Apologies

[Heather Ford]

On behalf of the team at Ushahidi, I wanted to send huge apologies for the technical difficulties we faced during the research seminar on Friday. Some of it was unavoidable (general fibre link down in Nairobi near the end of the call) but there were also some avoidable issues that we could have dealt with better. We want you to know that we really appreciate the time you took to participate in a fledgling area of work at Ushahidi and we really hope that this doesn't prevent us from sparking a conversation about how we can work together more effectively as a research community.

We are happy to report that there was a great local audience at the iHub (some of whom may be on this list now) so they at least got to hear all of the panel and ask some interesting questions. 

My slides are up on slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/hfordsa/ushahidi-research-establishing-a-learning-organisation. The other panelists will add theirs too and we'll send with a link to a blog post that we'll write to summarize what was covered. 

This was really an introduction to how we're starting to think about research at Ushahidi. Up until now, research has been project-based and isolated to specific areas, but we hope that, with growing capacity, we might be able to think about research across the organization as a way for us to stay close to the needs and experiences of users, and as a way to develop new products with an understanding of best case practice in the crowdsourcing field more generally. 

We look forward to hearing from you. Just a reminder that this list will be dedicated to relevant papers, events, methodologies, and research projects and the Mendeley group at http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1583283/ushahidi/ will be for adding any relevant papers and bibliographies on Ushahidi and crowdsourcing. 

If you know of anyone who is interested in or involved with research on Ushahidi, please send them along to this list. 

I'm looking forward to us getting to know one another better and finding better ways of supporting one another's work.

Best wishes,

Heather.

Heather Ford 

Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver

http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org 

@hfordsa on Twitter

http://hblog.org