Ushahidi is currently building a new public technology product called Dispatcher, which helps communities build resilience through peer-to-peer engagement and machine learning. Dispatcher builds upon our deep experience in crisis response, and is the next chapter of Ushahidi’s mission to understand and improve how communities come together and help each other, both in times of crisis as well as during everyday life.

In order to best design a product that is responsive and thoughtful to the needs of our user base, we will be hosting a community research study at iHub in Nairobi on 1 March 2019, from 08.30am until 18.00pm. We are opening this event up to the public for participation, and would like to invite anyone who is interested to sign up for a 20-minute time slot to chat with us and answer a few questions about your community involvement.

We sent out the Ushahidi Open Source Survey 2018, to get a better understanding of who our open source user and contributors are, their experience using and contributing to our tools, and what we can do to improve your experience.

We sent out our survey on 4th October 2018, with an initial deadline for feedback of 19th October 2018. In a bid to garner more feedback, we extended the period to November 9th 2018. However, even with the extension, the feedback turn out was still lower than expected. Nonetheless, those who participated in the survey shared some useful insights that will feed into our open source strategy moving forward.

Last week, Ushahidi launched our first grassroots fundraising campaign, geared towards raising support to enable us to continue to support hundreds of grassroots organizations using our cutting-edge open source technology to make their work 10x more effective.Over the next couple of days, we'll be featuring some of our grassroots partners, learning more about the projects and how they're using Ushahidi.

This week, we feature Penang Hills Watch, run by Penang Forum, whoo have been using Ushahidi to raise awareness about environmental impacts of hill land degradation while engaging with government authorities to take action against unsanctioned or non-compliant acts of hill clearing in Penang State.

Here are some thoughts from Rexy Prakash Chako and Dr Kam Suan Pheng, co founders of Penang Hills Watch

Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.

The Bedrock of any democracy is elections. However, recent outcomes of elections around the world have planted seeds of doubt in credibility, and it seems that democracy is on trial. We, as Ushahidi, jump in to try infuse the electoral system with trust, through technology