I dream of Ushahidi community members sharing best practices and mentoring others to change their world. To make this more possible, we have a new wiki and video channel. Both community zones are available for all of you to collaborate and share content. But, most of all, build, spread and change Ushahidi. Ushahidi exists to give people voice. Video and wiki toys are key to amplifying your experience and sharing with others.

Join the Ushahidi wiki community

Ushahidi's community has been without a home to connect, share and collaborate. One of the big requests from the community was to give people an enhanced community home. We are happy to launch the new Ushahidi wiki. The wiki has three major purposes: Overview of Use Cases/Types of Maps, Community Sharing(e.g. Best Practices) and Product and Technical Documentation.

The main reason we've moved the wiki is that it gives you (FINALLY) a community interaction zone:

• You can collaborate and share knowledge in one space.
• You can create your own Ushahidi user profiles.
• You can connect with others who share your common interests.
• You can blog, comment and create to help build and spread Ushahidi.
• We are working on community programs including online meetups and badges to connect you more.

Take a wiki software tour:

Setting up your Ushahidi wiki account

• Create account at wiki.ushahidi.com reviewing the these steps.
• Here is an example of an Ushahidi wiki profile: Heather Leson
• We will use the "label" feature for all community members and technical members to self-identify skills.
• Join a Team by added a "label" to your profile. Example: If you want to join the design team, add the "design-team" label to your user profile.

The wiki will be migrated to the community.usahahidi.com website in the future. Some of you may have created a "community user account" on community.ushahidi.com. Single sign-on for the wiki, forums, and community site is on our community roadmap for the coming quarter. In the coming days, we will be contacting people who have signed up "community membership" via the community site or who otherwise offered to participate in the community (e.g. Volunteer sign-up forms). It will always be a work in progress. Sign up for a team, add a page and make it your won. We can't wait to see how you use it.

Thank you, Society of Technical Communication (Toronto)

On February 29th, 2012, the Society of Technical Communications participated in a workshop to hack the Ushahidi wiki. The teams provided overall taxonomy changes, a deep dive into improving the Products and Documentation section, provided writing tips and feedback on how to localize wiki content. We are so very thankful for their contribution to making Ushahidi better. I would like to extend an extra special thanks to Janet Swisher of Mozilla for providing us with a framework of open source technical documentation and to Gil Broza for guiding us through agile exercises.

Consolidating and Translating Our Videos

Consolidation - ushahidi.mirocommunity.org

There are a lots of videos out there on the web relating to Ushahidi. With this in mind, we realized our community needed a place to view and contribute videos in a central location. Thanks to the wonderful Miro Community Platform, we're able to provide just that. Head over to http://ushahidi.mirocommunity.com and check it out! Special thanks to Nicholas Reville and the team at the Participatory Culture Foundation for make this a reality.

Translation - www.universalsubtitles.org

The Ushahidi Community is global and some of our videos need subtitles to help us reach the largest audience possible. As such, we've set up the Ushahidi Video Translation team over on Universal Subtitles (also a product built by the awesome folks who make the Miro Community Platform). All language speakers are welcome to help out with the translation! For more info on our video consolidation and translation efforts check out the Ushahidi Video Project wiki page. In honour of the launch, here a new video featuring Kate Cummings of Ushahidi Liberia:

Community Next steps:

• Closing the Feedback loop: We've launched Github issues for technical issues. But, this only serves one part of the community. Recently at ICT4D, we heard from a number of community members on how we can improve. We want to improve the feedback loop. Any recommendations?
• One Community site: All of the community tools (forums, wiki, community.ushahidi.com and video channels) need to be integrated into the main website. This will make it easier to collaborate. The project requires single sign-on.
• Community Office hours: We will be starting Community Office Hours in the coming week to ask questions via skype or twitter. Watch this space for more details.

Now, please go play with the new toys! Heather