Where Has Appfrica Been?

If you follow this blog relatively closely you’ve probably realized that that it’s been fairly quiet for just over a month. This was partly because of the holiday season and my being in the air or in airports, continent hoping (from Kampala to Amsterdam to Texas to Tucson to Atlanta to Denver to Washington D.C to South Africa back to Kampala in two weeks). Travel always throws a wrench into my connectivity because with all the chaos caused by airport security, I’m never in the mood to do any work by the time I actually can. Also I forced myself to take a much needed break, one can only put in 14 hour workdays for so long before needing to completely shut out the world of work…no matter how much you love it.

That said, my new job at Ushahidi saw me go from zero to sixty as soon as I was back on the ground here in Kampala. The nation of Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake, killing over 72,000 and displacing hundreds of thousands. If you aren’t aware of Ushahidi, the company makes it’s mission to curate and crowd source reports of incident during crisis events. My job at Ushahidi as the Director of Swift River, is to help to deal with the overwhelming flood of information, commentary and rumor that often follows a tragedy such as this one. Needless to say for the past week it’s all I’ve been willing to make time for. The result was Haiti Tracker, a tool that helps Ushahidi manage the flood of invaluable information coming from Twitter users.

For more on what we’ve been up to at Ushahidi, please visit - http://blog.ushahidi.com/