Happy Code Year! Ushahidians are arriving in Kenya for our annual team meetings and coworking. We're excited to get started. If you are a community member, partner, friend, funder or fan of Ushahidi, you can help us plan for 2013 by participating in our brief Ushahidi Community Survey. In the Weekly, we have upcoming community events for developers and the Kenyan elections. Plus, we are excited to share SwiftRiver planning. First up:

Deployment of the week:

What a way to start the Deployment of the Week! Give some Gratitude to Gratitude: Article about the Gratitude Map in Scientific America. See more Deployments of the Week.

Into the Code

[caption id="attachment_11013" align="aligncenter" width="500"] This Ushahidi code flag hangs in the ihub Nairobi[/caption]

Swift River API Updates

We've started created wiki pages for each of the API resources in the draft shared on the list towards the end of last year. See SwiftRiver REST API. Any feedback you may have is most welcome. For API request authorization (by external apps/services), we're leaning towards OAuth2. This (API authorization) will be available on both the hosted (https://swiftapp.com) and personal installations and it will also have a rate limiting mechanism. In the first version, we're thinking of enforcing authentication on all API requests. What do you guys think? You can track the API development on Github. On the UI/UX front, we have a new round of revisions which we'll be rolling out in the next 3-5 weeks. See Github for more details.

Feature Requests:

According to the GeoThings' previous dialogs with NGOs in Taiwan, they think a killing feature is offline map support is really needed by Ushahidi app. GeoThings used this to develop an Android application that has this feature based on OpenStreetMap. Now, they would like to extend this user experience to Ushahidi app. This is a call for participation of this development so both iOS and Android can get this offline tiled map support. An easy way to describe this feature is: Locate and browse with offline OpenStreetMap for incident report submissions even when the Internet is not available. GeoThings will next deploy those features for Taiwan NGOs, could be some good practices of using Ushahidi. :-) (Thanks, Slayer!) To see more Feature requests, add issues and grab code, see Github.

From the Community

January means finally more Community Events. We will hold two so far. Stay tuned for more news.

Uchaguzi Kenya Community Meetup: January 16th, 2013

Uchaguzi is an Ushahidi deployment to monitor the Kenyan general election on March 4th, 2013. The Uchaguzi project aims to contribute to stability in Kenya, by increasing transparency and accountability through active citizen participation in the electoral cycles. We will be announcing more details about partners and plans. We'll discuss Ushahidi's plans for the Kenya 2013 elections, share ihub Research's Umati findings, demo the Uchaguzi platform and invite you join local community teams to to get involved. Register for the Uchaguzi Community Meetup.

Ushahidi Live Developer Community Meetup: January 22, 2013

Ushahidi's technical staff will be in Nairobi for team meetings, so we decided to do a live community call connecting the local community with our global community for a live demo and Q & A session. This will be via skype, streamed and recorded. We welcome local Nairobi techs and our global community to register. All previous developer community meeting recordings are on the wiki.

Translations:

We're excited that our partners at Al Jazeera have supported the translation of Ushahidi fully into Bosnia. Thanks to them and to all the amazing participants! https://twitter.com/HarisAlisic/statuses/288991468260052992 http://twitter.com/HarisAlisic/statuses/288990992235888640 How to help Translate (WIKI)

UMATI Research

ihub Research in partnership with Ushahidi is conducting important research into dangerous speech leading up to the Kenya 2013 elections. Please find the second report: November 2012 Umati November 2012 report Happy Week!