MyWeku

Every year the Huffington Post, the worlds most influential and $315 million valued blog selects 100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 12 categories who have made a significant impact in their chosen fields. This year, Africa’s very own Juliana Rotich has been nominated as one of 10 change makers in the Business and Technology category.

Nomination and more importantly winning in any of the categories undoubtedly brings more awareness of the work that the likes of Julliana and others are doing and helps inspire others to follow in their footsteps. 15.6 million read the Huffington Post daily, according to Quantcast.

With that in mind, do head over to the Huffington Post to vote for Juliana Rotich! for her work with one of Africa’s foremost iniatives – Ushahidi. (Details of her nomination are below)

Changed the game by: Creating a tech tool to engage citizens in global humanitarian issues.

Juliana Rotich is the executive director of Ushahidi, an open source project that uses crowdsourced information to collect and map information on global crises. Ushahidi, which is Swahili for “testimony,” enables users to send  information from around the world to report conditions ranging from human rights violations to voting fraud. Ushahidi was first used in Kenya, where 45,000 Kenyans used the platform to report violence that broke out after the disputed election in 2008. The Ushahidi team then created maps pinpointing the violence and realized that there was a great need to expand the platform.

Ushahidi has since been a vital tool in monitoring elections in Burundi, Sudan, Mexico, and even the 2010 blizzard in the Washington DC area. Just two hours after the Japanese earthquake, a version of Ushahidi had been created by Japanese volunteers to pinpoint locations where people may have been trapped.

The non-profit organization has released two other products to help make crisis crowdsourcing more efficient: Crowdmap, which allows users to set up their own map of events and visualize information, and  SwiftRiver — a free open source platform that helps filter, sort and verify real-time data from Twitter, SMS, email and RSS feeds during the massive surge of crisis data which comes in the first 24 hours of a disaster.  Originally from Kenya, Rotich studied IT at University of Missouri Kansas City and spent several years as an IT professional before helping to create Ushahidi.

She said it:Talking about her organization, “Think of it as an upturned umbrella, where you have an umbrella and the spokes are pointing out. The spokes represent all the different sources of information, and all that information is funneled into a map.”

Must-click:Ushahidi site

Nii Thompson