It is my pleasure to announce that Kisumu, the first Beta release of Ushahidi is now available. It’s been a hectic last few weeks here at Ushahidi, but we are pretty excited because Ushahidi 0.8 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements and plenty of bugs fixes. Here’s a partial list of improvements:
  • New Installer Wizard: Henry worked on this wizard in order to help you get Ushahidi up and running as quickly as possible. We're also hoping to have an update wizard ready for you soon.
  • User Levels/Ranking: Soyapi has built functionality into Ushahidi that allows you to categorize users sending in messages via SMS, Twitter and Email. By automatically approving or rejecting incoming messages, the administrator is empowered to handle pertinent information.
  • Alerts: Jason has been hard at work on this module to enable users to receive alerts for incidents occurring within proximity of a certain location. Users will receive alerts via email or SMS.
  • Custom Forms: Until now, the report entry form was restricted to a specific number of fields. Ushahidi allows you to design your own forms to deal with different types of situations that require the collection of specific types of data.
  • Ushahidi API: The system for entering or extracting data from an Ushahidi instance via the API has been updated and expanded.
  • Improved Message Handling: We've streamlined the process of handling messages received via SMS, Twitter, Email and Laconica.
  • Import/Export Data: Ushahidi now imports and exports incident report data.
A number of performance issues have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship version 1.0, some of which we have fixed already for the next beta. We’d love to hear your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try the release first-hand: use this link to tell us what you think. On behalf of the entire Ushahidi team, we’re really excited to make this Beta broadly available, and look forward to your feedback! Several organizations that had requested a download are receiving emails with a download link. To request your download, kindly use this link. We ask for your contact information so that we can be in touch with version updates and for keeping up with the different deployments.