[caption id="attachment_11908" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Ushahidi Team - January 2013[/caption] As the greater Ushahidi community continues to grow, we're realizing we need to have special people dedicated to both the deployer side, and the developer side. Likewise, as the number of products and projects grow, managing the operations were becoming a bottleneck. For this reason we're taking our own core team and doing some rearranging:

Community Developer Liaison

One of the top requests from our Community, including our 2012 Community Survey, has been to provide more technical support for Ushahidi. We're happy to announce that Ushahidi is promoting Angela Odour from Ushahidi Software Developer to our new Community Developer Liaison. Angela started with Ushahidi in 2010 as an intern. She has dug in the code, answered your forum and github tickets, and grown with Ushahidi. Instrumental to the Uchaguzi community efforts, Angela helped document processes and train community members for this large project. Being very familiar with our product suite/team and our community is key to success in this role. Angela will be focused on improving our documentation, hosting technical events (online and in person), and increasing our developer community support. Angela will need your help on how we can better support your Ushahidi journey. Please don't hesitate to drop her a line at: angela AT ushahidi.com.

Operations Manager

So, operations can be a handful for a distributed team, and it's hard to checkin with people and understand the needs for the small teams when you're constantly on the move (both problems that are mine specifically). It was abundantly clear from the team meeting that I need some help internally with our communication and accountability. To this end that we are creating a new role -- the Operations Manager -- who will work internally with individuals and teams to connect the dots, ensure we're on track with our deliverables, and help seek assistance where and when needed. We asked Rob Baker, who was originally part of the volunteer community and then who then joined the team full-time last year, to take on this role. Rob has been a bulwark to the team since he joined, carrying serious technical credentials, backed up by a detail oriented focus on projects. Plus, he's a great guy that gets along well with everyone, a specifically important character trait for someone who's managing ops in a fairly flat organization like Ushahidi. Rob can be reached at: robbaker AT ushahidi.com.

Founder Wrangler

It turns out that as things get busier it's harder and harder to do the small things that make our team, the community and our partners experiences great. Coordinating meetings, travel and communications become problematic and an increasing number of things fall through the cracks. Enter Esther Ondingo. We've known Esther for two years, since she was previously John Kieti's right-hand lady in the m:lab. She's now the go-to person for the whole team when it comes to anything to do with facility related items in Nairobi, as well as being Juliana's, David's and my own wrangler. :) (Her contact is: esther AT ushahidi.com) In just the first month that Esther has been on the team, she's proved to be a god-send. I'm constantly amazed by the people I get to work with; Angela, Rob and Esther thanks for being part of the team. (photo credit: Afromusing aka Juliana Rotich, Executive Director's camera via Gunner of Aspiration Tech. Location: Kenyan Coast)