Idontcode-at-Ushahidi

A repository for people who use Ushahidi's open source tools that want to contribute that don't code. Primarily for people in international development, activism, volunteering and community development that have a deep understanding of what tools need to do in order to make a positive change in the work that they do.

This document (the README file) is a overview to give you some information about the project.

Who are we?

We're a team at Ushahidi dedicated to opening up the way that people can contribute to the Ushahidi open source.

Ushahidi, which translates to “testimony” in Swahili, was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Since then, thousands have used our crowdsourcing tools to raise their voice. We’re a technology leader in Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, with a global team. We are a social enterprise that provides software and services to numerous sectors and civil society to help improve the bottom up flow of information.

We believe that if marginalized people are able to easily communicate to those who aim to serve them...

...then those organizations and governments can more effectively respond to their communities' immediate needs...

...while simultaneously bringing global attention to their problems through the aggregation of their voices.

What are we doing? (And why?)

Historically, open source tech projects typically ask from contributions from developers (people who can code) or those with tech skills. However, within the charity, activist humanitarian and international/national development community we know that there is deep, meaningful insight that helps us all understand the challenges organisations and people face across the globe.

Often, the people working on the technology products (from designers to researchers, developers to product managers) are anware of how vital certain functions and features could be to certain types of humanitarian work. With this project, we hope to facilitate a way that people with the experience, knowledge, stories and insight into the challenges faced across the global can offer this information in order to inform the way that a technology product is developed and grows in order to do good.

What do we need?

We need a variety of people to help with this effort you could be:

• A person who works for or volunteers for a charity, non-profit or community organisation dedicated to doing good in whatever manner you conduct
• A person who is a national or international development worker either within and organisation or consultant who has knowledge or an understanding of challenges globally.
• A person directly affected by a humanitarian issue globally, perhaps you've had your human rights violated or experienced a issue that is being tackled by humanitarian efforts. You may or may not call yourself an activist.
• A researcher, UX professional or Designer who is interested in knowing more about the what the designs and research they work on needs to do from a user/beneficiary perspective. You could have valuable interviewing and questioning/insight gathering skills that can be of help in issue comments
• A developer or person who can code who is interested in knowing more about the what the code they work on needs to do from a user/beneficiary perspective

Get in touch




If you want to know more, get in touch with me at [email protected] or you can join our community channels to ask questions:

• Our forum
• Sign up to the mailing list
• Chat with us on:
  • IRC at #ushahidi on Freenode
  • Gitter at ushahidi/Community
  • Skype
• Messages to any of these channels should show up on all of them!

Understand the jargon



• Ushahidi:
• Ushahidi: Translates to “testimony” in Swahili. The name of the non-profit organisation creating humanitarian tech
• Platform: The name of the Ushahidi tool/technology that is used for crowd sourced data collection
• Deployment: An instance of the Ushahidi platform is referred to as a 'deployment'
• Post/Response/Report: A single instance of a person completing a response to a survey on a particular deployment.
• User/Responder: A person responding to one of Bristol Women's Voice surveys on the Ushahidi platform about street harassment
• Beneficiary: A person/s that benefit from the work that a humanitarian organisation/individual does that could include platform/deployment
• Admin/s: The person/s that own the platform deployment, have set it up and maintain the data and what happens to the data.
• Version 3 or V3: Platform has many versions, the latest of which is version 3
• Version 2 or V2: The previous instance of the platform tool was called V2

There are a lot of things that can be included and when you start trying to define it, it can get complicated. One of the easiest ways to get involved is if you see a typo or missing jargon term in this document, you can request a change or addition to this document :)