Mark your calendars, on Monday, October 22nd we'll hold our next Community Developer call to dig deeper into details about the Ushahidi version 3 release. The weekly is full of Usahhidi news from ICCM, RHOK, Colombia Simulation mappers, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and more.
Slayer aka Kuo-Yu Chuang gave an ICCM Ignite talk on his vision for using satellite imagery and open source technology (including Ushahidi) to connect Taiwanese citizens for emergency preparedness. More details from the GeoThings Team.
Using Ushahidi should only be one component of our outreach campaign for preparedness. The Yoestuveaqui Colombia Simulation project truly focused on the citizen engagement. Check out this fun video on how to plan:
Community news:
EQNZ up for award
Congratulations to the EQNZ team for their New Zealand Open Source Awards nomination for People's Choice. Voting is open until October 26th. I wish them the best of luck for their hard work. (More on this project)Bushfire Connect closes
Maurits Vander Vlugt and the Bushfire Connect Team announced that Bushfire Connect has come to an end: Spatial Information in the 21st Century: The Rise and Fall of @BushfireConnect. The lessons learned are key to understanding the long tail project needs to sustain resources and funding. I would encourage people to review this piece as they plan their work and also to consult the 3rd Ushahidi Toolkits about Outputs of a project. Lastly, I wish all the team members well and can't wait to see what they work on next. ****** I'm slowly recovering from an amazing ICCM event. Congratulations to Jen Ziemke, Melissa Elliot, and Patrick Meier for bringing inspiring folks together and for organizing a successful International Conference of Crisis Mappers! Special nod goes to Willow Bl00, Geeks without Bounds, my hack cohort. Together we hosted the first ever RHOK ICCM.Crowdglobe Report @ ICCM
At the International Conference of Crisis Mapping (ICCM), there were a number of announcements pertaining to Ushahidi and our community. First off, Steven Livingston relaunched the Crowdglobe report. The details are available for download and report. This report and the research has had a big impact on Ushahidi's planning for the coming year. Thank to Internews for this review.GeoThings @ ICCM
Slayer aka Kuo-Yu Chuang gave an ICCM Ignite talk on his vision for using satellite imagery and open source technology (including Ushahidi) to connect Taiwanese citizens for emergency preparedness. More details from the GeoThings Team.
Deployment of the Week:
Congratulations to Yoestuveaqui: Il Simulacro Nacional y IV Simulacro Distrial de Evacuacion por Sismos - Deployment of the Week. See all the Deployments of the Week.
Using Ushahidi should only be one component of our outreach campaign for preparedness. The Yoestuveaqui Colombia Simulation project truly focused on the citizen engagement. Check out this fun video on how to plan:
Into the Code:
The Next Community Developer Call is Monday, October 22nd. See the Community Meetings wiki page for all the times and how to connect. We'll be talking about Ushahidi v3. Check out the following pages about the DB schema and more: Ushahidi v3 (wiki).The RHOK ICCM challenges included three Ushahidi related hacks among the 7 amazing projects:
1. OpenIR from MIT continued to build on their Ushahidi plugin. 2. A subtle but powerful glue was created by Josh Snider while working on Challenge 15: Extracting info into SMS reports. A user could send in a text which would port directly into a wiki and geocode. If formatted incorrectly, a text is returned to the person asking them to reformat. The potential of messaging format issues could assist in the accuracy of content collected to so support digital humanitarians in processing massive amounts of incoming texts into maps. 3. Dale Zak of the Ushahidi team worked with participants to improve Ushahidi search by location and topic. Here is a protomap (also available for download):