Kenya’s Ushahidi, the builder of open source software for the advocacy, development, and humanitarian sectors has won a Classy Award at Classy.org’s finalist ceremony Thursday, June 16. The Classy Awards exist to put a spotlight on changemakers addressing some of the most complex and severe problems the world faces today.
The Award Leadership Council chose Ushahidi as one of the 10 recipients out of 1300 applicants and 100 finalists after a year-long research and vetting process. The Council scored each nominee based on four criteria: Scale, scope and leadership expertise of the problem; the level of creativity and innovation in their solution; their ability and capacity to solve the problem; and organizational effectiveness and resource management.
The Classy Awards ceremony was the culminating event of Classy.org’s Collaborative, a three-day conference designed to bring together and showcase leaders of innovation. Held in Boston, Ushahidi’s COO, Nathaniel Manning, attended the awards ceremony, and accepted the award on behalf of Ushahidi when the exciting news was announced on stage. “We are wonderfully surprised, honored and humbled to win the Classy Awards for Social Innovation out of such an incredible group of finalists. It’s truly our users, the organizations using our platform to listen and respond to their communities and the local humanitarians helping each other, who deserve this credit,” said Manning in his acceptance speech.
Ushahidi, now nine years old, recently released a redesigned and reimagined version of its original data collection platform. The Ushahidi Platform has been deployed more than 100,000 times in more than 159 countries, has been translated into 50 languages, with 8 million testimonies, reaching nearly 20 million people. The platform allows human rights activists, humanitarian organizations, and local governments to collect, monitor, and respond to information directly from the crowd, helping to get the whole story — not only the data points.
Users can create their own deployment in minutes through Ushahidi’s hosted version, or install the open source code on their own servers.
