20. July 2016 Kenya

Juliana Rotich is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi, the crowdsourcing platform that leverages mobile phones and the internet to change the way information flows.  Ushahidi is a web based reporting system that utilizes crowdsourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. In the Kenyan scenario it was used to map out incidents of violence. Ushahidi then grew to be an open source platform that has been used in various situations such as the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, the Palestine conflict crisis, heavy snow crisis in Washington.

Juliana has worked in the telecommunications industry for over ten years.  She is originally from Kenya, with a computer science degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a Technologist, budding African Futurist and TED Senior Fellow.

She co- founded Mobisoko, a mobile marketplace for language and location relevant apps in Africa. She also writes the well-respected ‘Afromusing’ blog, typically with a focus on African tech and renewable energy. She often speaks at international conferences about technology, innovation, media, open source, crisis mapping and Africa; Past conferences she has spoken at include Lift, DEMO, TTI Vanguard, TransMediale, WSIS, DLD Women, Guardian Activate World Economic Forum -Davos, and ARS Electronica.

She was named one of the Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper and top 2 women in Technology 2011.

Company Profile
Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.  We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.

Ushahidi started as an ad hoc group trying to figure out a way to gather more and better information about the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008.  Since then, the Ushahidi platform has gone open source, and is now being deployed all over the world.  In short, Ushahidi has shown how to leverage technology to impact and create change globally.