On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:36 PM, LBell
<lbell270@...> wrote:
Hi all -
Not sure the best place to ask this - but here it goes:
I've been super-impressed with the responsiveness of some of the
developers, especially via git., Thanks. However, as I continue to get
more involved, I'm interested to know more about Ushahidi as a whole.
Where can I learn more about Ushahidi as an organization / company?
Things I am interested in knowing:
- Size of the core team (and roles)
- Are there paid staff / developers?
These are the paid staff. Half developers, half other
- Who is ultimately responsible for development directions?
David Kobia, Director of Technology
Brian Herbert, Director of Crowdmap
- Funding source(s)?
We have two funding sources: foundations and paid for deployments.
The Foundations that currently fund us include Omidyar, Ford, Knight, MacArthur. Nat Manning runs a special project team which does consulting and paid for deployments. These are highly customized Ushahidi deployments.
- Long-term prospects (and prospectus)?
- Legal status / business model of Ushahidi? (Non-profit / For profit
/ Registered?)
Non- Profit
- etc.
My reasons are two-fold:
- First as I meet more of the group, it is fun to know who fits in
where into the master plan,
Well, as a forum moderator, you are part of that master plan. Thank you for building community with us.
- And second, in my project's quest for funding, I need to be able to
answer potential donor's questions with something more than "Yeah -
its a great group of people... somewhere... doing assorted things to
make The Awesomeness."
I'd be happy to help you with this writing. I really see deployers as the people who are mostly deserving of micro-grants/kickstarter types to do the amazing work that they do. Maybe i should believe in lottery tickets so that I could help fundraise for everyone ; )
My ultimate hope is that if I can scrape together enough funding for
implementation, I can start kicking some back into the Ushahidi
ecosystem - either directly to the core development, or to plugin /
independent developers who can address our niche needs. In the case of
Ushahidi core, I'm curious to know how that would be utilized.
Wow, that is amazing. As we approach plan our next steps, we will be hosting more calls and sharing designs about how to improve. We are braining about how to improve our plugin architecture and software development (in general) to open up more and make it a valuable experience for folks like you. And, for the long standing community members who have built so much over the past years.
For example, I was discussing my implementation with a "socially
responsible" venture capitalist last week who was throwing around
numbers that seemed would be best suited for giving Ushahidi a boost
(and my project could ride on the wave -- rather than fund our
implementation directly.) To paraphrase the discussion, it basically
boiled down to this: What could (and would) Ushahidi do with a million
dollars?**
Thanks,
Loren
**Note: this is not to even vaguely suggest that any money approaching
even a fraction of that sum is remotely likely to be coming my (or
Ushahidi's) way via this person, but it was an interesting discussion
that got me thinking in scales I had not previously considered.
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