Ushahidi Weekly Update (#6)
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 24 - May 1, 2012
Community and Deployers:
About: What are you working on? What do you need help with?
- The Ushahidi Community Developer call was on April 30th. Attendees (16) provided overviews of OpenGeo SMS, Offline/Online Applications and OccupyMap. Dale and Henry answered mobile development questions. Then, we did a deep dive on security issues and how to improve our workflow and software. Great feedback and participation: Monthly Developer Community call (audio recording is about 1 hour and 12 minutes). Slayer wrote a great summary.
- Security Working Group. Michael Coates of Mozilla has offered to help lead a community working group for security issues. On this week's community call, a few other volunteers have offered to join this initiative. The Security wikipage (sorely in need of useful edits) is where we will build out this project.
Code:
About: What code are your working on? What needs help?
- Help Wanted: Can you help solve some of the Github Issues? Our technical team is attempting to catch up, but a few extra hands would be helpful. Ask question on our Ushahidi Developer Skype chat channel. (to join: Ping HeatherLeson)
- We issued a security update on the weekend. Please update your deployments: http://security.ushahidi.com/ (Crowdmap is complete.) Thanks Dennison for the help!
- The Swift Team is incorporating all the feedback from our second major team test. To sign up for the beta, add your email here:
- Android APK (tablet) will be ready for community testing next week. Translation help is requested for this new tool.
- Henry is also working on updating SMSSync.
- Crowdmap team (Brian and Evan) are working on some major Crowdmap changes and preparing for the upcoming maintenance: http://status.crowdmap.com/
We will be performing maintenance beginning on Thursday, May 3rd at 2:00am - 8:00am GMT (other timezones). We do expect downtime during this period so please plan accordingly. We will be moving our databases to new servers for better resiliency to prevent downtime and failure moving forward. This is one of the steps we are taking related to unexpected downtime from our hosting provider mentioned here and here on the Ushahidi Blog.
Ideas / Plans:
About: What plans, projects, and ideas do you have?
Jep has been brainstorming about visualization next stages for Ushahidi. Here is some food for thought.
Community changes:
About: This section is for any major change announcements.
Localization journey : we are still looking for ways to improve our localization and translation services. Lend a hand?
Events:
About: Events, presentations and hosting by Ushahidi Core, Community. Share your presentations, your videos etc.
Hosting:
Ushahidi Community meetup in Panama City May 10th
Attending:
Brandon Rosage participated in the International Council 2012, Paley Center for Media event. Here is his slidedeck and Technology and the Democratization of News video.
Dale Zak presented at the Sask 3.0 Summit:
OSCON = David Kobia will be speaking at OSCON in July 2012. Heather will be attending to participate in the Community stream and meet up with the HFOSS working group. Are you going?
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!
- The informal HFOSS Community Lead meeting was on Wednesday. Heather attends these with Benetech, Mifos, OpenMRS and FrontlineSMS counterparts. This month we had a great chat about new ways to think about funding models for social enterprises. Celina provided an intro to Start Some Good. If you are an HFOSS organization community leader, please contact us to join.
- Wayne Beaton of Eclipse Foundation met with Heather to provide some pointers on how to open up a community more. He'll be at OSCON too. The main feedback he had was:
- a true open source organization gives the community more power to control, shape and affect the project. This also means determining best methods for code ownership.
- Citizen Lab is hosting a Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop: Issues for Latin America in Panama next week. Do you have any feedback on security issues for election monitoring?