Announcing Ushahidi Trusted Developers

We aim to grow and support our community, both developers and users. This is a bit of a juggle with the many moving parts of three software products combined with a global network of people using our software for election monitoring, crisis/emergency response and civil society actions. For recognition, we have a few existing programs for the community and our partners. We'll be growing these programs and adding a few new ones in the coming months. First up, I'm delighted to share that we are changing the Trusted Developer program. Previously we have recognized the significant contributions of John Etherton and Rob Baker as Trusted Developers. We are excited to announce the following additional Trusted Developers for 2012. These developers have lead in the Ushahidi community for over a year. We recommend their work and seek their guidance was we plan the roadmap for Ushahidi 3.0. The Trusted Developers provide code, feedback, leadership and mentorship in our Developer Community. With their guidance we will review your feedback in github issues and forums, as well as roadmap and feature requests. It is our hope that they can help support your efforts to use Ushahidi and help us all evolve. We recognize that there are many more leaders rising in our community. We are very thankful for all the contributions and recommendations. Please join us in welcoming our new Trusted Developers: Farid Boushra Attaalla: Farid is a web developer with over seven years of professional experience in the development. As the the owner of New Generation Development Center, a civil society organization promoting human development company, he specializes in creating custom web sites for NGO's and Elections monitoring, focusing primarily on custom Ushahidi, WordPress design and development. He also blogs on topics relating to web design, small business, Egypt politics and work-life balance. Chris Blow: Chris is an interaction designer and web developer with a background in usability testing. He is responsible for design strategy at Meedan, an international nonprofit working on cross-cultural communication. Chris has been involved with Ushahidi since its early stages in 2008 when he first met Erik at a coffee shop in San Francisco. Over the years he's worked on design, theme development, system administration, public speaking and data visualization. He collaborated on early stages of "Multiple Hosted Instances" (now Crowdmap), helped design the first Ushahidi iPhone application and has contributed to the Swift River strategy. Kuo-Yu Slayer Chuang: Slayer started his research and industrial-related service projects in Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan from 1999. His current research topics are humanitarian supports, Internet of Things, CPU design, Location-based services (LBS) with Open GeoSMS, and fair/charity trading for Taiwan local agriculture. Kuo-Yu joined MIT CSAIL as an visiting scientist for the multi-tile debugger research of RAW (Reconfigurable Architecture Workstation) project from Oct. 2001 to the end of 2002. Then started a few research projects from 2003 such as ITRI CX32 CPU design, natural hazard monitoring with WSN, micro controller toolchain design, LBS on mobile devices, and later participated OGC open standards technical meetings for joining SWE standardworking group. From 2008 until now, Kuo-Yu and his team are developing a tiny handy Short Message Service (SMS) based standard for exchanging coordinates on mobile devices called Open GeoSMS and is one of the OGC standards. This open standard is under discussion of ITU-T and has already adopted by several telecommunications operators, map/navigation service providers, device makers, and even for some open source disaster management project such as Ushahidi and Sahana. Now a social enterprise, GeoThings, is going to be launched for providing integrated disaster management solution and fair/charity agriculture trading platform. Francesco Ciriaci: A humanitarian geek, Francesco spent 10 years in social entrepreneurship as project and program manager, working at the intersection of technology, humanitarian relief and international development. Francesco co-founded Reflab and currently lives in D.C. working at the World Bank to leverage mobile tech for transparency and accountability of development projects (#WBFinances). Francesco has led the Offline to Online App Community Project for the past year. A committed Ushahidi fan, he belives citizen engagement and crowdsourcing are the key to build a better world. Pablo Destéfanis: Pablo is an ICT expert with 15 years of experience in the private and public sectors. He is based in Washington, DC, and has extensive experience in infrastructure, security, and enterprise IT, which he scales and applies to projects in Human Development, focusing on open source and mobile solutions for healthcare, education, and governance. He holds a MSc in Systems Engineering, and is pursuing a Master's in Technology Management at Georgetown University. Pablo provides end-to-end project implementation, including technology analysis, design, power solutions, development, team leadership, and deployment, with extensive experience in Latin America and Africa. Sara Farmer: Sara is a data nerd with a crisismapping habit. She's a Standby Task Force core team member, has led various parts of CrisisCommons and spends a lot of her spare time building code for this space, and mentoring teams building socially useful systems though Geeks without Bounds and Random Hacks of Kindness. Her day job is CTO of Change Assembly, a startup dedicated to improving the availability of human development and crisis data. Aaron Huslage: Aaron is a co-founder of Tethr, which is delivering worldwide on-demand communications to people and organizations all around the world. He was a co-founder of Safecast which provides crowdsourced radiation monitoring data to Japan. Aaron serves on the board of advisors of Geeks without Bounds and active in the Random Hacks of Kindness community. Seth Kigen: Seth is a software developer/GIS consultant who has been actively involved in both developing visualization tools and providing training services to several organizations on how to utilize free and open source GIS/visualization tools to support informed decision making. Ajay Kumar is a technologist and development professional with interest in application of ICTs for social benefit from the small town, Bokaro Steel City in India. He works on application of ICTs for social benefit and believes in applying technology to help people & communities. He also likes to tell stories and learn by traveling. With a background in Software Engineering, his main areas of interests are: Human Aspects of Technology & Human Centered Design, User Experience Design, ICTs for Development & ICTs in Disaster Management. He recently moved to The Netherlands to study Philosophy of Science, Technology & Society at University of Twente and reflect on how technology affects human behaviour and society. More about him can be found at http://aju.bz/me. Dunstan Machoka: Dunstan is the CEO of BTI Millman Limited an ICT solution provider based in Nairobi. He is a graduate from the University of Nairobi with Bsc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering and is currently pursuing his Masters in Public Policy and Administration. Dunstan is the team leader behind the development and deployment of The eMazingira Platform. This is an Ushahidi deployment that enables the real-time mapping of environmental incidents. Together with other reporting mechanisms the platform enables citizen participation in environmental conservation. The initiative has earned the team local and international awards including The Tandaa Grant Award-2010, United Nations World Youth Summit Award-2011 and The African Business Awards-Award for Environmental Sustainability in 2012. Apart from this other initiative done include The Kusanya Mobile Data Collection System currently used by the United States Presidents’ Malaria Initiative Program targeting malaria prevention in 15 African Countries with successful deployments in Ghana and Ethiopia. Hiroshi Miura: Hiroshi is a Sub-leader of Sinsai.info / Representative director of OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan. He has been in charge of operating and leading Sinsai.info, Japanese Ushahidi responded to disaster in 311. OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan has been responsible to provide sinsai.info service and management. He is also active as evangelist of Open Source Software, recently lead as director of Human Resource Development WG in Japan OSS promotion forum. He has been involved in development of Linux, Samba, OSM tools and so many OSSes. Tarik Nesh-Nash: Tarik is the CEO of Software Centre, a software R&D startup based in Morocco. He previously worked as a manager at Microsoft in Seattle and Beijing, and as a delegate in Iraq at the International Committee of the Red Cross. Tarik is on the board of Transparency Maroc, the national chapter of Transparency International, and a member of The Regional Council of Human Rights, a national institution for the promotion and protection of Human Rights. He founded many political crowdsourcing initiatives particularly related to constitutional drafting, election monitoring and corruption fighting. He is interested on applying technology to concepts related to participatory democracy. He has a master’s degree in Computer Sciences and a bachelor in law. Hal Seki: Managing Director of Sinsai.info / CEO of Georepublic Japan. He has been in charge of leading Sinsai.info, a website using Ushahidi platform to provide information about the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, as a member of OpenStreetMap Foundation JapanHack For Japan which is a community for technicians to encourages them to use their skills for something good for Japan. Hal is well-known as an organiser of a largest non-commercial industrial conference for location-based services called Geomedia Summit in Japan. Dennison Williams: Dennison is a developer with the March-Hare Communications Collective which provides communication tools to anti-authoritarian actors engaged in hostile environments. He has contributed patches and development direction to Ushahidi Core, developed a few custom Ushahidi modules, themes and mobile applications, and has contributed to security audits. **** We are very thankful for all the Ushahidi contributors and look forward to more recognition in the coming weeks and months. Thank you, Heather