Ushahidi Weekly Update (#13)

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.
Date:  June 13 - July 9, 2012 (Note: This is a big summary for the past few weeks. I was mostly offline on course. )

Community and Deployers:

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

Here are the latest Deployments of the Week:

July 6: End Slavery Tennessee (Door Hanger Placement Campaign)
June 29: Orasulmeu: Mapping Traffic in Romania
June 22: Korupedia: Mapping Corruption in Indonesia
June 15: Contamos: mapping the Mexican elections

See all the Deployments of the Week

Help Wanted:

Ushahidi is looking for a community person to do some paid desktop publishing.  If you have the skills, please send a website and more details to hleson at ushahidi dot com.

Code:

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

SwiftRiver Beta has started. To give feedback, add your notes to our spreadsheet. And, here's the SwiftRiver sign up to get cracking.

Thanks to Simcha Levental for building up our documentation for Installing Ushahidi v2.X on Amazon Web Services. Edits are welcome.

Our technical team has been reviewing Github and coding for the next Ushahidi 2.5 release. Testing will commence next week (July 9th for a week.) We'd love more eyes on the changes. Linda and I will share documents shortly.

We are working on the Ushahidi redesign. As mentioned on our blog post, we've created Personas. Let us know if described you well:

Events:

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

We've had a number of events in the past weeks.  Plus, we have more this week. As well, we will be at OSCON and the Community Leadership Summit.

Election Hackathon

The Free Election Hackathon was held on Saturday, June 16th in London, UK. We joined friends from The Small Axe,  OneWorld, IFES and ERIS

There were two big outcomes for Ushahidi:

  1. We were able to connect with Election Monitoring groups who have varied experience. This discussion will be the basis for some upcoming programming including blog posts and an election monitoring webinar.
  2. Our team conducted comparative research into the wide range of election monitoring deployments.  The next step is to locate a researcher to dig into the Election Monitoring data. This is complex because election mapping is a constant arch. 

See more from @ElectHack

Security - OWASP meetup (Portland)

Thank you to the Open Web Application Security Project (Portland) branch for hosting our first formal Security test meet-up. Robbie MacKay and Henry Addo participated virtually as team support. The feedback is being reviewed and implemented for the next releases. Ushahidi has a Security Working Group to build a security ecosystem of developers and improved software. If you would like to join, please contact us directly. To see the most up-to-date security patches, see our security page.

Tokyo Casual Meetup

Google hosted their first Google Big Tent Event on July 2nd in Sendai, Japan. Ushahidi was invited to participate in the panel: "Managing the crowd: benefits and challenges of social media in a disaster". We were honoured to talk about the amazing efforts of the Sinsai.info volunteers whose "brainsourced" effort identified and geolocated over 10, 000 reports for the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.  Thanks again to Google, World Vision NetHope, OCHA, the other sponsors and participants for this opportunity to connect and share.

Both Google and NHK covered the event.  Tasukeai Japan interviewed Hiroyasu Ichikawa and Taichi Furuhashi of the sinsai.info team and Heather Leson of Ushahidi:

Ushahidi Casual meetup in Tokyo. There were 16 attendees (not all attendees shown) including members of the Sinsai.info team, Japan OpenStreetMap Foundation, DataKind, Citizen Lab and a few academic researchers. The Ushahidi team, and we think the world, has been completely inspired by the dedication of the hundreds of volunteers who made the Sinsai.info project a success. The community continues to plan for future collaboration. We also got a preview of OpenRelief's amazing Robot.

 

(photo taken by restaurant staff on our behalf)

Design Jams in Seattle and Nairobi

Registration is open forconcurrent Design Jams on July 10th. Our designers will be co-hosting the events with Brandon in Seattle and Jepchumba in Nairobi.