Ushahidi Weekly - 2

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. (The archive for weekly reports is on the wiki.) Date: March 26 - April 3, 2012

Community and Deployers:

Deployment of the Week: Syria Tracker. See all the previous Deployments of the Week. Can you help the International Detention Coalition with their outreach campaign? They are mapping incidents involving children in immigration detention. The Women's Media Center launched their map Women under Siege. This team has done a phenomenal amount of outreach for the project. It is a good use case for other deployers to model.

Code:

A security patch for the Ushahidi Platform is being tested and will be released this week. Crowdmap had an outage on Friday, March 30th due to a DDOS attack on our hosting provider. We are making some technical changes (scalability) this week to address these issues. The Crowdmap team will be working on topical maps in the coming weeks. An incident summary will be posted on Wednesday. SwiftRiver beta is pending. Brian M., Brandon, David and Emmanuel are integrating the UI changes. The timeline for private beta on April 9, 2012: http://swiftly.org/beta/ Ushahidi core team is testing a security update, db schema changes/documentation , and bug fixing/testing. They are also working separate the map load and timeline in Ushahidi core. This will help improve map load. Henry is testing the Android release and working on the auto-upgrader for Ushahidi core. Dale is testing the ios update and is looking for community help on this. Evan released a pre-built Ushahidi virtual machine intended for demonstrating the platform. We continue to collect feedback for Ushahidi 3.0. What is your wish list?

Ideas / Plans:

Have you read Wicked Problems by Jon Kolko?

Community changes:

We are working on a community site redesign to integrate all the community touch-points (wiki, forums, and community site). There have been a few signups for the Universal Subtitles video channel to translate content. Thanks to the DRC team for sharing their Ushahidi 101 video translated into French.

Events:

Hosting: Heather Ford is hosting a WikiSweeper Research Workshop in San Francisco on April 4th. If you are local, you can participate. The recording will be posted after the event. (Thanks to Wikimedia for hosting this talk.) There will be an Ushahidi Istanbul meet-up on April 9th. Attending: Heather Leson attended the Ontario Government's Social Media Conference on March 29th. She was on a panel with the City of Calgary and the Canadian Red Cross. Heather will be at TedXSilkRoad on April 11th Juliana Rotich joined Clinton Global Initiative University working session on peace and human rights on March 31st in Washington DC. It was live at http://live.cgiu.org. On April 2nd, Juliana met with World Bank regarding open data initiatives. Patrick Meier is speaking and attending WhereConf.

Meetings:

Heather will be meeting with some folks from Google Ideas to brain on opportunities for our community.