Ushahidi Weekly Update (#7)

We are a growing community. This weekly report is for the whole community and team to share what you are working on and what you need help with. Highlight your presentations, events, code and more. These reports will go out every Tuesday.

Date: May 1 - 7, 2012

Community and Deployers:

About: What are you working on? What do you need help with?

• Deployment of the Week:  Mind the News Gap (Press Gazette article)

• With the assistance of Michael Coates, we have started a Security Working Group. Thanks to community members on the dev call for offering to assist. We will be collaborating the OWASP community to test, identify and patch potential security issues.
• The Our Rio20 project, created by Manu Kabahizi continues to make outreach noise online. Have you added your thoughts on #thefuturewewant?
• Congratulations to Anahi and team for the Internews project in the Central African Republic.It was featured on the UNOCHA website in Car 
• Roger Huder mentions Ushahidi's use in Haiti in his recently published book Disaster Operations and Decision Making. For more research items, see the community research site.

Congratulations to the Harassmap and Qiantang River teams:

Harassmap won a BOB for Best Use of Technology for Social Good  

Part of the Ushahidi team in Kenya recorded this short video to congratulate Harassmap.

Qiantang River Map won the Technology Application Award of the 2012 China Intel Social Innovation Prize and its US $16,000 prize money.

The Offline Online App has been submitted to the finals for the International Space Apps Challenge in the category of Citizen Science. Here is their video:

Code:

About: What code are your working on? What needs help?
Evan Sims and Brian Herbert moved Crowdmap to new infrastructure. Databases are now properly replicated, the webserver has been switched to Nginx and is being load balanced. Crowdmap will now be able to handle larger loads of traffic and should have less disruption to individual deployments in the future.
Robbie: Security fix for API. Fix for google maps layers. Lots of coding on the Internews RCA deployment.
Help needed: Volunteers for further work on WMS layers or mapbox plugin. Someone to help with unit tests (this is boring but helpful).

Ideas / Plans:

About: What plans, projects, and ideas do you have?
Gabriel White of Small Surfaces is consulting with the Ushahidi team to research and provide some UX feedback for Ushahidi products. He previously assisted us with the feedback from the Ushahidi Evaluation and Ushahidi Toolkits. We are attempting to incorporate deployer feedback better into our software designs. You can continue to add your thoughts here.

Community changes:

About: This section is for any major change announcements.
Have you joined the Community mailing list? See list.ushahidi.com for details.

Events:

About: Events, presentations and hosting by Ushahidi Core, Community. Share your presentations, your videos etc.

Hosting: Ushahidi is hosting a casual community meeting in Panama City on May 10th

Attending:

Citizen Lab, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Open Net Initiative are hosting a Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop: Issues for Latin America in Panama. Heather Leson will be presenting about Lessons Learned from Emergency Response and Election Monitoring. (May 6 - 10, 2012)

World Economic Forum on Africa: Representing Ushahidi in dialogue about Crowdsourcing, governance and growth. Juliana will be meeting with various organizations and individuals from May 9th-11th.

Ushahidi will also be hosting a small roundtable on Education, Technology and Open Data at the iHub on the 15th of May.

Meetings:

About: Ushahidi core team will share about their meetings to improve the Community experience. If you are meeting about Ushahidi, feel free to share too!
Jennifer Chan and Heather Leson met to discuss the next level of connecting academic research to software change. This includes publishing the Use Case studies from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative - Knight joint project in late May.