All Articles Tagged "ushahidi"
Black Women in Tech Make Huff Post’s Must-Follow Twitter List
Black Web 2.0 Founder Angela Benton
The lack of diversity in the technology field is a dirty non-secret of the industry. Software firms, game designers and other businesses seem futuristic but in one way are very entrenched in the past: these entities tend to be overwhelmingly white and male. But there are contenders in the tech sector who break this mold — female trendsetters in both Silicon Valley (the California-based area of the technology industry) and Silicon Alley (the NYC tech community) — creating despite a tradition of sexism. And many of these women are black.
The latest installment of The Huffington Post’s long-running Women in Tech series showcases some of these women. Their latest piece, “27 Female Founders In Tech To Follow On Twitter,” features three African-American ladies blazing new tech sector trails. Huffington Post senior editor Bianca Bosker writes about the compilation:
As part of our Women in Tech series, we’ve compiled a list of 27 female founders who are changing industries, reshaping the public sector, doing good, and helping others, all by using technology in creative new ways.
These women are also active Twitter users who are each worth following for the insights and advice they offer about everything from entrepreneurship and VCs to social media and coding. They include CEOs and CTOs, experienced entrepreneurs and experts, scientists and engineers.
The three black members of this special “must follow” female clique are:
Afrilabs Links Entrepreneurs, Startups, Tech Communities in Africa
(Fast Company) — Erik Hersman, director of operations at the non-profit Ushahidi, today announced the launch of a network of startup incubators and tech communities throughout Africa. Dubbing the new venture Afrilabs, the network is meant to connect a thriving scene of tech entrepreneurs involved in such outfits as iHub in Kenya, Hive Colab in Uganda, ActivSpaces in Cameroon, Nailab in Kenya, and Banta Labs in Senegal. In addition to integrating incubators throughout the continent, Hersman and his colleagues are also in the process of starting an investment fund for seed capital investments “that are accessible to startups that come through the different labs,” Hersman tells Fast Company. “The association is for linking the spaces for learning, growth, and to provide greater mass for the entrepreneurs that we work with,” says Hersman. Afrilabs will focus on connecting young entrepreneurs, web and mobile-phone programmers, designers, and investors. Technology-focused startup incubators are now found throughout the developing world, but Afrilabs takes the idea a step further by creating formalized links between the incubators, rather than leaving them to function in isolation. While incubators in themselves leverage the resources of external institutions–such as universities, corporate mentors, and government agencies–linking the incubators means that each incubator also benefits from the resources beyond national borders, creating a fortress-like web of connections, support, and mentorship.
Google Hires Crowdsourcing Guru to Manage Africa Outreach
(Fast Company) — Much of the coverage of Google focuses on its domestic priorities–its rivalries with Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook, its friendship with Verizon, its interest in net neutrality. But less well covered has been the tech giant’s efforts overseas, particularly its focus in the past few years on expanding Internet usage in places where it trails, like Africa and the Middle East. Google just scored a coup in moving those efforts forward–by hiring Ushahidi’s founder and director to become its manager of policy in Africa. You may know Ushahidi as the open-source platform for crowdsourcing information, created following the 2007 Kenyan elections as a way for people to report incidents of violence. The woman behind it was 33-year-old Ory Okolloh, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had previously created a site to monitor corruption in the Kenyan legislature.
