Ushahidi

Juliana Rotich - Executive Director

Juliana Rotich is originally from Kenya where she spent her early life and schooling. She later moved to the US where she majored in IT and has worked in the industry for over ten years.

She collaborated with the online community and co-founded Ushahidi which is the Swahili word for testimony. Ushahidi is a web based reporting system that utilizes crowdsourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. As a Program Director for Ushahidi she manages projects and aids in the development and testing of the Ushahidi platform.

She also blogs at 'Afromusing' blog, typically with a focus on African tech and renewable energy. She is a budding African Futurist and a TED Senior Fellow. She often speaks at international conferences about tech and Africa.

Erik Hersman - Director of Operations & Strategy

Erik Hersman is an international technology influencer with a keen eye on the impact of web and mobile technology innovation across Africa. Raised in Sudan and Kenya, Erik brings unique energy and insight to the world of technology and innovation – bridging the gap between Africa and Silicon Valley. He has a B.S. in Business Management from Florida State University.  As part of the Ushahidi strategy he has been building the iHub (Nairobi's innovation hub) since early 2010, a place that has grown to 3000+ Kenyan developers, designers, and entrepreneurs with connections in the corporate, academic and investor sectors.

An avid blogger, Erik writes two different technology-related blogs - AfriGadget and WhiteAfrican. He is frequently a speaker at meetings and conferences dealing with technology in Africa, mapping, blogging and web application development, including; TED, PopTech, DEMO, Picnic, SXSW, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0.  He is a TED Senior Fellow, a PopTech Faculty Fellow, sits on the Safaricom Innovation Board and is a founding organizer of Maker Faire Africa.

David Kobia - Director of Technology Development

David is a co-founder and technology lead at Ushahidi and brings more than 10 years of product development experience and a multidisciplinary background to his work, with a focus on social and emerging technologies. He works in a variety of roles, from designer and coder to strategist. After pursuing a BS in Computer Science at the University of Alabama, he has been a professional software developer and has worked with almost every web technology in use today. In 2010, he was a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award (35 top innovators under 35) and the Humanitarian of the Year award.

Henry Addo - Senior Developer

Henry is a software developer living in Accra, Ghana. He has worked as a software developer with several IT companies including Suuch Solutions, txtGhana, IDZ Ghana limited. He has also worked as a Java instructor at IPMC Ghana, an IT training institution.

He is passionate about open technologies and has been instrumental in the evangelism and advocacy of the use of Free and Open Source Software in Ghana. Henry enjoys riding on his motorcycle when he is not doing his professional work, practice Karate Shotokan and traveling. You can read about his personal experiences with technology on his blog at Info zone.

Patrick Meier - Director of Crisis Mapping & Partnerships

Patrick is a recognized expert and thought leader on the intersection between new technologies, crisis early warning, humanitarian response and human rights. He is the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers and previously co-directed Harvard University’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning.

Over the past 10 years, Patrick has consulted extensively with several international organizations including the UN, OSCE and OECD in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is regularly invited to present at conferences such as the Skoll World Forum, PopTech, SXSW, Where 2.0 and TEDx. He has been interviewed by the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, PBS and NPR. Patrick is also a distinguished scholar completing his PhD at The Fletcher School during which time he was a Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University. In 2010, President Bill Clinton publicly thanked him for his leadership and contributions. He blogs at iRevolution.net and can be reached at patrick@ushahidi.com and@patrickmeier.

Brian Herbert - Director and Lead Developer: Crowdmap

Brian Herbert is the Director of Crowdmap, serving up free hosted deployments of the Ushahidi Platform. Crowdmap allows anyone to have a website up and running that crowdsources and aggregates geospatial information and visualizes it in useful ways for visitors. His responsibilities run the gamut from customer service, to vision and development.

Before falling in love with Ushahidi, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, worked with Esoko in Ghana as a software developer and performed web maintenance at CNET. He received his MBA from Kennesaw State University and a BS in Computer Information Systems from Bellarmine University.

Caleb Bell - Designer

Caleb is a UI Designer living in Tallahassee, Florida. Before joining Ushahidi, he practiced web and print design at Design Farm, a small creative studio in Tallahassee. Caleb enjoys using graphic design principles to simplify needless complexity and just make things look good. He grew up in Kenya and loves to drink chai with anyone and everyone.

Linda Kamau - Developer

Linda Kamau is a software developer based in Kenya with a degree in Business Information Technology. She develops both web and mobile applications. Before joining Ushahidi, Linda worked as a software developer with IT firms such as Ibidlabs, Ltd. and Mobile Pay, Ltd.

When not doing what she loves most (coding), she enjoys outdoor activities like camping. She is also a die hard Man U fan and can often be found watching the latest football match.

Limo Taboi - Finance Director

Limo is a banker and blogger living in Nairobi, Kenya. Prior to joining Ushahidi, Limo worked as a banker in the Kenyan finance sector. He holds an MBA and dabbles in Nairobi Stock Exchange investments and real estate management. In the future, Limo plans to develop funding and finance links to the local tech community. He enjoys formula one racing and travel.

Emmanuel Kala - Developer

Emmanuel is a software developer living in Nairobi, Kenya and has been part of the Ushahidi volunteer developer community since December 2008. Prior to joining Ushahidi, he served as the lead for the software development team at Strathmore University where he worked on applications for managing higher education institutions. He also worked as developer at Alliance Technologies. While there, he worked on a file encryption tool and deployed Open Source GIS tools at the Department of Defense.

Ahmed Maawy - Software Engineer, Swiftriver

Ahmed Maawy is a software development guru, developing on desktop, mobile and web platforms. His experience ranges from enterprise systems development to online marketing and mobile data collection. He has worked with companies such as Kenya Airways and the Romanian Tarom Airlines. In the past, he has also served in technical management positions. He has a Degree in Business Information Technology from the Malaysian Limkokwing University of Creative Technology. During his free time, Ahmed loves to spend time with family, close relatives and friends. In addition to that, he also enjoys coding something very challenging or reading about astronomy, science and technology as well as watching the Discovery or National Geographic channels. As a hobby, he enjoys walking around and traveling along the coastal towns of Kenya, visiting and spending time with his family and friends.

Charl van Niekerk - Sr. Web Application Developer

Charl van Niekerk is a software developer with over seven years of industry experience building scalable web application back-ends. He obtained his Software Engineering degree from the University of South Africa. He is a strong proponent of web standards and firmly believes it should be illegal to ship binary executables without the corresponding source code.

Heather Ford - Web Ethnographer, SwiftRiver

Heather Ford is an anthropologist who studies how communities develop alternative systems of trust and authority online. She uses ethnographic methods to study bias, network effects and do behavioral analysis of online communities that either use Ushahidi/Swift tools or who may benefit from them. Heather is recent graduate of the UC Berkeley iSchool Masters of Information Management and Systems program where she looked the social life of information in schools, educational privacy and Africans’ on Wikipedia.

She is a former Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board member and the former Executive Director of iCommons – an international organisation started by Creative Commons to connect the open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. She was a co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa and of the South African non-profit, The African Commons Project as well as a community-building initiative called the GeekRetreat – bringing together South Africa’s top web entrepreneurs to talk about how to make the local Internet better.

Heather Leson - Director Community of Engagement

Heather Leson has a diverse technical background and experience in digital response and open source communities. She brings a passion for community building and idea hacking to her role as Director Community Engagement at Ushahidi. With a formal education in politics and library information technology, she has over 10 years of experience in technical incident management, software life cycle development, customer care and communications in Internet technologies.

A leader within open communities, including Random Hacks of Kindness and CrisisCommons, Heather is the organizer of numerous successful unconference and hackathon events. Bridging information and people inspires her. She enjoys sharing stories about tech super heroes on her blog textontechs.com. Always interested in hearing from members of the Ushahidi community, reach out to Heather at: hleson@ushahidi.com and @heatherleson.