What a week! We have an important security update, news about a few community award winners/nominees, some code changes and a community meetup in Panama:

Code:

  • A vulnerability has been discovered in the Ushahidi Admin API. A fix has been issued, please update your deployments. Full details. (Crowdmap was updated.)
  • Evan Sims and Brian Herbert moved Crowdmap to new infrastructure. Databases are now properly replicated, the webserver has been switched to Nginx and is being load balanced. Crowdmap will now be able to handle larger loads of traffic and should have less disruption to individual deployments in the future.
  • Robbie issued the security patch for the API. He is also working on fixing google maps layers.
  • Technical Help needed: Volunteers for further work on WMS layers or mapbox plugin. Someone to help with unit tests (this is boring but helpful). Check in the developers mailing list or join our Ushahidi skype community developer chat.
  • Robert Colombo needs help on batch upload data with custom fields: data is not being imported from custom fields (fields are empty). Also Queries on custom fields and Plugin based fields (i.e. report status). Download pic and video names when download reports could be a must (for GIS analysis).

Community and Deployers:

  • Deployment of the Week: Mind the News Gap
  • With the assistance of Michael Coates, we have started a Security Working Group. Thanks to community members on the dev call for offering to assist. We will be collaborating the OWASP community to test, identify and patch potential security issues. Let us know if you would like to participate.
  • The Our Rio20 project, created by Manu Kabahizi continues to make outreach noise online. Have you added your thoughts on #thefuturewewant?
  • Congratulations to Anahi and team for the Internews project in the Central African Republic. It was featured on the HPDT website.
  • Roger Huder mentions Ushahidi's use in Haiti in his recently published book Disaster Operations and Decision Making. For more research items, see the community research site.

MapStars - Congratulations to the Harassmap, Qiantang River and Offline/Online teams:

Ushahidi is honoured to share news of mapstar teams: Harassmap, Qiantang River and the Offline/Online App teams: Harassmap won a BOB for Best Use of Technology for Social Good HarassMap Part of the Ushahidi team in Kenya recorded this short video to congratulate Harassmap. Qiantang River Map won the Technology Application Award of the 2012 China Intel Social Innovation Prize and its US $16,000 prize money. The Offline Online App has been submitted to the finals for the International Space Apps Challenge in the category of Citizen Science. Voting is open, can you help support them? Here is their video:

Ideas / Plans:

Gabriel White of Small Surfaces is consulting with the Ushahidi team to research and provide some User Experience feedback for Ushahidi products. He previously assisted us with the feedback from the Ushahidi Evaluation and Ushahidi Toolkits. We are attempting to incorporate deployer feedback better into our software designs. You can continue to add your thoughts on the wiki.

Community changes:

Have you joined the Community mailing list? See list.ushahidi.com for details.

Events:

Hosting: Ushahidi is hosting a casual community meeting in Panama City on May 10th Attending: Citizen Lab, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Open Net Initiative are hosting a Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop: Issues for Latin America in Panama. Heather Leson will be presenting about Lessons Learned from Emergency Response and Election Monitoring. (May 6 - 10, 2012) World Economic Forum on Africa: Representing Ushahidi in dialogue about Crowdsourcing, governance and growth. Juliana will be meeting with various organizations and individuals from May 9th-11th. Ushahidi will also be hosting a small roundtable on Education, Technology and Open Data at the iHub on the 15th of May. For more Ushahidi weekly, see our wiki.