We've been deep in Kenyan deployment planning and owe you many updates from the Community around the world. Weekly Updates will start again next week. We've got some great events happening, a few Deployments of the Week and news about Ushahidi 3.0.

Upcoming Ushahidi events

Brandon Rosage is joining the SXTXState Project team in Austin, Texas on Saturday, February 23, 2013. They'll be hacking on Ushahidi. Register for the Austin, TX event. https://twitter.com/CindyRoyal/status/303984229149184001

Ushahidi Community Developer call

The Next Ushahidi Developer call is Tuesday, February 26th/Wednesday, February 27, 2013. Join Us. This is a virtual event held on skype. We alternate timezones. This is the North/South America and Asia/Oceania friendly month ; ) Some highlights: Jon Shuler will talk hardware, Robbie MacKay will give an Ushahidi 3.0 update and Evan Sims will share some details about Crowdmap.

From the Community

Deployments of the Week

Thank you to our community mapstars from Iraq, Australia, Canada, and, well, the world. Here are some newly recognized Deployments of the Week: February 19: Dispute Monitor (Iraqi Centre for Negotiation and Conflict Management) Note: this is not a public-facing map. February 12: Missing or Unsolved Murders Of Indigenous Sisters February 5: World Radio Day January 29: Brisbane Storm and Floods

Mumbai Community Event

Ushahidians throughout the globe represent us with their projects and often at events. Here's an awesome report back from Praveen S. He is in Mumbai training folks on Ushahidi: "TechCamp Mumbai Day 1 just concluded a few minutes back and a sense of deep satisfaction is beginning to come in. So what is a TechCamp? you may be asking. A Techcamp is a forum where technologists come together with representatives from Non-Government organizations from around South Asia that includes Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and round to participate in 2 days of interactive sessions, participatory workshops on how technology can be an enabler and catalyze social change. The trainers come from various organizations/ Foundations behind technology for social change like FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap and so on. The day started with an awesome session of Speed Geeking where over 100 participants spent 5 minutes at every table hosted by a Tech Trainer and they rotate. In a period of 60 minutes the participants get to learn about 12 different technologies by spending 5 minutes in each table getting a taste of each. This session was followed a 90 minute deep dive session of each of the technology and I had the opportunity to showcase Ushahidi. The afternoon session included facilitation of workshops around Problems that can be solved with Ushahidi. Its been an awesome day interacting with so many participants, sharing and listening to stories from all over South Asia on social change through technology, I may be tired now but I am Inspired to just be here." Click to reach Praveen Praveen, thanks for being a voice in South Asia! (Photo by Praveen with a guest shot of Mikel Maron, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team.)

In the news:

Here are some new articles about Mapping, Ushahidi in the Arab world and more: The Ethics of Participatory Digital Mapping with Communities (Linda Raftree). L'emergence d'un humanitaire open source (article referring to Ushahidi en francais) Crowdmaps Bringing Transparency to the Arab World Dan Mcquillian is teaching students about Ushahidi at Goldsmiths, University of London Our friends at TechChange are hosting an upcoming course which may be of interest. See their article:"Kenyan election as challenge for technology, ethics and communities in peacebuilding."

Into the Code

How to use Crowdmap

Evan Sims, Senior Developer for Crowdmap held Community Hours. Here's a video with some Q & A to get you started on your project:

Feature Freeze for Ushahidi 3.0 From our Lead Developer, Linda Kamau: 2012 saw the commencement of a discussion on rebuilding the Ushahidi Platform dubbed 3.0. Major strides were taken including the definition of user personas, design wireframes and mockups, defining a database schema and beginning building the foundation of the API . Some of the key reasons for building 3.0 included the need to take back the platform to the users to allow for more varied use cases and most importantly, a more scalable and user friendly platform. In order to deliver on the above, this means a few compromises have to be made on the current version (2.x) of the platform. Today, we are announcing a “Feature Freeze” meaning we shall not be building any new features on 2.x. Don't worry, we will continue to support 2.x with bug fixes, security updates and some pending feature requests. We would like to double our efforts on delivering a solid 3.0 platform so we are focusing our resources there. Note: You can submit a pull request for a feature you have built and feel it should be bundled into the platform. In addition, this does not mean that the 163 feature requests posted on our github issues page are ignored! We are tagging some of them as “3.0 candidates” for referral during the 3.0 build out, as some of these are actually what 3.0 is all about. We shall be putting up the complete list of features that will make it to 3.0 on the wiki and share the link within the next few weeks. Here are the important dates to note as we prepare transition from 2.x to 3.0: Sep 30th 2013 – End of bug fixing/support Dec 30th 2013 – End of Security fixes/support Happy Mapping!