yenye umri wa miaka 200, akiheshimu jina la marehemu babake ambaye mwenyewe alikuwa msimamizi wa utunzaji wa makabuli haya hadi alipoaga dunia miezi michache iliyopita. Anold Kayanda anasimulia makala hii kwa lugha ya Kiswahili.
durée : 00:57:58 - Cultures Monde - par : Julie Gacon - Du mouvement de contestation “Y en a marre” au Sénégal à la plateforme citoyenne Ushahidi au Kenya en passant par le mouvement “La Lucha” en RDC, les années 2010 ont vu l'émergence sur tout le continent africain de nombreuses mobilisations et initiatives citoyennes. Quelles évolutions et impacts ? - invités : Pierre Jacquemot ancien ambassadeur, chercheur à l'IRIS et président du GRET (ONG de développement); Michel Luntumbue Chargé de recherche au GRIP (Groupe de recherche et d'information sur la paix et la sécurité) à Bruxelles; Micheline Mwendike Kamate Co-initiatrice du mouvement congolais “La Lucha"
Dr. Lisa Schirch, Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, introduces us to peace tech, its history, trends, current examples, and their impact - including Ushahidi, Build Up, Polis, and the “Angry Uncle” Chatbot.More about Lisa's work at www.toda.org and https://kroc.nd.edu/faculty-and-staff/lisa-schirch/
Mtaalamu wa Umoja wa Mataifa kuhusu haki za watu wa jamii ya asili amepongeza uamuzi wa Mahakama ya Afrika ya Haki za Binadamu wa kuagiza serikali ya Kenya illipe fidia watu wa jamii ya asili ya Ogiek nchini humo kwa machungu na ubaguzi waliokumbana nao nchini humo. Kupitia taarifa iliyotolewa leo mjini Geneva Uswisi na ofisi ya Umoja wa Mataifa ya haki za binadamu, mtaalamu huyo Francisco Cali Tzay, amesema uamuzi huo wa mwezi Mei mwaka huu unafuatia hatua ya mahakama hiyo kubaini kuwa serikali ya Kenya ilikiuka haki ya kuishi, kumiliki mali, maliasili, maendeleo, dini na utamaduni wa jamii ya Ogiek, kwa mujibu wa Katiba ya Mahakam ya Afrika ya Haki za binadamu. Bwana Tzay amesema uamuzi huo pamoja na malipo ya fidia ni hatua nyingine muhimu katika kutambuliwa na kulindwa kwa haki ya ardhi ya mababu za watu wa jamii ya ogiek kwenye msitu wa Mau nchini Kenya. Mahakama imeitaka serikali ya Kenya illipe fidia ya takribani dola 489,000 kwa kupotea kwa maliasili ya jamii hiyo na zaidi ya dola 844,000 kwa machungu waliyopitia kutokana na ubaguzi na kunyimwa haki ya maendeleo, utamaduni wao na dini yao. Mahakama pia imetaka serikali ya Kenya ichukue hatua muhimu za kisheria, kiutawala au hatua zozote zile kutambua, kuheshimu na kulinda za waogiek iwe kwenye maendeleo, au uwekezaji wowote kwenye ardhi yao na wapatiwe haki ya kushirikishwa katika miradi yoyote itakayofanyika kwenye eneo lao. Katika kesi hiyo, mtaalamu huyu wa Umoja wa Mataifa naye pia alitoa Ushahidi wa kitaalamu. Bwana Tzay amesema anapongeza sana uamuzi wa mahakama huku akisema unapeleka ujumbe mzito kwa ulinzi wa ardhi na haki za kitamaduni za waogiek nchini Kenya na watu wote wa jamii ya asili barani Afrika na kwingine kote duniani huku akitaka serikali ya Kenya itekeleze uamuzi huo.
Kwa Undani ni matangazo ya dakika 25 yanayochambua habari kwa undani zaidi na kumpa msikilizaji maelezo ya kina kuliko ilivyo kawaida kuhusu tukio au swala lililojitokeza katika habari.
Today on That Tech Pod, Laura and Gabi chat with Dr. Bright Gameli Mawudor. Dr. Mawudor is the CTO at XETOVA, a Data Science as a service organization and also the founder of the Cyber Security collective Africahackon, the first ever Live demonstration Cyber Security Conference in East and Central Africa. He acquired a PhD in IT Convergence and Application Engineering with concentration in Information Security from Pukyong National University, South Korea. He has over 10 years of professional experience in the Cyber Security industry with strong expertise in Cyber security Strategy building, Resilience and system penetration testing. Bright has also presented at over 150 Cyber Security conferences, lectured at various universities and contributed to cyber security publications. He was also recognized by Tribe of Hackers: Blue Team 2020, Top 40 Under 40 2016 of young entrepreneurs in Kenya and worked with world class organizations such as Dimension Data/NTT, Cellulant and Ushahidi. Dr. Mawudor, has performed various evaluations and selections of Cyber Security tools and successfully implemented IT security systems to protect the Confidentiality, Availability and Integrity of critical business environments to curb and mitigate risks. Technically highly skilled in various environments, especially in the Cyber Security space, dedicated and a team player with excellent leadership qualities.Follow That Tech Pod: Twitter-@thattechpodLinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/thattechpod website: thattechpod.com
In this episode, we speak with Desigan Chinniah, previously at Mozilla, advisor to many web startups and now on the board of Tor. We discuss the evolution of web tech from websites to complex decentralized applications running on browser APIs, the competitiveness of the browser rendering engine versus the UX layer and how developers think about privacy. Does it live in browser settings, extensions or on the protocol core level?About Dees ChinniahDesigan Chinniah is a creative technologist. After two decades of dot-com checks in, Dees now has a portfolio of advisory roles (Ably, Coil, Replay, SEDNA, Zama) and board positions (Ushahidi, The Tor Project). He invests early into diverse and under-represented minority founders and is a mentor at Design Club, Mozilla and Seedcamp.Other things mentioned:MozillaFigmaVS CodeHTML5GeckoWebKitBraveFirefoxOperaEdgeHomomorphic encryptionReplayGlitchSourcegraphDesiganchinniah.comLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/cyberdeesOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don't have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev.
In this episode of The GovLab Collective Intelligence Podcast, Dane Gambrell interviews Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director of Ushahidi. Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an online platform for crowdsourcing data in support of crisis relief, human rights advocacy, transparency and accountability campaigns. You can read our full case study about Ushahidi here: https://collective-intelligence.thegovlab.org/case/ushahid
Kettle COO, Nathaniel Manning, talks about balancing risk in a changing climate, structure without bureaucracy, evolution by design, good decision making, the social contract of insurance, and sitting on a monastery cushion for 3 months. He also talks about old guard vs new guard, building the plane while it's flying, making the implicit explicit, and evolution by design.Nathaniel has a long career of founding and leading companies including Fellow Robots, BRCK, the largest provider of public wifi in Africa, and Ushahidi the world's largest open-source platform for crisis response. Along the way, he worked on furthering clean energy as part of the Clinton Climate Initiative at the Clinton Foundation, and Nathaniel was part of the Obama Administration's first class of Presidential Innovation Fellow where he was special advisor on open data at USAID, the world's premier international development agency, where he went on to become the Chief Data Officer.With that kind of track record, it's safe to say that Nathaniel puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to creating technological solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. Nathaniel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielmanning/Kettle: https://ourkettle.com/Episode Website: https://betweentwocoos.com/kettle-coo-nathaniel-manningMichael Koenig on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mkoenig514
Panelists Georgia Bullen | Memo Esparza | Eriol Fox | Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain Open Source Design! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source with design. Learn how we, as designers, interface with open source in a sustainable way, how we integrate into different communities, and how we as coders, work with other designers. Today, as we wrap up 2021 and our first year of doing this podcast, we get reacquainted with each of our panelists as they give us a little history of their backgrounds and their involvement in open source. We talk about some of our favorite conversations, episodes, and guests that we had on, as well as the most memorable moments. We're also looking forward to 2022 and discussions we would like to have for future episdoes that would be of interest to everyone listening out there. Also, if you want to be a guest or if you want to get more involved in these types of conversations we have on this podcast, we're going to let you know where you can go to get plugged in to be a part of our community. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out much more and thank you for joining us! [00:00:53] Since it's been a year since we started doing this podcast, the panelists introduce themselves and give a little history of their backgrounds. [00:07:52] Richard and Memo tell us their most favorite conversations, guests, and episodes that they really enjoyed this year. [00:11:36] Eriol shares four things that are most memorable to her, which include the guests on this podcasts being from all different parts of the world, the diversity of what design means being covered so broadly, guests coming in talking about different communities, and conversations about what it means to be a designer. [00:14:52] Georgia reflects on what this podcast was set up to accomplish and she wonders what else is on the panelists minds about conversations on what it means to be a designer, the state of sustaining open source design at the moment, and future discussions they want to have. [00:21:41] Find out different places you can get involved and join us besides listening to this podcast, such as the Sustain Discourse, the Open Design discussion channel, the Sustain Slack, and if you want to be a guest on the podcast please contact us. [00:22:38] As we look forward to 2022, the panelists share parting thoughts on things they want to do and people they want to thank for being a part of this podcast. Links Open Source Design Twitter (https://twitter.com/opensrcdesign) Open Source Design (https://opensourcedesign.net/) Open Source Design Discourse (https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/) Sustain Design & UX working group (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/design-ux-working-group/348) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) Sustain Open Source Twitter (https://twitter.com/sustainoss?lang=en) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Georgia Bullen Twitter (https://twitter.com/georgiamoon) Eriol Fox Twitter (https://twitter.com/EriolDoesDesign?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Memo Esparza Twitter (https://twitter.com/memo_es_) Sustain Open Source Design Podcast-Episode 5: Bryan Paget on Open Source Developers with Design Thinking (https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/5) Sustain Open Source Design Podcast-Episode 10: Justin Scherer on Open Source Design at Stax (https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/10) Imposter Syndrome & Design- Who gets to say “I'm a designer?”-Human Rights Centered Design (https://hrcd.pubpub.org/pub/uyydag1t/release/2) Simply Secure (https://simplysecure.org/) Ushahidi (https://www.ushahidi.com/) Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/) Eriol Fox's PhD research into Design and Humanitarian Open Source Software-GitHub (https://github.com/Erioldoesdesign/Design_HOSS_PhD) The user is drunk-Richard Littauer Website (https://theuserisdrunk.com/) Sustain Open Source Design Podcast-Episode 16: Jérémy Landes on Type Designing (https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/16) Sustain Podcast-Episode 100: Only Hosts, on who are are, where we came from, and where we're going (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/100) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
MLOps Coffee Sessions #68 with Chris Albon, Wikimedia MLOps co-hosted by Neal Lathia. // Abstract // Bio Chris spent over a decade applying statistical learning, artificial intelligence, and software engineering to political, social, and humanitarian efforts. He is the Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously, Chris was the Director of Data Science at Devoted Health, Director of Data Science at the Kenyan startup BRCK, cofounded the AI startup Yonder, created the data science podcast Partially Derivative, was the Director of Data Science at the humanitarian non-profit Ushahidi, and was the director of the low-resource technology governance project at FrontlineSMS. Chris also wrote Machine Learning For Python Cookbook (O'Reilly 2018) and created Machine Learning Flashcards. Chris earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis researching the quantitative impact of civil wars on health care systems. He earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, where he triple majored in political science, international studies, and religious studies. // Relevant Links --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, Feature Store, Machine Learning Monitoring and Blogs: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Neal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nlathia/ Connect with Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisralbon/
In this edition: an illegal bus ride with Palestinians to the beach -- Cameroonian Baka indigenous group's ancient forests under threat -- Innovative apps made in Nairobi's 'Silicon Savannah'
Arguably the most important step in digital and financial inclusion is getting people online in the first place. The largest provider of free public wifi in sub-Saharan Africa is BRCK, a truly remarkable Kenyan start-up that has grown from its revolutionary first BRCK v1 to a SupaBRCK to connect rural villages in Rwanda to its brilliant Moja free public wifi. Co-founder Erik Hersman, who also co-launched renowned tech firm Ushahidi and the iHub in Nairobi, tells Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about why the internet should always be free. Read more on Stuff Studios.
Makala hii imeangazia kufukuzwa kwa wafanyakazi wa umoja wa mataifa nchini Ethiopia, mvutano kati ya viongozi wa madhehebu ya kikatoliki kiprotestanti na makanisa ya uamsho huko DRC washindwa kuafikiana kuhusu uteuzi wa mwenyekiti mpya wa tume ya uchaguzi, CENI. Huko Burundi wafanyakazi wa serikali waaswa kuhalalisha ndoa zao; la sivyo wafukuzwe kazi...pamoja na mengine mengi duniani kwa wiki hii. Ungana na mwandishi wetu Ruben Lukumbuka kusikiliza zaidi.
In anticipation of our upcoming virtual CC Global Summit, we're doing something a little different in this episode. Pack your bags and prepare for a short (audio) tour around the world, join CC's Ony Anukem as she speaks to three of our wonderful Summit keynote speakers. First up in Nairobi, Kenya, where we sit down with Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director at Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a global non-profit technology company that builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to raise their voices. Angela was also recently appointed to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. Next, we'll arrive in Bangalore, India, where you'll hear from Shuttleworth Fellow and Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, Achal Prabhala. AccessIBSA is a project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in India, Brazil and South Africa. Our final stop on the tour will be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where we will catch up with Cecília Olliveira, Executive Director of Fogo Cruzado. Fogo Cruzado aims to expand a community-driven open data platform and reduce the impact of armed violence to build a more just society. She is also a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Are you ready for an adventure? Get to know our Summit keynote speakers, as we talk about their work, what drives them and what they are most excited about for this year's CC Global Summit. Register for the 2021 CC Global Summit: https://www.classy.org/event/cc-global-summit-2021/e347520 Follow Angela on Twitter: @AngieNicoleOD Follow Cecília on Twitter: @Cecillia Creative Commons on Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecommons Donate to support the work of Creative Commons: https://www.classy.org/give/313412/#!/donation/checkout Theme music: "Day Bird" by Broke for Free (http://brokeforfree.com/). Available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license at the Free Music Archive (http://freemusicarchive.org). Open Minds … from Creative Commons is licensed to the public under CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
This #JamlabMeetup conversation focuses on what the implications might be for the roles of the media and various civic tech actors who are typically involved with trying to strengthen citizen engagement, increase transparency, accountability and democratic governance. Panelists share strategies that can be implemented to help journalists and civic activists to prepare and improve on ways of empowering communities, and the diversity of voices within the public space through digital media and other social innovations. Events Speakers: Kathy Magrobi, founder of Quote This Woman+ in South Africa Ivan Louis Pinno, co-founder of Digital Woman Uganda Dr Caroline Khene, senior lecturer at De Monfort University in the United Kingdom Daniel Odongo, director of implementation at Ushahidi
This #JamlabMeetup conversation focuses on what the implications might be for the roles of the media and various civic tech actors who are typically involved with trying to strengthen citizen engagement, increase transparency, accountability and democratic governance. Panelists share strategies that can be implemented to help journalists and civic activists to prepare and improve on ways of empowering communities, and the diversity of voices within the public space through digital media and other social innovations. Events Speakers: Kathy Magrobi, founder of Quote This Woman+ in South Africa Ivan Louis Pinno, co-founder of Digital Woman Uganda Dr Caroline Khene, senior lecturer at De Monfort University in the United Kingdom Daniel Odongo, director of implementation at Ushahidi
“The goal of the social good sector must be to end need, not just meet need. This means, for example, that international organizations … must have a transition plan that is centered around devolving power, money and voice to local organizations.” – Patrick Meier When Patrick Meier was 12 years old and living in Africa with his European parents, the first Gulf War broke out. With a big map of the Middle East, he started physically mapping the news updates with crayons and pens and markers. Fast forward to January 12, 2010 at 4 pm – when he learned as a Tufts doctoral student about the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Patrick didn’t know if his close friends, who were in Port Au Prince at the time doing research, were alive, hurt, or even worse. So he did what he had done many times since childhood – he pulled out a map of Haiti, and started to manually map crowd-sourced pictures, updates, and video footage that were emerging, largely from local Twitter users. He did so on a free open source live mapping software platform from Africa called Ushahidi (meaning “witness” in Swahili). Soon dozens of friends and fellow students joined him in the volunteer live mapping effort from his Boston apartment – along with students in communities around the world. Started as an emotional reaction to concern for his friends and others devastated by the earthquake, Patrick had no idea if his ad hoc efforts at sense making would be useful. Ten days later, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency referred to the live map as the most comprehensive crisis map of Haiti available to the humanitarian community. What started in his living room in snowy Boston with a bunch of friends from Tufts University, and what transformed into an “ad hoc collaboration by ordinary people wanting to help” using free open technology tools created not in Silicon Valley but in Africa, became the means for first responders being able to save hundreds of lives in Haiti – and a model for global institutions navigating humanitarian disasters thereafter. It also created physical maps of previously “dark”, unmapped areas of the world by tapping into a grassroots system of volunteers receiving and translating text message from people on the ground. And it began Patrick’s attempts to change the world in multiple ways, one map at a time, helping to revolutionize the power of ordinary citizens. Patrick now is using his various skills as a digital humanitarian and global-local activist to help silently transform the growth story of underdeveloped countries through technology. Over the past 15 years, he has worked around the world on a wide range of humanitarian projects with the leading international organizations including the United Nations, Red Cross and World Bank. In 2015, he authored Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. His influential and widely-read blog iRevolutions has received millions of hits. He currently serves as the Executive Director and Co-Founder of WeRobotics, which scales the positive impact of humanitarian aid, development and environmental projects through the use and localization of appropriate robotics solutions. These include aerial, marine and terrestrial and robotics. WeRobotics co-creates local innovation labs in developing countries (“Flying Labs”) where passionate local partners gain direct access to the professional skills and robotics technologies they need to scale their impact. In the process, WeRobotics works with these partners to incubate local businesses that offer robotics as service. According to Patrick, “the vast majority of social good projects seem to be led by foreign experts. They parachute in to momentarily extract data from the Global South without having any local knowledge or understanding of the local context. And then they usually disappear. We founded WeRobotics to counter this foreign-first, top-down, and techno-centric approach by shifting power to local experts.” Patrick says his plan for WeRobotics “resonates with calls from leaders in the Global South: we exchange knowledge and connections with and between local experts across Flying Labs, helping them reinforce their capacity, credibility and visibility; driving new funding, technologies and leadership opportunities to local experts while actively crediting and building their human resources based on their priorities. We are actively ceding market share to local experts. Our impact metrics reflect these priorities. … If we can cede majority market share to local experts, then others can too, along with entire sectors and industries. This is the systems change we seek, nothing less.” Patrick is an internationally sought-out speaker, having given well over 200 talks in more than 20 countries across 6 continents. He has a PhD from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from Stanford University, an MA from Columbia University and was a visiting student at UC Berkeley. In addition, Patrick was a Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo and holds certificates in Complexity Science from both the Santa Fe Institute and the New England Complex Systems Institute. He has taught several professional, graduate and undergraduate courses. Patrick’s photography and artistic sensibility – undoubtedly of use in his mapping and visualization work – has received acclaim. A President Emerita of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) once described his aerial photography of Italy as “fascinating,” “wonderful,” and “like a montage by many a contemporary artist.” His photography has also been featured by National Geographic. Meier was born in West Africa to European parents, and lived in Kenya until he was 15. He holds a CASA-certified drone pilot license for multi-rotor, fixed-wing and powered-lift drones. He has authored numerous leading publications, including on the humanitarian use of drones. He now lives in Switzerland. Please join David Bonbright and Aryae Coopersmith in deep dialogue with this fascinating and multi-faceted, mission-driven humanitarian.
SFG12 - Nat Manning, CEO of KettleNathaniel is the co-founder and COO of Kettle, a machine-learning-powered reinsurer that protects people from increasing climate change crises. Nathaniel previously led Ushahidi, the world's largest open source data platform for crisis response. There he helped scale the Ushahidi platform to over 200 countries gathering over 10M first hand reports. Previous to that he was a Presidential Innovation Fellow for Open Data, and then the first Chief Data Officer of the US Agency for International Development, where he helped open up and analyze large data sets for humanitarian response. He has been part of the founding teams of technology startups like BRCK and FellowAI and is on the board of Project Wayfinder.Nathaniel joins me today to discuss his path from Ushahidi to forming his own company, Kettle. We learn more about crowdsourcing information and why Ushahidi's timing was fruitful. Nathaniel shares with us the types of funding that Usahidi looked into and the benefits and pitfalls of each. I ask him for his input on how would he change the funding system for tech nonprofits. Nathaniel speaks to how his time with the government at USAID prepared him for the CEO role at Ushahidi. We also learn about Nathaniel's passion for insurance and the beauty of insurance in its purest form.“That's the impact you're really making is that sort of financial safety net there to let people who get hurt from these, acts of God, whether it's a hurricane or a fire, which, like I said, sadly, or there's only more and more of that they're protected, and that our communities are protected.” - Nathaniel ManningToday on Startups for Good we cover:How Ushahidi fostered creativity amongst the employeesThe challenges of running a big tech non-profit Building business development teamsDealing with misconduct in leadership as a CEOConnect with Nathaniel on Twitter or Kettle's website and his own personal website Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.Don't forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about The Giving Circle
They say never waste a good crisis. And while COVID-19 has had a horrible, crippling effect on individuals and economies alike, if there's one positive to the pandemic, perhaps it's that it's compelling and facilitating partnerships to serve the greater good; to bring people together to solve problems that have already existed, but that now have been brought even further to the fore. In this episode, we talk to entrepreneurs who have solved and are solving problems through crisis-induced collaboration.1:52 - We take a look back at a prior crisis-induced collaboration with Ory Okolloh, a Co-founder of Ushahidi, a digital and data mapping platform built in response to post-election violence in Kenya in 2008. 6:23 - Today, the Kenyan tech ecosystem is collaborating on a COVID-19-induced initiative, Safe Hands Kenya. We hear from Peter Njonjo, Co-founder and CEO of Twiga Foods, which is repurposing its existing technology and logistics infrastructure to get essential good in the hands of at-risk Kenyans. 9:06 - Safe Hands Kenya is a community-wide collaboration of both partners and competitors. Sokowatch Kenya CEO Angela Nzioki shares her perspective on the partnership approach, and both Angela and Peter discuss the impact for their respective businesses. 13:01 - Is this period an opportunity to take things even one step further, asks Ory Okolloh. 14:42 - My b-mic, Sayo Folawiyo, and I share our thoughts on this episode and the insights from Ory, Peter and Angela.
Angela Oduor Lungati is a technologist, community builder and an open source software advocate. She is passionate about building and using appropriate technology tools to create impact in lives of marginalized groups. With over 10 years of experience, she currently serves as the Executive Director at Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company that builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to raise their voices.
Open source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. These challenges include exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, how software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability. Ushahidi builds humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalised people across the globe. Its lead designer Eriol Fox will talk us through how they’ve been piloting a series of design jams to solve the problems of how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world. Come if you want to understand the impact design can have in the humanitarian and open source software sector and how to engage designers in humanitarian and tech for good causes. It’s ideal for anyone interested in the future of how OSS and humanitarian tech tools looks
The man leading BRCK, a team of dedicated individuals trying to connect Africa to the internet. BRCK is a rugged wireless WiFi device designed and engineered in Kenya for use throughout the emerging markets. He is also a co-founder of iHub, Nairobi's innovation hub for the tech community, and co-founder of Ushahidi, the free and open-source software for crowdsourcing crisis information.—Recorded live at the global event in Cardigan, west Wales in 2019.Watch Erik's full talk here: www.thedolectures.com/talks/erik-hersman-its-possible-to-do-hard-things-in-difficult-places
Web: erioldoesdesign.com Twitter: @EriolFoxDesign Instagram: @EriolFox Medium: @EriolDoesDesign Donate to Ushahidi's efforts: ushahidi.com/donate/donate-payment Watch Eriol's Diversity in Design presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=D1RZiIcnEWU Learn more about Joyann Boyce: thesocialdetail.com Read Mike Monteiro's Ruined by Design and Erin Meyer's The Culture Map Learn more about open-source design: OpenDesign.Ushahidi.com and @opendesignis on Twitter Support our guests and the creation of future episodes through sponsorship (bezier.show/support) or by buying Bézier swag. Transcript: adobe.ly/37XgbW7 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bezier/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bezier/support
The team break free from our Manchester studio and head down south to the glorious Bath Digital Festival to record two special live episodes. In this second episode, we’re taking questions on Social Media and Democracy, in a live recording of BDF Question Time 2019, a public debate about the ethics of social media and the role they play in the rise and fall of our democratic process. Our host is Jim Morrison, Director of Bath Digital Festival and founder of OneSub He’s joined by: Rebecca Rae-Evans - Reply & Tech For Good Live Bex is founder of the design studio Reply, and the podcast Tech for Good Live. Rebecca has a varied and extensive 15 year agency background in research and user-centred design. Deciding she wanted to align her work with her personal values, 6 years ago, Rebecca transitioned into working exclusively on projects that are for the social (and environmental) good. John Harris - The Guardian John is a Guardian columnist, who writes on subjects including politics, popular culture and music. He is the co-creator of its acclaimed video series “Anywhere But Westminster,” which focuses on the social realities underlying huge changes in politics. Eriol Fox - Ushahidi Eriol is a Design Lead who has worked in-house roles for 9+ years. Eriol is a Humanitarian/tech for good advocate and video game enthusiast. Ushahidi is a humanitarian, non-profit technology leader, developing open-source, digital tools to help people with better democratic process, human rights issues, natural and human-made disasters. James Padolsey - Ex-Facebook & Twitter Software Engineer James in his past as a software engineer worked at Facebook, Twitter & Stripe. He stepped away after ten years in tech and is now training as a paramedic. Mykola Kuzmin - University of Manchester Mykola is a 3rd year PPE student at the University of Manchester. Debate Mate Advanced Mentor, winner of Model United Nations competition at Regent's University and the winner of The Devil's Advocates debate on Immigration. --- Thanks to Bath Digital Festival, and to OneSub for bringing us here. OneSub are pretty ace, you should have a look at what they do, they’re building a new way to read the news, helping to balance bias and break out of filter bubbles. Listeners, what did you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch on twitter @techforgoodlive or Email at hello@techforgood.live And we’d love it if you gave us a nice iTunes review and told your mates about this podcast!
In episode five of the Loud Ideas podcast, Mind Doodle's marketing manager Tess Coughlan-Allen talks to Eriol Fox from Ushahidi about designing for everyone.
The first African smartphone factory, where phones are made from scratch, opened this week in Rwanda. The smartphones are designed for the African market, so they are being made as affordable as possible, while being accessible and secure. Tunabot Professor Hilary Bart-Smith at the University of Virginia, USA went back to basics to develop a fast swimming robotic tuna - the tunabot. They took detailed anatomical data from the Yellow-finned tuna and Atlantic mackerel and 3D printed the fast tunabot. The tunabot swims faster than existing tunabots by increasing the frequency with which its tail beats. Tech to help deal with dementia An estimated 130 million of us could have dementia by 2050, but technology could help people live with the condition. Videos that pop up on your phone to help you perform everyday tasks like boiling the kettle or QR codes on your clothes that help others identify you and contact your family if you get lost are just some of the advances that Jason Hosken reports on. Ushahidi Ushahidi is Swahili for witness and it’s also the name of an open source software. It was originally created ten years ago to report reprisals and violence around elections. Since then it’s widened out into all kinds of crisis mapping – everything from monitoring natural disasters to illegal deforestation. Angela Odour Lungati is the recently appointed Executive Director at Ushahidi. Producer: Ania Lichtarowicz (Photo: MaraPhone factory. Credit: MaraPhone)
Michelle Casbon is back in the host seat with Mark Mirchandani this week as we talk data science with Devoted Health Director of Data Science, Chris Albon. Chris talks with us about what it takes to be a data scientist at Devoted Health and how Devoted Health and machine learning are advancing the healthcare field. Later, Chris talks about the future of Devoted Health and how they plan to grow. They’re hiring! At Devoted Health, they emphasize knowledge, supporting a culture of not just machine learning but people learning as well. Questions are encouraged and assumptions are discouraged in a field where a tiny mistake can change the care a person receives. Because of this, their team members not only have a strong data science background, they also learn the specific nuances of the healthcare system in America, combined with knowledge of the legal and privacy regulations in that space. How did Chris go from Political Science Ph.D. to non-profit data science wizard? Listen in to find out his storied past. Chris Albon Chris Albon is the Director of Data Science at Devoted Health, using data science and machine learning to help fix America’s health care system. Previously, he was Chief Data Scientist at the Kenyan startup BRCK, cofounded the anti-fake news company New Knowledge, created the data science podcast Partially Derivative, led the data team at the humanitarian non-profit Ushahidi’s, and was the director of the low-resource technology governance project at FrontlineSMS. Chris also wrote Machine Learning For Python Cookbook (O’Reilly 2018) and created Machine Learning Flashcards. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis researching the quantitative impact of civil wars on health care systems. Chris earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, where he triple majored in political science, international studies, and religious studies. Cool things of the week How Itaú Unibanco built a CI/CD pipeline for ML using Kubeflow blog Why TPUs are so high-performance BFloat16: The secret to high performance on Cloud TPUs blog TPU Codelabs site Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning paper Machine Learning Flashcards site Interview Devoted Health site Devoted Health is hiring! site Ushahidi site FrontlineSMS site New Knowledge site Joel Grus: Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow site Snowflake site Periscope Data site Airflow site Kubernetes site Chris Albon’s Website site Partially Derivative podcast Partially Derivative Back Episodes podcast Question of the week Chris Albon To paraphrase: A computer program is said to learn if its performance at specific tasks improves with experience. To find out more, including the definition of a partial derivative, buy a pack of Chris’s flashcards. Who knows, they might help you land your next job. Where can you find us next? Michelle is planning the ML for Developers track for QCon SF on Nov. 13. Mark is staying in San Francisco and just launched two Beyond Your Bill videos: Organizing your GCP resources and Managing billing permissions. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 5” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Crowd Laugh” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org “Transformers Type SFX 2” by HykenFreak of Freesound.org “Approx 800 Laugh” by LoneMonk of Freesound.org “Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org “C-ClassicalSuspense” by DuckSingle of Freesound.org
The Mission of the Republic of Senegal to the UN hosted a United Nations roundtable for 14+ member nations on July 30, 2019. Dr. Matthew Daniels of IWP, Stephen Enada of the Int Committee on Nigeria, and Katy Money of Ushahidi led the discussion on how NGOs are using digital media.
Humanitarian AI Today's host Mia Kossiavelou speaks with Nathaniel Manning, CEO of Ushahidi, about humanitarian AI and Dispatcher, a new Ushahidi project which Nat will be heading using machine learning to match community resources with local needs.
Social media is under fire for how it threatens our society, our politics, even our mental health.Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech giants are criticized for spying on us and using secret algorithms to push us toward extreme views.Civic Hall is a key player in a growing movement to use technology to better the world-- what people are calling "civic tech".Our guest, Micah Sifry, co-founder and President of Civic Hall, is a longtime advocate for transparency, better government, and using tech for social change. "The problems that we face as a society are not going to be solved by tech alone," he says. Most of the problem-solving work that we see and support at Civic Hall is, at most, 20% tech and 80% social." In this episode we highlight the work of several groups, including Code For America, which is on a mission to make government work in the digital age, and Ushahidi, an organization that builds tools to solve the world's biggest humanitarian and international development challenges. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This weeks wonderful guest is Eriol Fox, designer at Ushahidi, joining us to discuss knife crime, how this years Budget is tackling the big tech giants and swearing at Piers Morgan (the colossal t*sser) in the name of charity. Things we mentioned: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46027265 http://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/Children_excluded_from_school_are_at_risk_of_knife_crime/latest-news.htm?ref=130695 https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/1055748086159605761 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/29/uk_budget_2018_tax/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/maxinemackintosh/2018/10/28/uk-announces-its-vision-for-nhs-technology-and-its-not-sexy/#3fcc1e38178b https://technation.io/news/it-pays-to-be-diverse-in-uk-tech/ https://danhett.itch.io/sorry Thanks to the magnificent PR Agency One who try to make sense of this mess. Also, thanks to podcast.co for hosting us in a beautiful mirrored studio. Which you can’t see. But it is pretty. Special thanks to @geekytom for the theme tune Get in touch:Twitter: @techforgoodliveInstagram: techforgoodliveEmail: hello@techforgood.live
Technologist. Blogger. TED fellow. Serial Entrepreneur. Passionate advocate and patron of Africa’s tech startups. Erik Hersman is a well-known elder of Kenya’s tech scene, having helped to found some of Kenya’s leading tech companies and ecosystem institutions. In response to the outbreak of post electoral violence in Kenya in 2008, he set up with three other co-founders Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping tool deployed in crisis situations. In 2010, he founded the iHub, Nairobi’s innovation hub, which is the nexus for Kenya’s entrepreneurs, hackers, designers, researchers and investors. In 2014, he helped to set up BRCK, a manufacturer of a rugged Internet router for Africa and a provider of free Internet via its Moja service. He spends most of his time at BRCK these days where he’s CEO. He also helped to found Gearbox, a hub for hardware development, and is a principal at Savannah Fund, an African venture capital fund. He is the founder of the influential Africa technology blogs, The White African, and Afrigadget. Erik is also a Senior Ted Fellow and Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow. You can connect with Erik at @White_African on Twitter.
The first in a special edition series of Tech for Good Live podcasts, recorded from UX Copenhagen. (@uxcopenhagen) It’s a two day conference on ethical design and we’re here, bringing you three podcasts looking across a range of topics. Accessibility, dark patterns and design ethics. In this podcast, we talk accessibility and inclusive design. We talk about the best and the worst in the sector and the latest developments. With regulars: Rebecca (Bex) Rae-Evans - looking after digital ethics at The Federation (@Rebeccawho) Jonny Rae-Evans - Head of Product Innovation at the Big Lottery Fund (@jonnyraeevans) And with special guests: Eriol Fox - from Ushahidi, open sources crowd mapping platform for human rights activists and crisis response. Founded in Kenya in response to violence around the elections - to raise marginalised voices. (@EriolDoesDesign / @ushahidi) Molly Watt - is a prolific advocate of inclusive technology. She specializes in assistive technology and design for those with sensory impairment (@MollyWattTalks)
Essential to a free and functioning democracy is an independent press, a crucial civil society actor that holds government to account and provides citizens access to the impartial information they need to make informed judgments, reason together, exercise their rights and responsibilities, and engage in collective action. In times of crisis, the media fulfills the vital role of alerting the public to danger and connecting citizens to rescue efforts, as Ushahidi has done in Kenya. Or, it can alert the international community to human rights abuses as does Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. But, the very capabilities that allow the media to alert and inform, also allow it to sow division – as it did in Rwanda leading up to and during the genocide-- by spreading untruths, and, through “dog whistles,” targeting ethnic groups and inciting violence against them. This panel will focus on two topics: the role of media as a vehicle for advancing or undermining social cohesion, and the use of media to innovate, organize and deepen understanding, enabling positive collective action. * Abdalaziz Alhamza, Co-Founder, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently * Uzodinma Iweala, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Ventures Africa; Author, Beasts of No Nation; Producer, Waiting for Hassana (moderator) * Ben Rattray, Founder and CEO, Change.org * Malika Saada Saar, Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights, Google
Linda Kamau is the Lead Software Developer for Ushahidi based out of Nairobi. She also is a co-founder at AkiraChix, a non-profit that offers technical training and outreach for young women. Linda talks to Scott about her journey and how she plowed forward even when obstacles were in her way.
Juliana Rotich var en av huvudtalarna på Internetdagarna 2016. Digitalsamtal träffade henne efteråt. Avsnittet handlar bland annat om Ushahidi, en plattform för att samla information från allmänheten, och om Brck, hårdvara som tar digitaliseringen till områden i Afrika där internetuppkoppling saknas. Har du synpunkter på samtalet, frågor eller förslag på vad vi kan prata om […] The post #056 – Juliana Rotich appeared first on Podcasten Digitalsamtal.
I recently had a conversation with Erik Hersman, an African instigator, entrepreneur and innovator whose work is widely recognized among the technology, development and humanitarian communities. And, I’m inviting you to join in. For those of you who don’t know Erik, he co-founded the heroic open source project called Ushahidi (which means "testimony" in Swahili), a crowdsourcing site which launched in 2007. Ushahidi was instrumental in mapping the violent attacks that were taking place during the Kenyan crisis. In 2008 Erik was named a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow and has become a Senior TED Fellow. The backdrop to our conversation for the show is Erik’s latest project: BRCK – a 'portable, rugged, on ramp to the internet for the many who as yet aren’t connected. Full show notes available at: Instigating.co/4 Episode 4 Released November 9, 2015 Edited by Moondogmarketing.com
This week, we have a brief discussion about how third party ad networks affect performance on news sites before talking with Sophie Shepherd. Sophie is a Senior Designer at Ushahidi, a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source products for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. We discussed the challenges of designing for international users with minimal data speed, how Ushahidi brings data and information to regions with nearly no connection, designing with task completion in mind, and more. ##Show Links: Sophie Shepherd Follow Sophie on Twitter Ushahidi Lara Hogan - A List Apart - Showing Performance Global Mobile Book Eric Meyer Crisis Design Rust Belt Refresh ##Transcript Katie: Welcome. You're listening to Episode 8 of The Path to Performance, the podcast dedicated to everyone to make the web faster. I am your host, Katie Kovalcin. Tim: And I'm your other host, Tim Kadlec and yeah, you nailed it; this is Episode 8. Well done! Katie: I was like, oh yeah, I totally know which episode it is. Wait: no, I don't. This is Episode 8. Tim: I mean, it's understandable; the numbers are getting higher, it's getting harder and harder. Katie: Totally out of control it's on more than one hand now! Tim: Yeah, once you've thrown that second hand, things get really complicated. It gets worse when you have to start taking off the socks and using your toes as well! That's where I always get hung up! Katie: You can wear flip-flops and then you don't have to worry about it. Tim: True, true. Katie: How are you, Tim? Tim: I'm doing OK; I'm actually wearing flip-flops right now! Yeah, I am! Katie: It's warm in Wisconsin? Tim: It is warm, for once. Yeah, I'm doing good; enjoying my day. And you? Katie: I'm good as well. The sun is shining here, which is a very rare thing in Ohio this summer and I feel like I have been whining about it for so long but today, I'm not whining. Tim: That's good! That's good! I'm guessing, we could maybe one of these times maybe we'll have an episode where we just kind of whine all the way through, but otherwise I think people probably enjoy the non-whining better. Katie: We can just have a bummer episode! Tim: Yeah, just a downer of an episode where we just air all our grievances about everything… Katie: We just talk in emo voice, just like…mwww…yeah, the web does actually kinda suuuuck… Tim: Yeah, exactly! I think this goes over well, I think this is maybe like a special Christmas edition. Katie: That is a really good idea. Tim: Right in time for the holidays. Katie: Christmas Bummer Episode! Tim: This is brilliant. That has to happen; I'm writing this down. Anyway, but glad to hear you're doing good now on this totally not Christmas at all episode. That's good. Katie: Yeah, on this summer-sunshine flip-flop fun-time episode! Tim: Yay! Katie: So, on the note of cool things, there's this episode from the Washington Post where in kind of a similar fashion, I know we talked a couple of months ago about Vox sort of declaring performance bankruptcy, Washington Post kinda did the same thing and talked about in an article the other day and that was pretty cool. They mentioned it sort of being in response to the instant articles and talking about just ads on news sites generally kind of sucky for performance, but I really liked this quite that it ended on that we have very little control over ads that load late or slowly but we wanted to make the core use experience as solid as possible because that is what we have control over and that's kind of a cool way to think about performance, just focusing on making good the core part that you do have control over. Tim: Yeah, and I think that's just generally awesome advice for anybody, because the ad work stuff comes up a lot and you have very little control over those third party ad networks and unfortunately a lot of them are super-slow right now but also essential for business but I like that they made the clear distinction between their core experience and understanding that the ads is just something you're going to have to tack on afterwards but mitigate the issues as much as possible. I think that's just really solid advice for any publisher. Katie: Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice article, it's a quick read; I recommend giving that a little skim or browse. Tim: Definitely. And then of course, Lara Hogan, who has made a habit out of writing good things over and over and over again or providing good performance advice in general, she wrote a post for A List Apart about showing performance; basically getting into some of the things she talked about way back in Episode 1 with us and also in her book about the importance of making performance visual: going into the dashboards and things like that, that they have up at Etsy and making sure that people can actually see the difference in performance. Katie: Yeah, she tweeted a little quick video a while ago and it might actually be in that article, I haven't had a chance to read it yet; it's on my to-do list but she posted a video of their video systems and it's really cool, it's really awesome to see that. Did I tell you that Lara, she talks about donuts all the time and donuts being her reward for good performance, achievements, good things like that, and when I saw Lara in New York a couple weeks ago, she took me to The Donut Spot that's in her neighborhood and I was so excited! Tim: Yeah, you told me. She's never taken me to The Donut Spot. I'm a little disappointed. I'm excited for you though: that sounds really cool. That's kind of… Katie: You know what? It was a really good donut because she says she's not a fan of the hipster donuts with a bunch of stupid toppings like cereal and candy bars and crap. Tim: Like the voodoo donuts thing in Portland? Katie: Yeah. These are just some straight-up home-town donuts in Brooklyn; I guess not really home-town but they were good! Tim: That's good. This is just like plain glazed? I want to know how far down the rabbit hole you went. Katie: We got banana…no, not banana: they were like custard-filled ones with the chocolate icing. I'm not a donut expert but those good ones! Tim: Gotcha, OK. That's a safe choice. Katie: Not the white sugary whipped cream-filled, the kind of yellowy-custard cream-filled ones; those are good ones. I don't know the distinction: is one cream and one custard? Is one icing and one cream? I don't know. Tim: I think it's usually like an icing and cream thing. Depending on where you go, it's almost like pure frosting is what it tastes like you're eating… Katie: Yeah, like you bite in and you're just like, oh my… Tim: Yeah, it's like there's frosting on the outside of the donut and frosting shoved down the inside as well and you just feel the cavities forming as you're eating them. It's great. It's a really good experience. But that's good. No, I did not…you did tell me this and that's very awesome, very cool. It's kinda like… Katie: Sorry; I'm obviously still thinking about that. Tim: I don't blame you. Katie: It was an experience. But, back to today's episode! We are talking to Sophie Shepherd and the big reason we wanted to get Sophie on here is not only because she's an awesome designer but because she has experience with working on products that are primarily used in developing countries that typically have the less than ideal device scenarios that we kind of always talk about in theory but she has some really great insight on talking a bout it in practice and actually designing for those devices and scenarios so it's going to be really interesting. Tim: Yeah, it'll be a nice fresh take, a different perspective than we usually get. Very cool. Katie: Cool. Well, let's go hear from Sophie. Katie: And we're back with Sophie Shepherd from Ushahidi. Sophie; can you tell us a little bit about Ushahidi and what exactly that is? Sophie: Sure. So, the what exactly it is, it's a Swahili word that means "Testimony". A lot of people are like, "Usha-what?" so it's not English so don't feel bad if you can't say it. And the company was founded in 2008 in Kenya so in 2008 what was happening in Kenya. there was an election that was fairly corrupt and there was quite a bit of violence broke out and some bloggers who were in Kenya and living in Kenya realized that they needed to do something to help out as well as just writing about what was happening, so they made a product in which people could submit reports of different places where the election was happening, different polling stations and this way they could say, there's been violence here, someone was killed here or this is a safe place where you can go to vote, or there's fraud happening. And what Ushahidi does is it takes all of these different reports and collects them into one place and provides a list and a map for them. So that's how it was founded; it's now a number of products but the name of our main platform is still Ushahidi and the purpose of it is still too collect data, crowd-source data. It's oftentimes gets mapped but isn't necessarily, we're re-doing the platform right now so that it's not only map data; it can really be anything that users submit. Katie: Awesome. So, spoiler alert, I know Sophie really well so I know the details of what she does and what really struck me and why I wanted to get her on the podcast so bad is because you deal a lot with users that are in places that have really poor connectivity and the products that you're designing are really crucial information that they need to get to. Can you talk a little bit about all of that and the challenges that you face when designing for that? Sophie: Sure. So, I think something that's really interesting is that it's not only poor connectivity but the kind of contexts in which people are using our products are unique. Not exclusively, but oftentimes they're used in crisis situations, so people don't have a whole lot of time. A lot of the time, the power could be down or internet could be down, so it's not only we have to think about connectivity but also ways that people are submitting information. This has been the first project I've worked on where it's not just, when we talk about performance, it's not just people needing to load something fast but it's about access and accessibility so, built into our product is people can anonymously text stuff in and that'll become a part of our system so it's really thinking about this whole ecosystem of access and ways of submitting information rather than just a website. Katie: Can you talk a little bit about what that means exactly, more than just a website? How else are you working around those connectivity and accessibility issues? Sophie: Yes, well, Ushahidi as a whole, not only with our platform but we have a lot of other companies that have spun out from the product itself, so there's a company Brick which is really, really awesome. It was founded by someone who was also a founder in Ushahidi and they make wifi devices that are super-rugged; they work off 3G connections so you can take those anywhere. We were in Kenya and they have all these attachments so it can be solar-powered wifi, so we had a group meeting in Kenya and we were all accessing the internet in the middle of nowhere on a beach from this device we had. So, it's thinking more about getting people information. Similarly we do a lot with SMS so if someone only has a phone they can text in a report or receive a response saying, OK, this has been confirmed, through their phone. Tim: This is fascinating stuff. I always think it's very interesting to hear the perspective outside of what we're used to in the little bubble that we get to live in here in the United States tech industry. This is taking everything in terms of the importance of building something that is going to work on different devices and the importance of building something that's going to perform well and this is really scaling up the importance of doing that, the vitality of doing that from just business metrics to, like you're saying, people's lives at stake in some of these cases. I'm curious; you mentioned being in Kenya and using those devices to get access. You can't obviously develop all the time in Kenya, so how are you finding ways to get that experience here, when you're building stuff from the United States so that you're feeling what it's going to be like on those, a 2G or a 3G connection or whatever it happens to be? Sophie: It's definitely a challenge for me because not only am I working every day on a really good connection but I've never really not had that; maybe five years ago my connection was not as good as it was now but I think I've always been as far as connection speeds in the one per cent, but we have a really great user advocacy team at Ushahidi so this is not only thinking about performance and website metrics, but we have a whole team that is dedicated to making sure that our users are satisfied, listening to what their needs are and responding in that way and also helping them, because this is a product that then gets extended and they can download it and set up their own deployments to use the product so we have a team that works really closely with people who are actually using it, which is terrific because we get a lot of feedback through that. Tim: I was going to say, are some of the team members in Kenya? Sophie: Uh-huh. Yeah, we have one person in Kenya, one person in Canada and then we have as part of, we have a specific user testing wing that's in Kenya but what they do is, since they are so in touch with people who use this stuff all over the world, they're good at being able to not only test it in Kenya but test it elsewhere and talk to…we have a large group using this stuff in Nepal right now because of the earthquake so they're in touch with them, checking that everything's working OK, getting any feedback from them. Katie: Do you tend to look at what specific devices the majority of users in these areas are using and start building and testing there or how does that work out? What's the size of an iPhone, that tends to be our default? What devices are you really thinking about in those areas? Sophie: It's interesting because right now, we are in the midst of re-building this product and so a lot of the people out there who are using it right now are using Version 2 which is the older version and at this point I don't even know how many years old it is but it's fairly outdated. It still works really well but it's not responsive; it's hard, we've noticed that quite a lot of people are using it on a desktop but that's only because it doesn't work very well on a phone so it'll be really interesting, we're launching the new one which is fully responsive and a lot more modern in this way to see how people end up using it. But it's tough because we can't say, iPhone users use this because it's used really everywhere in the world so maybe if it's used in the US it is going to be on an iPhone more, whereas elsewhere, it's Android but we try to cast a really wide net so there's an Android app that will be used for collecting information, you can submit by SMS. The new version's going to be totally responsive so what we try to do is not really focus on one but make sure that everyone can use it. Katie: So, you've been working on a responsive re-design and everything we've talked about has been the poor connectivity and all of that. How has performance played into those decisions when building this site or the product again for this new version? Sophie: It's a continuous consideration and process of checks and balances. One thing is that, thinking about images: part of this new system is we're able to have people submit images as part of their reports so that's something that we still have not quite figured out how we should work with how to then deliver those back to people and also thinking about different JavaScript libraries that we're using. It's a constant balance, so I think we're still figuring it out. We've done quite a bit of user-testing but more UX user-testing but the application itself is not totally done, it hasn't been built yet, so I think that's to come in terms of optimizing how it's going to work exactly. But from the design and front-end, we've definitely been keeping things really light and really the only question that we have is how we're going to treat images. Tim: Is it primarily a matter of using them or not using them or is it a degree of compression in terms of getting them to a point where maybe they're a little pixilated and ugly but they're balanced: the trade-off is that they're going to perform well on those types of networks? What are you battling with, with the images? Sophie: Well, I think basically every single image that is ever going to be on the site is going to be submitted by a user, so we don't know exactly the sizes of images that are going to come in and then at what point we are then going to compress them or shrink them and how we're going to do that and then how they're going to then be delivered back out. Yeah. Tim: So it's getting a system in place for all the user-generated content? Sophie: Exactly, yes. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: So, you talk a lot about style guides and patter libraries and Sophie I know that's how you like to design and work. What is that process looking like? Do you do testing as you go on designs and see how performing it is or how fast it's loading under those different circumstances? Can you just talk a little bit about your design thinking? Sophie: Yeah. What we have been doing is we did all the UX fairly separately, thinking about just user flows and how things were going to be laid out and how things should work and then we did some visual design and then we started combining these by building the pattern library, so we took out patterns from visual design and eventually we've just started building templates and designing in the browser because we have enough of these patterns to build upon and it's been really great; this is the first time that I've worked in this way and what I really love about it is that each of our patterns and components basically stand on their own so it's really easy to look at them and understand exactly where certain weights are coming from. By designing modularly, we can pull those out rather than seeing a page as a whole and not really understand what's causing what. Tim: In a prior episode, we were talking to Jeff Lembeck of Filament Group and he mentioned what he called the "Jank Tank" which is this big box of basically ugly, horrible, slow devices. Considering how wide the net you're spreading, do you have anything similar? Is there a Ushahidi Jank Tank that you guys go to? Sophie: There isn't, but I love that idea. Tim: Yeah, I think we were fans of that too. Sophie: Is it like…what does he mean exactly? Tim: The idea was having… Sophie; …lowest common denominator kind of devices? Time: Yeah, basically grabbing cheap devices or old devices and firing those up: things that are going to be maybe a few years old and are probably going to be a huge challenge to make things feel fluid and work well on those and you have those handy to test them out and see what honestly might be a more typical user would experience than the high end stuff. Sophie: Yeah, we don't have that here in the States; I feel bad calling it a Jank Tank because that's negative-sounding, but in the office in Kenya, they have…they all work in a building and there's quite a few tech companies that work in there and they have something like a Mobile Device Lab and I think it was sponsored by a mobile company there but I was there earlier in the year and it kind of blew my mind; I put a picture of it on Twitter that we can refer to in the Speaker Notes. But that was all of these phones that were phones that I hadn't even necessarily seen, that they don't sell in the States, and they're all used for testing so at some point probably now that I'm talking about it, I'm realizing we should do it sooner rather than later, they have a whole testing lab there that we can test this product on. Tim: Nice. A mobile device lab does admittedly sound a little bit more ??? serious. Katie: Everything that you're saying sounds like, just tying in that accessibility and performance are going hand in hand and it sounds like you've just learned a great deal of empathy in your time there. Is that true and has that influenced your design? Sophie: Yeah, definitely. I think something that has really changed in my mind is thinking about when doing the design, what actions are people going to want to take, so I think that goes with performance too: if we can only load this one button that says "submit a report" and skip all of the images then that's the most important thing, so, really thinking about where to guide people and what the most important and crucial actions are before loading and everything else, so as a designer that's been definitely something that, previously I was doing client work and it was like we had this long list of requirements that we had to fit in and now it's kind of re-assessing and re-prioritizing what requirements actually are and having different levels of this is the one thing they need to really use this app and then here's all of this other helpful stuff that could be called crucial but isn't actually life or death crucial. Katie: That's really interesting. Do you think that there's any way that, for those of us still working on client projects, to have those conversations with the client to try to be like, "no, really, but the marketing video isn't truly required"; exercises in priority and stuff: do you have any tips for paring down those requirements? Sophie: I think it's tough if your talking to a marketing person because they'd be like, "no, literally I'm going to die if I don't get this on there." Katie: And you're like, "no, literally, people are on our products like…" Sophie: Yeah. I think any time it's easier to say, "does this go above this in the priority list" people are willing to answer that question rather than either or. So, in general, communicating and deciding things I would recommend ordering rather than choosing people to sacrifice things. Tim: And it seems like that's clarified too in, I would guess one of the reasons why it works so well where you are is because that task, if you're looking at what the most important thing for the user to do is, it's so very clear and so very critical whereas on maybe on a more traditional thing where you're working with marketers or whatever, they may not have as clear a sense of, what is the ultimate purpose of this site? And then it becomes a lot harder to do the prioritization without that. Sophie: Yeah; it's funny because we're in the process right now of re-designing the company site as well as re-designing the product itself and it shouldn't be, because there's no life or death, but it's so much more complicated to prioritize stuff on the company site because there's so many different types of audiences and services that it needs to provide whereas on the app itself, it's pretty clear to say, what's the most important action for someone to take. Tim: Within the new site, do you still have to take into consideration a lot of the same sort of constraints in terms of the different devices and connectivity because that's who your audience is that you're marketing to, or are you marketing to a different group through the site? Sophie: Yeah, the site will be, well that's up for debate; that's I think what we're still trying to figure out. I think by default it's a good idea to not ever say, "oh well only people in the States with nice phones are going to look at this" just because that's a dangerous attitude to have, but it's possibly less of priority for the site itself. Tim: So, going back to prioritizing performance within the actual apps and stuff that you're doing: did you have set targets that you were looking at when you were working V3 of this? Were there hard-set goals; we are not going to go over this amount of weight or we are not going to take longer than this for the map of data to appear or anything like that? Sophie: Yeah, so we set a performance budget and we've set a few of them; we set one for the front-end so what we've done is build this pattern library and we have all of our, we're calling them "weight-outs" which are basically our different views within the app itself. So we had an initial goal for that, that we've met and then we set a separate one for the build itself and that's still in process, so hopefully we can get around that target. I like this too because instead of having one end-goal we can really check as we go. Tim: Yeah, it's nice to have it broken down like that. Can we ask what the targets are, just out of curiosity? Sophie: I can look them up but I don't know them right now. Tim: That's fine. Just curious. Was it in terms of the weight or is it a different sort of, more like an experience-focused metric or anything like that, that you're targeting? Sophie: Yeah, we did a weight and a load time. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: It sounds like you've worked in some of the perceived performance thinking too when you're saying, what's the critical information to load first. Sophie: Yeah, for me as a designer, that's definitely something that I can relate to more and I think in some ways it's possibly more important. I think they work as a team but… Tim: I think it is. And I think that's…I think or I hope that that's what, within the performance community, the people who really that's what they do focus on, I think that that's where everything is starting to, we're starting to wake up to that and certainly to shift towards understanding that it really is about the experience and making sure that the critical things are coming in, whatever the top task, whatever the most important features are on the page or coming in and measuring those sorts of things, instead of this blind race to the finish that we've kind of had in the past. Sophie: Yeah. I'm curious to see how that thinking changes because I love the idea of a performance budget but I think sometimes it can be a little limiting and you wouldn't want to sacrifice certain things just to fit into the performance budget. Not limiting, but I think it's very concrete whereas it should be a fairly fluid depending on context of the site itself. Tim: Sure, yeah, it doesn't dictate what goes on; it's another consideration or it's part of another piece in the puzzle. Sophie: Right. At the same time, it's the easiest way to communicate goals. Tim: True. It's hard to without it having a hard set thing, it's very hard, yeah. Sophie: Yeah, until you have the design done, you can't say, OK, our goal is that this is going to load and then this is going to load this much later. It helps to have a number that everyone can refer back to. Katie: So, when you say for everyone to communicate, who is that? Is that between you and the developers? Is this something that your leadership is really that's close to their heart as well? Sophie: Yeah, I think when I said that it was more coming from my experience with client work, where you're using this number as a kind of tactic to force a client to decide on certain things. For us, since we're all working internally, I think definitely any…basically, everyone wants to see it be as fast as it possibly can, so we're all working towards the same thing. Katie: Is there ever a push-back to even like, "OK, now that we've hit that, let's try another goal that's even faster"? Sophie: Not yet, because we haven't launched it, but I wouldn't be surprised if we launch it and get certain feedback that it wasn't loading or it wasn't working quite right on something. I'm really curious to see once it's out there and people are using it, how people respond. Katie: Yeah, I'm really curious to see what metrics you find out from that. Tim: Did you make a distinction…there's the cutting the mustard approach that the BBC popularized which is the core experience goes to maybe older, less capable browsers/devices and the enhanced experience goes to everybody else. One of the things that that fails at, or that doesn't take into consideration which seems like it would be really important for Ushahidi is the situation where you have somebody is on a very nice device but the connectivity is really awful. Did you have to make any distinction between different experiences or do you just have one experience and that experience itself is extremely lightweight, no matter what the scenario is? Was that enough for you to accomplish or you needed to do? Sophie: Yeah, that's funny; we had our company retreat in Kenya so it was I think maybe about half, maybe a little less of our company is in the US so we all went there with our snazzy iPhones and still couldn't connect to anything and it really, I think in terms of empathy, made us realize: oh, wait a second. But in terms of yeah, I think we're just going to try to make it fast for everyone. We don't have a whole lot of enhancements for people on quicker systems yet. Katie: When you were in Kenya, were there any things that were especially awful to try to load, like you're used to just being part of your everyday life? I'm just curious. Sophie: I remember reading Twitter, on the Twitter app and everything loaded except for the pictures and it made you realize just how often people supplement their tweets with pictures; I remember getting really frustrated about it. Katie: That's interesting. Sophie: But I didn't even really try to do a lot of stuff because it really didn't look very well. Same thing on Instagram; it's like sometimes this progressive loading thing; I would rather it not load at all than, oh, I see all of these people posted great pictures that I can't look at. I'd rather not know than… Katie: Or like the tweets having fomo, oh, you had a joke and I can't see the punch-line! Sophie: Exactly! Katie: That's really interesting because when we're just designing here in a bubble it's like, "well I think that would be fine for you to just know that it's there but not see it" but then when you're actually using it, you're like: no, this sucks. Sophie: Yeah, it's like actively frustrating. Tim: How often do you get to Kenya? Sophie: I'm new to the company; I've only been here since the beginning of the year but I think they do a retreat every year but not necessarily always in Kenya; I think every other year it's in Kenya. And I think other people on the team, it depends, we'll do these what we call Hit Team Meetings because everyone is remote and then mini-teams will get together and all work together for a week so those have been all over the place since people live on opposite ends of the world, depending on who's meeting they usually choose a place that is fairly central for everyone to get to. Katie: We'll start to have a list of sites, Sophie, how much is this really crappy, wherever you end up going… Sophie: How long does this take? Katie: Look it up and tell me how much it sucks. Sophie: It is cool to have people on the team everywhere for that reason. Tim: Sure, I bet that gives you a really nice overall picture of a whole bunch of different landscapes from a technical perspective. Sophie: Yeah. Katie: I know, I didn't prepare a list of questions like I should have! Tim: It's all right, I'm actually having a lot of fun just going off the cuff on this, knowing almost nothing. I did a little bit of research and I had heard of Ushahidi from this big fat book about mobile on a global scale that was put out a couple of years ago. Sophie: That's cool. What was that book? Tim: It's called Global Mobile. It's six hundred pages and each chapter is written by a different author on a different topic and I think Ushahidi came up twice… Sophie: Oh, that's awesome. Tim: …in the book. Sophie: Do you know what they referenced or what it was…. Tim: One was just talking about how…I don't remember one of the references in much detail. The other one I know that they were talking about a variety of different mobile technological solutions that were out there; I think they were focused primarily on Africa in that chapter or similar areas and they were talking about the different services that are making use of technologies that we might consider a little bit more simple, but they're doing really powerful things with it and so I think that they were focused on the SMS aspect, if I remember right. Sophie: Yeah, it's been definitely challenging, but also interesting that designing a product that is not used for one specific thing; it's very much user-focused and people will download it and decide how they use it, so it's been a challenge to design for that and to keep it well designed but also really, really flexible. Tim: Which is why I guess it's so important I guess that you are getting a chance to experience at least a little bit every once in a while because everybody talks about front-end design perspective, from a development perspective, how important it is to put yourself in your user's shoes and when you're talking about what Ushahidi is dealing with, and it's not just the devices or the browser or the connections: it's the situations; it's just so hard. It's so hard to put yourself in those sorts of shoes and understand what it must feel like to use the application or the site in those sorts of scenarios; that's such a huge challenge. Sophie: Yeah, there's no way that, well it sounds selfish saying it, but hopefully there's no way I would ever actually be able to experience that but I think that is why we have such a strong and valuable user advocacy team so that they can really communicate with them when people are in those situations and as they're using it in those situations. Tim: Do you get feedback from the users that are pertaining directly to things like how quickly they're able to report something or how quickly they're able to get access to the data that's been reported, in terms of it takes too long sort of a thing, not just a usability thing but from a performance perspective? Sophie: We haven't. Or not that I know of. Tim: Well, maybe that means you're doing an awesome job! Sophie: We'll see. It's also tough because the new version is yet to be used on a wide…by a lot of people, so we'll see, but it is great because we have the product is also open source, so we have a lot of community submissions and ideas so this is again the first time I've worked on something like that where I'll just be in my normal task list that we use internally as a team and I will get one from…I'm in Katmandu and this thing is not working; can you add this? So it is really cool to see that people care about improving the product. Tim: That's awesome. Katie: Is there anything that you've learned from going through this process and being hit with all of these pretty heavy design constraints that are just, oh man, there's no way I can ignore that. Has that changed your view on design, even outside of this product in particular? Sophie: I think that this has, compared to how I used to design, I'm keeping things a lot more simple, not even necessarily visually; visually as well but also just in how they work and not trying to dictate how something should work. Oftentimes we'll, with other people in my design team or sometimes with our developers, we'll discuss how something, spend hours doing flows and then just realizing, why don't we just let people do what they want to do and take a step back and not define so much how this should be used, so I think just the fact that so many different people are using it for different ways, I've found that it's often best to leave things open and then to not over-complicate them. Katie: Is that kind of freeing? Sophie: Errr….it's been difficult because I'm so used to not being like that. But yeah, kind of. For me as a designer it's been kind of hard to let go of control. Katie: Yeah, that's usually I think our downfall as designers is wanting to control everything and that's kind of a big part about embracing performance too: it just sounds boring to design for performance, even though it's not and it's just like anything else. Sophie: Yeah, I think that I talked to ??? about this a long, long time ago and I remember it's stuck with me in terms of performance but also it's kind of user advocacy side of design, which is that it's not in conflict with the design; you shouldn't think of performance as taking away from visual design but it's just a piece of design so it's just another aspect of UX and if it loads faster, then that'll make the design better. Katie; It means you did your job well! Sophie. Yeah, exactly. Tim: At the end of the day it's about, especially in your case, but at the end of the day it's really about how quickly can the people using the site or the application get the task done that they came to the site to do and so that makes performance comes right up front and center along with any other bit of the process really, information architecture, clear content structure and good visual design; it all contributes. Sophie: That's what design is, right? Getting people to be able to do what they want as easily as possible. Katie: Is this something that you were thinking about before having these experiences in these other parts of the world, or was that the eye-opener of, oh-whoa, my designs should encapsulate this? Sophie: Yeah, I think it's always something theoretically that I could be like, your designs have to load really fast, of course, but selfishly I've always wanted them to look really cool or try out some latest thing that's trending on the web. So I think it's helped me step out and realize I'm not designing this for me. If I want to try something, I can just do it on my own site. Katie: So, I'm wondering if that's maybe the first step for designers that are not wanting to think about it… Sophie: Make them design something for someone in crisis. Katie: Yeah! Sophie: At an agency, every junior designer has to design for… Tim: Oh man! Sophie: …life or death situations. Katie: It's part of the interview process, you need to whiteboard a crisis design. Sophie: Yeah! Tim: Talk about no pressure right off the gate, that's what you're dealing with! Sophie: Have either of you seen Eric Meyer's presentation? Tim: I have not, but I've heard it's excellent. Sophie: I really want to. Katie: I want to see it as well. Sophie: It sounds really… Katie: Everything you are talking about is making we think of that. Sophie: I would really, really love to hear, I don't know if he would…he could be a good guest on the podcast just to talk about his experience. Tim: Yeah, I'd love to talk to Eric. I've heard the presentation is just fantastic but I haven't had a chance to catch it live. I don't know if it's recorded or not anywhere but if so, I haven't seen it. Katie; I think if any of you want come hang out in Ohio, I believe I would have to double-check, but I think he's giving that Rustbelt Refresh in Cleveland in September. Tim: I do like that conference. I did that last year, it's a lot of fun. Katie: So, you want to come hang out in Ohio and see it? Tim: Sunny Cleveland! Katie: Where the lake caught on fire! Sophie: Oh my God! Tim: I don't think I heard this. Katie; I think it was before I ever lived in Ohio, ten or so years ago. It may have been the river, it may have been the lake, I can't remember. One of them was so polluted that it caught on fire at some point. (45:11) Tim: That sounds a lovely! Sophie: That's terrifying! Tim: My only knowledge of Cleveland, which I think is probably upsetting and insulting to all people who live in Cleveland… Katie: Drew Carey Tim: Yep. So, I apologize for that! Sophie: I've been to Cleveland; I spent two weeks in Cleveland. Katie: What? Sophie: I was going through, you know, being young and wanting to work for Obama during the election but even then, I don't know what's in Cleveland, even after spending time there. Katie: I have been to Cleveland twice and I don't know. I live two hours from it; I couldn't tell you what's in Cleveland. Sophie: Really cheap houses if I remember; lots of empty, cheap houses! Katie: One time I tried out to be on The Price is Right this is when Drew Carey was the host and because I am really bad at being like, wooow, cookie-crazy person to be on The Price is Right, they interview every person that goes through the process and like, "why should we pick you?" and my only response was just like, "I'm from Ohio. Just like Drew. Cleveland Rocks, right?" Sophie: Certainly good for TV. Katie: Yeah, well, we'll talk about Ohio. Obviously I did not make it! Tim: That's sad! Sophie: There's still hope; you could try again. Tim: Don't give up on that. Katie: No, that was actually…. Sophie: Don't give up on your dreams. Tim: No, you've got to follow through. Katie: That was horrific; you're just like cattle being herded for six hours through this line as they interview every single person that goes in the thing, so if you're ever in LA and thinking, it would be fun to go on The Price is Right: it's not. Sophie: Think again! Katie: Sophie, you never did that when you lived there? Sophie: A lot of people I knew did. Katie: Did anyone ever get picked? Sophie: They did it…I grew up in LA and they filmed Jeopardy I think right next to my High School and they would do it as a fundraising thing where you would…they'd get a group things of tickets to Jeopardy and then the cheerleading squad or whoever would try to sell them individually. Katie: Whoa! Sophie: That's the closest I've gotten. Katie: Growing up in LA sounds wildly different from anywhere else! Was it? Sophie: We didn't have any lakes that lit on fire! Katie: Wasn't your High School the one from Grease? Sophie: Yep! Katie: Oh man. Sophie: And Party of Five. Is that what that show was called? Katie: Yeah. Tim: That's kinda cool. Katie: I'm more interested in Rydell High though. Sophie: I think they filmed it in partially different schools but the stadium was our stadium. Katie: The track where Danny's trying to be a jock and running around? Sophie: Yeah, yeah. Katie: Aw man, that's the worst part when Danny's trying to be a jock! Sophie: Wonder Years. Wonder Years, that's the block I grew up on. Katie: Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: Dang, you have Wonder Years, Alison has Dawson's Creek. Sophie: Dawson's Creek. Way before my time. Katie: I want to grow up on a teen drama! Sophie: The Yellow Brick Road was also the street, from the Wizard of Oz. Tim: Where was the Yellow Brick Road? Sophie: Before the houses were built, they filmed it on the street that my house was on. Tim: What? Sophie: And then years later, they had a reunion for all of the oompa-loompas that I accidentally walked on and I was sort of….what? Katie: Were they dressed up? Sophie: No. Tim: Wait, wait, wait…you just said oompa-loompas, but isn't that…that's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? Sophie: Not oompa-loompas. Munchkins! The Munchkins! Tim: I was like, wait a minute… Katie: Glad you got that 'cos I didn't! Sophie: I didn't either, I was like, this sounds right. Tim: Yeah, OK, I just wanted to clarify which movie it was. Sophie: Can we cut this out? We're going to get complaints from Little People of America organization. Tim: Yeah, that's fine. Actually we could use a few complaints. We haven't got many or any yet. Katie: Thanks for bringing it up. Now we're going to….well, if you're looking for feedback, let me tell you...you can lay off the chit-chat. Tim: We've gotten plenty, plenty of negative feedback and complaints so please don't bother sending those emails or letters. There, that should… Katie: I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter about your podcast! Tim: It happens. Sophie: This really went off the rails! Tim: It did, but you know what? That's cool. That's all right. I feel like… (50:03) Katie: It was getting really heavy, so you know we to lighten it up. Tim: It was, we had to lighten it up and I feel like it's kind of weird that we had gone this far without talking about Drew Carey so, you know, however many episodes we're into this and Drew Carey had never come up; seems wrong. Katie: Really? Sophie: Give us some Drew Carey facts, Katie! Katie: Actually, well I don't know any Drew Carey facts but I'm sure Tim has lots because that seems like that's your era of TV. Tim: I'm not that old, all right? Katie: Yeah, but Everybody Loves Raymond, you'll never… Tim: Yeah, I actually had…. Sophie: Are you Everybody? Tim: No, no. Am I? Sophie: Do you love Raymond? Tim: I do love Raymond; I do. It was a good show, all right? It was a good show. Under-appreciated by the current generation! Sophie: It was the most popular show ever at the time. Tim: It was really popular; really popular. Sophie: Did you just watch it on multiple TVs over and over again to up the ratings? Tim: Errr…. Katie: He had it going on every TV in the house, the whole day and night! Sophie: The syndication too so they're getting those checks, all from Tim! Katie: Tim loves Raymond! Sophie: New TV show! Tim: All right, all right; neither one of you are ever invited back on this podcast; even you, Katie. That's it, that's the end of it. I'm going to go start my own podcast where we're going to talk about Everybody Loves Raymond and The Drew Carey Show and things like that. Katie: Indiana Jones Tim: Indiana Jones, yep. This really did get off the rails. My gosh! Sophie: Yeah, feel weird going back to talking about crisis. Tim: So, well, you know, maybe we don't, there was a lot of really good, like Katie said, it was getting really serious and really awesome discussion, I think, around performance and it was really cool to hear somebody who is coming at it from that global perspective which, it's just not something that we commonly think about a lot, for most of us aren't dealing with on a day to day basis, so it's really interesting to have somebody come in and burst the bubble a little bit and give us a broader perspective. Katie: Yeah, it's great because I think like you said, Sophie, earlier: in theory everybody's like, it's nice and stuff and obviously we talk a lot about performance and everything and it's one of those things that I think everybody is like, yeah, yeah, in theory yeah, we want it to be fast because we don't want to be shamed by Twitter, but… Sophie: Other web designers! Katie: Yeah, basically. So it's great for you to come in here and give us the perspective of what that actually means and hopefully shed some light on that empathy. Sophie: Yeah, thank you for having me. Katie: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Tim: Going forward, it anybody wants to follow along and hear more about what Ushahidi's doing or about what you're doing, how do they do that? Sophie: For Ushahidi, I would recommend following Ushahidi on Twitter, ushahidi.com for a lot of information about all their different products and blogposts and then for me, my website is sophieshepherd.com Tim: Very cool. Katie: What about any social media that you may have because, I might be biased, but I think Sophie you have a pretty good account that's pretty funny! Sophie: My Twitter unfortunately is sophshepherd, because there's a British teenager named Sophie Shepherd who took that from me. So, don't follow her unless you want to hear a lot of complaining about tests and boyfriends. Katie: Do you follow her? Sophie: Occasionally! Then I get too mad about it and then I think, what if they think it's me? Katie: Is she also blonde and kind of looks like you? Sophie: Yeah, I've sent her a message; she does kind of. I sent her a message on Facebook once and she went, what are you freak? And then that was it. Katie; Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: She called you a freak? Sophie: Yeah. I'll put a screenshot in our speaker notes! Katie: OK, well follow the real Sophie Shepherd then. Sophie: Yep. Tim: Well, thank you and we'll definitely have to have you on again to discuss because I feel like there's a lot more we could get into in terms of Drew Carey and Ray Romano, so in a future episode. Katie: You can do that on your separate…Everyone Loves Ray. Tim: And Tim Loves Raymond. Yeah, that's good. It'll be the initial episode. Sophie:: Tim and Ray. All right. Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thanks; bye. Katie: Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Path to Performance podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or on our site pathtoperf.com; you can also follow along on Twitter @pathtoperf. We'd love to hear what you thought so feel free to drop us a note on Twitter or leave a raving and overly kind review on iTunes. We like to read those. And if you'd like to talk about being a guest or sponsoring a future episode, feel free to email us at hello@pathtoperf.com
Brandon Rosage and Sophie Shepherd from Ushahidi tell us that focusing on performance and designing with a pattern library make a focused, usable product—in the developing world, and everywhere. Read more »
On the second episode of the African Tech Round-up we get an update on progress being made by iAfrikan and Ushahidi’s Report Xenophobia Initiative (ReportXenophobia.co.za), find out which African country Facebook’s Internet.org app will be rolling out into next, reveal details regarding the latest tech firm seeking delisting from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, prepare to bid farewell to South Africa’s largest e-commerce brand, examine whether or not the vinyl record is making a bold comeback and poke fun at an initiative that will allow South Africa’s business elite experience homelessness for one night. Be sure to listen right through to the end of this week’s show to hear us debate the role of diversity in Africa’s tech industry-- and business in general. We’ll pose the question-- does nurturing diversity enhance productivity and contribute to increased profitability? Music Credits: All Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
In the very first episode of the African Tech Round-up Podcast, hosts Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku share a little bit about themselves before diving straight into the Africa's most noteworthy digital, tech and innovation highlights from the past week. Most importantly, Tefo and Andile discuss a promising tech-driven initiative called reportxenophobia.co.za launched by iAfrikan-- in association with Ushahidi, that aims to nip the recent occurrence of xenophobic violence on the African continent in the bud (with special emphasis on South Africa). Music Credits: “Protofunk”, "Rolling at 5" and "On the Ground", by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This month’s podcast features a long journey across Tanzania to discover how low-tech innovation can help developing nations eradicate poverty and meet the Millennium Development Goals. From improved cookstoves to a new system that combines sanitation and composting, small initiatives aimed at local communities can bring big leaps where limited resources and infrastructure are available. Looking at the Millennium Development Goals, we also shed light on what’s needed to reduce global carbon emissions in order to reduce global warming and prompt sustainable development. Joyeeta Gupta of the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, says that countries ignoring the issue of climate change have to be isolated by the international community, while the developing world needs to find a new model of sustainable development. We then talk about conservation with the story of an award-winning vet who is trying to save the endangered grey crowned crane of Rwanda, which is being wiped out by poaching. We also meet Chris Albon of non-profit tech company Ushahidi to discuss how open data tools can map human rights abuses during crises. Finally, there is a sneak preview of next month’s podcast: border water wars and World Water Week.
Ushahidi is an interactive mapping tool for use in crisis situations, which humanitarian workers can use to help them target assistance.
How can we use technology to support sustainable development? In this university podcast, media expert Tim O’Reilly discusses notions of collective intelligence, man-machine symbiosis, and real-time feedback loops from sensors to provide a context for understanding the role of tools like FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, Crowdflower, Samasource in powering the future. He considers Google’s autonomous vehicle and unpacks the technology behind it to provide deeper insight into where technology is taking us. O’Reilly delivered his remarks at the USRio+2.0 Conference hosted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/technology_and_environmental_sustainability
Robbie MacKay, Brandon Rosage and Brian Herbert have a chat about what’s new in Ushahidi Platform 2.5, Cairo. If you’re upgrading your deployment or you’re interested in what we’re up to, have a listen and see what’s new under the hood. Announcing 2.5 – Cairo Facilities Theme for Ushahidi On the wiki: Upgrading Ushahidi On the wiki: Migrating to Ushahidi 2.5 Opening Music:Blue Ducks - Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation Closing Music:Broke For Free - As Colorful As Ever Subscribe iTunes | Subscribe RSS | Download
Brandon Rosage and Brian Herbert talk about big phones and Internet zippyness in Korea, the case_sensitive podcast and design considerations in Ushahidi 3.0. A few links from the show: Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get faster, cheaper broadband than US cities case_sensitive podcast Opening Music: Blue Ducks - Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation Closing Music: Broke For Free - As Colorful As Ever Subscribe iTunes | Subscribe RSS | Download
Today Brandon, Evan and Brian cover OSCON where we talk about the benefits of openness in our industry, just getting things done, design jams and a tease about the future of Crowdmap. A few links from the show: OSCON 2012 Weekly: OSCON, Code testing and more Design: Views, Reports, Themes and a Pony Disrupting Ushahidi 2/2 Burger Map Women Under Siege – Mapping sexualized violence in Syria Opening Music: Alash Ensemble - Eki Attar Closing Music: State Shirt - Computer Subscribe iTunes | Subscribe RSS | Download
Evan Sims and Brian Herbert kick off the Ushahidi Podcast, talking about Ushahidi’s central authentication system, CrowdmapID. Other topics cover badges, Yubi Keys, and the future undecided format of the podcast. A few links from the show: Wiretap Studio Swift River CrowdmapID Crowdmap YubiKey Карта помощи пострадавшим от наводнения на Кубани (Map of the victims of the floods in the Kuban) CrowdmapID Server Repository Ushahidi Android App 3.0.0 Badges by Ushahidi Roderick on the Line The Vergecast Opening Music: Lessazo - Moussa Closing Music: Chatham County Line - Carolinian Subscribe iTunes | Subscribe RSS | Download
Installing second hard drive, getting rid of pesky toolbars, Profiles in IT (Juliana Rotich, co-founder Ushahidi), finding a tech job (What Color is Your Parachute?, survey employers, tackle selected tech projects, joint interest groups, read industry rags, attend workshops), Stuxnet updates (Obama claims credit, joint US-Isreali initiative, effectively penetrated Iranian nuclear enrichment program, 1000 centrifuges destroyed), Flame malware (40 times bigger than Stuxnet, probably developed by Stuxnet team, targets Iranian intelligence, may be easily turned against US), Oracle-Google trademark lawsuit (Google successfully defends the use of Java APIs, good for innovation in software development), and history of the microwave (accidental discovery that radar would melt a Hershey bar led to Raytheon patent). This show originally aired on Saturday, June 2, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).
Installing second hard drive, getting rid of pesky toolbars, Profiles in IT (Juliana Rotich, co-founder Ushahidi), finding a tech job (What Color is Your Parachute?, survey employers, tackle selected tech projects, joint interest groups, read industry rags, attend workshops), Stuxnet updates (Obama claims credit, joint US-Isreali initiative, effectively penetrated Iranian nuclear enrichment program, 1000 centrifuges destroyed), Flame malware (40 times bigger than Stuxnet, probably developed by Stuxnet team, targets Iranian intelligence, may be easily turned against US), Oracle-Google trademark lawsuit (Google successfully defends the use of Java APIs, good for innovation in software development), and history of the microwave (accidental discovery that radar would melt a Hershey bar led to Raytheon patent). This show originally aired on Saturday, June 2, 2012, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).
The Disaster Management Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is helping incident responders learn to use social media. In this one-on-one interview conducted at Stanford University, host Karl Matzke and Jeannie Stamberger discuss how to write retweetable messages, how to separate legitimate helpers from posers and how to use social media to prevent loss of life. In one example, the World Bank used teens with cell phones to create GPS-linked maps identifying structures vulnerable to collapse in earthquake-prone areas. In another, during a recent evacuation drill at Stanford University, Stamberger reported that tweets provided useful information that would have taken exhaustive testing to uncover. In the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, the Google people-finder application helped connect lost quake victims to the friends and relatives who were looking for them. In another case, Ushahidi encouraged the use of Twitter hashtags #haiti or #haitiquake to report security threats, health emergencies and natural hazards. (Today they are moving these functions to local partners.) Perhaps the most intriguing research Stamberger is conducting is in how to stop a rumor. Incorrect information travels as quickly as correct information; these researchers seek to tell the good from the bad, and then learn to get truthful information out quickly. Matzke and Stamberger discuss how organizations can join the Disaster Management Initiative, a consortium of practitioners, academics, non-profits, for-profits, volunteers, researchers and other interested parties. https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/jeannie_stamberger_crowd-sourcing_disaster_relief
Teresa Clarke, Chairman and CEO, Africa.com Leapfrog Technology; South Africa’s Access to Telecommunications; Sahara Reporters; Ushahidi’s Subsequent Uses; Kenya leads US in Mobile Payments
A VerySpatial Podcast | Discussions on Geography and Geospatial Technologies
Main topic: Integration of social media and geospatial technologies. News: Census of Marine Life, Galileo, and Ushahidi.
Patrick Meier of Ushahidi.com talks about their free and open source solution, first created for mapping incidents of violence during the 2007 Kenyan elections and now being used in Haiti and Chile to assist with rescue and relief efforts.
Patrick Meier talks about deploying mobile and web tools to enable citizen reporters to give early warning about human rights violations: “crisis mapping.”
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