Ushahidi Weekly Update (#3)

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: April 3 - 13, 2012

This week's report is late due to travel and the holiday.

Community and Deployers:

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

Deployment of the Week: 

April 6: Nigeria Security Tracker and April 13: A New Thing (Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod congregations related to forming faith, generating social action, connecting with new people and equipping leaders.)

See all the  Deployments of the week.

More Deployment updates:

• Brad Anthony and his team have been hard at work preparing their deployment. He has been a daily fixture on the Community asking questions and learning.  They recently launched Global Animal Welfare.
• Mechul Ogrenci is the second deployment out of Turkey. Their focus: Students have been detained due to their ideas and political activities. This deployment is to amplify the legal and administrative rights violations and seek to make them visible to us all.
• Mali Monitor launched to map grassroots coverage humanitarian crisis.
• Bill Morris presented an Ignite talk aboutVTIrene.
• Aaron Huslage and his Tethr Project was short-listed for the Knight New Challenge - networks. Aaron hosted one of the Hurricane Irene maps and is a key supporter in our community.

Code:

About: What code are your working on? What needs help?

Team Crowdmap (Brian, Evan and Brandon) have been locked in a room creating Topical Crowdmaps.   The SwiftRiver team is working more UX integration and testing.

Ajay Kumar (community member) is creating an IVR hack for Ushahidi. Stay tuned for updates.

Ideas / Plans:

About: What plans, projects, and ideas do you have?

Nat is working on a proposal for the Huffington Post to crowdmap people's experiences/stories with poverty and economic distress as a result of the GFC in the USA, and recent success stories of how people have reinvented themselves to start anew during this time of strife.

Nat is working on a proposal to the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) to crowdsource information from people receiving microfinance to add transparency to this industry.

Community changes:

About: This section is for any major change announcements.

Events:

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

Hosting: 

The Ushahidi Turkey event was attended by 7 people including folks from OSM Turkey, Al Jazeera, an NGO and an emergency manager. This was our first community meet-up in Turkey. Here's to more capacity building.

Attending:

Heather attended TedxSilkRoad and presented Map it, Change it. 

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!

Nat attended the Mozilla/Ecocity/Rio20 brainstorming event on April 9th at Mozilla.

On April 10, Heather met with Mustafa Erdik and his team at Bogazici Univ., Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute.