Happy Week! In this Community report, we're featuring work from Jakarta, Italy and, of course, Kenya. The next two months will be full of Uchaguzi updates. Since the Ushahidi team is heavily involved in the project, we want to share our journey with you. Believe me, we are learning tons!
Francesco's project, GeoAvalanche, is really leading the charge for preparedness. Given that I come from a snowbound country, I'm a fan of how it could be applied in other countries.
Civic Education is needed on how to effectively use social media during the election period. Kenyan social media community are diverse and need to be active participants and committed against hate speech and participating in a positive way towards free and fair election. THe Uchaguzi platform is a powerful tool against the noise and inflammatory nature of other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and can be used to defuse inflammatory and often inaccurate reporting.
On 2nd of March just before the elections there will be a statement of unity from bloggers, social media and Facebook.
Watch these spaces:
Twitter - @uchaguzi
Instagram - #uchaguzi #kenya365
Facebook - Uchaguzi Kenya 2013
Google + Uchaguzi pages
(Thanks to Mark Kamau for loaning us the brand new UX LAB for this event.)
The Community Outreach Working Group met with the Translation teams. We know that this project needs to include Kiswahili translations as a top priority. The team will be collaborating with Translators without Borders to hold local training sessions. We'll be updating the docs and trying to make it easy for folks to jump in to translate tweets.
We also began the structure for how we will train local groups. This includes a local simulation. Our partners, Standby Task Force, are working with Pybossa to aid the microtasking of reports (geolocating and categorization). In the coming weeks, there will be a number of sessions for the local community to learn about the techniques, the software and the best practices of groups like the Standby Task Force.
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The Uchaguzi Technical team is posting all the code and issue tickets to github. In our meetup, we began planning around mapping and testing the deployment. See the code.
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The Uchaguzi Analytics and Research team is meeting on Wednesday, January 30th to keep planning.
Register for the Uchaguzi meetup.
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Deployment of the Week: OpenIR Jakarta Banjir
This week's feature Deployment is from the OpenIR team. They are in Indonesia testing out their Infrared Imaging software. The floods of the past weeks has resulted in their OpenIR: Jakarta Banjir map. They've geolocated over 1500 reports:
Into the Code
We hosted our Ushahidi Community Developer call live from Nairobi. While the Internet was less than cooperative, we had participants locally in Nairobi connected to Global community members from Cambodia, India, Egypt, and Canada. The audio recording was very choppy. Seth Kigen, Trusted Developer created a Windows 8 Ushahidi App. Here's his demo: (see more Ushahidi community videos)Some Other Highlights:
- Grant McaEwan University (Canada) is joining Ushahidi again to do a full Software developer course using Ushahidi. See Cam's post about last year's class
- Farid Boushra (Egypt) is investigating an SMS automap plugin
- Praveen (India) is working on CoalMining map. He will be sharing more details on the skype dev chat
- Uchaguzi community developer testing help will be starting in the coming week. Stay Tuned.
From the Community:
Francesco Bartoli Participated in Where Camp EU. He spoke about the GeoAvalanche Project and provided an Ushahidi demo: https://twitter.com/geoavalanche/status/293120793917935616
Francesco's project, GeoAvalanche, is really leading the charge for preparedness. Given that I come from a snowbound country, I'm a fan of how it could be applied in other countries.
Update: Workshop in Cambodia
In December, the Open Institute held various workshops throughout Cambodia focused on Gender-based violence tracking using Ushahidi.Great Lakes Commons Meetup - Toronto, Canada
Paul Baines of the Great Lakes Commons project is hosting a community meetup on Sunday, February 3rd. He's seeking local guidance and some dev input. I'm excited to be back in Canada to support his important project. What stories can we map about the environment and communities? Register for the Toronto meetupUchaguzi update
The Uchaguzi Technology, Translation, Social Media and Community Outreach Working Groups met last night. We had some successful planning sessions. On January 30th, the Research and Analytics team will be meeting. Stay tuned for more Working Group meetups in the coming weeks.Highlights from the Social Media Outreach Working Group:
Civic Education is needed on how to effectively use social media during the election period. Kenyan social media community are diverse and need to be active participants and committed against hate speech and participating in a positive way towards free and fair election. THe Uchaguzi platform is a powerful tool against the noise and inflammatory nature of other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and can be used to defuse inflammatory and often inaccurate reporting.
On 2nd of March just before the elections there will be a statement of unity from bloggers, social media and Facebook.
Watch these spaces:
Twitter - @uchaguzi
Instagram - #uchaguzi #kenya365
Facebook - Uchaguzi Kenya 2013
Google + Uchaguzi pages
Highlights from the Community Outreach team
(Thanks to Mark Kamau for loaning us the brand new UX LAB for this event.)
The Community Outreach Working Group met with the Translation teams. We know that this project needs to include Kiswahili translations as a top priority. The team will be collaborating with Translators without Borders to hold local training sessions. We'll be updating the docs and trying to make it easy for folks to jump in to translate tweets.
We also began the structure for how we will train local groups. This includes a local simulation. Our partners, Standby Task Force, are working with Pybossa to aid the microtasking of reports (geolocating and categorization). In the coming weeks, there will be a number of sessions for the local community to learn about the techniques, the software and the best practices of groups like the Standby Task Force.
*****
The Uchaguzi Technical team is posting all the code and issue tickets to github. In our meetup, we began planning around mapping and testing the deployment. See the code.
*****
The Uchaguzi Analytics and Research team is meeting on Wednesday, January 30th to keep planning.
Register for the Uchaguzi meetup.
****