Launching our Ushahidi Course

Today we are excited to announce, in conjunction with our friends and colleagues at Ushahidi, one of our first new 200-level courses: Ushahidi: Frameworks for Effective Platform Management, a four-week, online course running this summer from June 4th – 29th.

What has us most excited about this course is our approach toward one the highest-profile and most utilized programs in the current generation of ICT4D tools. Working closely with Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships, and Heather Leson, Director of Community Engagement, we’ve developed a syllabus that focuses both on building confidence in using the Ushahidi platform as well as putting equal attention on essential logistical issues like building trust networks, bolstering security and privacy, and generating effective, actionable data.

“Ushahidi collaborates on a number university courses focused on either Ushahidi software development, research or project work,” said Leson. “The TechChange course offers more access to various community leaders and a holistic participatory process which will complement our Ushahidi programming, inform existing knowledge (wiki.ushahidi.com) while growing the community of deployers. Someday these people will mentor others to make map change around the world.”

As with all our courses, we’re inviting several guest experts to join us in creating a space to discuss these principles, learn from existing case studies, and apply best practices toward new ideas and programs, including members of Ushahidi’s core team.

About the Course
Our lead moderator for the course is Rob Baker, TechChange’s Director of Training and Strategic Partnerships, who facilitates our online course on Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management. Rob has worn many hats working with Ushahidi, including being project and/or technical lead for over a dozen deployments around the world, conceived and co-developed the first iteration of the Ushahidi Community website, is the first inductee into their Trusted Developer Network, was Director of the Universities for Ushahidi program, and has spoken at several events, conferences, and universities on behalf of Ushahidi including the World Bank, US State Department, MIT, and Harvard University.

As this will be our first 200-level course, we are proud to offer a discounted rate of $395 with an early-bird rate of $295 for those registering before May 4th, which is lower than other TechChange offerings.

If you think this course is right for you or your organization, please check out the details at our course page. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us anytime.

We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully working with you this summer.