My Beauty Best Teacher

Ethan Zuckerman writing about his recent visit to iHub Nairobi:

Kenya’s not just part of the narrative behind Ushahidi, a platform used globally but developed by Kenyans to respond to a domestic political crisis. Kenya matters because it’s one of the places where the future of technology is coming into focus, where a generation of creative people are building the future, one experiment at a time. iHub makes sense because it’s the physical manifestation of the creative collaboration that took Ushahidi from idea to project to platform within months. I had to go to Nairobi before I really got it. And now I don’t want to leave.

Twaweza's name means:

...“we can make it happen” in Swahili. It is a new citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa. Twaweza believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action. We seek to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding government to account.

Ghana's Danquah institute calls for examination of e-voting Mac-Jordan writes in Global Voices:

...the Danquah Institute (DI), a policy think tank, research and analysis centre, is urging a national platform for stakeholders to lead the discussion on the possibility of facilitating the adoption of biometric voter registration, and subsequently the e-voting system in Ghana.

From the Ushahidi Blog:

Over the last week, while the world watched the US elections (as were we), we were also watching the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Since last Wednesday we’ve been quietly scrambling towards the first deployment of the new Ushahidi Engine into a crisis zone. Today, we’re announcing this instance to the world...[continue reading]

White African reports on the UnitedforAfrica mapping application:

The Ushahidi engine (version 1) is being used to map reports of the current xenophobic attacks happening in South Africa on a site called UnitedforAfrica.co.za. The attacks are a product of foreigners moving across the borders, especially Zimbabwean, and encroaching on the lives of South Africans.