How I succesfully became an Outreachy intern for the May to August 2019 session at USHAHIDI.

I wrote this poem for our 2017 kick off annual team retreat. In 2016 we shipped a new version of the Ushahidi platform (Mustang) and the first version of TenFour (Rollcall). We had been working on these products for more than 2 years and getting them out the door was a huge accomplishment. It was us working together as a team that helped us to overcome the obstacles and birth more years of impact at Ushahidi.

This is the second of three spoke word pieces I composed and performed at Ushahidi team retreats over the years. Have been working up the guts to share these with the world. Ushahidi has been a source of inspiration, this poem in particular focused on how we measure success. So often funders are exclusively focused on the growth of quantitative impact metrics, but i've personally found this to be emblematic of the cliche "missing the forest through the trees."

Ushahidi has inspired some great works of art at our annual team retreats over the year. Here is the first (of three) Ushahidi inspired poems performed at our team meeting.

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