At Ushahidi, we believe that engaging and partnering with our community is essential to establishing an environment of mutual trust and respect. We enjoy working in tandem with you to design, develop and deploy our tools. Like Erik once said in this past blog post, our community is what makes the Ushahidi boat move, sink or float.
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At a recent event with some members of our community[/caption]
This community has continued to grow and diversify over the past 5 years of our existence. Back in 2008, when we deployed the platform during the Kenyan post election violence, there was just about a handful of us. A few months down the line, we managed to rally up a developer community after opening up our source code. As time went by, we continued to establish ourselves as an open source organization that built crisis mapping tools. Then came the Haiti deployment, and a community of crisis mappers continued to grow around us.
The launch of Crowdmap propelled our community to even greater heights. With ease of deployment, came diversified use of the platform, beyond just crisis mapping. Of the 50,000+ deployments we’ve had, nearly 30,000+ of these came from Crowdmap. We’ve continued to see the platform be used for election monitoring, citizen journalism, human rights mapping, anti-corruption mapping, research, and even fun stuff like Burgermap.org.
As a team, we’ve also been trying to meet the growing needs of this diversified community, not only through our products, but even in our means of engaging with you. There have been some wins, such as improved documentation, better translation of our software, just to mention a few. However, we've also let a few things drop. In the rush to develop and release new products in the last year or so, our engagement has been lacking. We haven’t been as enthusiastic as we should in our interactions with you on our forums, mailing lists and chat so we apologize. Our community is our most important asset and an insular approach only stifles the great feedback you guys haven given us over the years. An open source initiative should be just that – ‘open’.
Last week, Juliana talked about growth in the team, and alignment of our work. One of our key commitments is to improve how we engage with you all in the coming months. That said, here's some of what we plan on doing:
1. More meetups! – we plan on having more in-person meetups this year. Additionally, if you're in Nairobi, you'll be happy to hear that we plan to schedule a meetup every month. Please contact us if you'd like to run one in your city and we'll support you the best way we can.
2. Cleaning up the forums – we’re porting our original forums to Discourse. Our current forums are in our wiki here, and that has worked pretty well, but we’re trying to encourage participation. We’d like to hear your opinion here: http://forums.ushahidi.com/t/on-moving-to-discourse/1451/2
3. Unified Skype Chats – we had so many developer chats. We closed all the other developer chats and have a single one – the ‘Ushahidi Dev Chat’.
4. Documentation – once we had no documentation, now we have too much and it needs a little organizing. We’re getting a tech writer to help us write better guides, howtos and tool documentation.
5. Community website – we’re also cleaning up our community site, to allow you to share all your cool addons, plugins, extensions, along with listing ‘nice-to-have’ features that you can help us work on.
We're going to be sending out a community survey, within the coming week to gather some of your thoughts and comments as we plan our engagement strategy for this year. We still have a lot more work to do, beyond the points mentioned above. As always, your feedback is highly appreciated, and do feel free to chime in of you have any thoughts on how we can work better with you.
At a recent event with some members of our community[/caption]
This community has continued to grow and diversify over the past 5 years of our existence. Back in 2008, when we deployed the platform during the Kenyan post election violence, there was just about a handful of us. A few months down the line, we managed to rally up a developer community after opening up our source code. As time went by, we continued to establish ourselves as an open source organization that built crisis mapping tools. Then came the Haiti deployment, and a community of crisis mappers continued to grow around us.
The launch of Crowdmap propelled our community to even greater heights. With ease of deployment, came diversified use of the platform, beyond just crisis mapping. Of the 50,000+ deployments we’ve had, nearly 30,000+ of these came from Crowdmap. We’ve continued to see the platform be used for election monitoring, citizen journalism, human rights mapping, anti-corruption mapping, research, and even fun stuff like Burgermap.org.
As a team, we’ve also been trying to meet the growing needs of this diversified community, not only through our products, but even in our means of engaging with you. There have been some wins, such as improved documentation, better translation of our software, just to mention a few. However, we've also let a few things drop. In the rush to develop and release new products in the last year or so, our engagement has been lacking. We haven’t been as enthusiastic as we should in our interactions with you on our forums, mailing lists and chat so we apologize. Our community is our most important asset and an insular approach only stifles the great feedback you guys haven given us over the years. An open source initiative should be just that – ‘open’.
Last week, Juliana talked about growth in the team, and alignment of our work. One of our key commitments is to improve how we engage with you all in the coming months. That said, here's some of what we plan on doing:
1. More meetups! – we plan on having more in-person meetups this year. Additionally, if you're in Nairobi, you'll be happy to hear that we plan to schedule a meetup every month. Please contact us if you'd like to run one in your city and we'll support you the best way we can.
2. Cleaning up the forums – we’re porting our original forums to Discourse. Our current forums are in our wiki here, and that has worked pretty well, but we’re trying to encourage participation. We’d like to hear your opinion here: http://forums.ushahidi.com/t/on-moving-to-discourse/1451/2
3. Unified Skype Chats – we had so many developer chats. We closed all the other developer chats and have a single one – the ‘Ushahidi Dev Chat’.
4. Documentation – once we had no documentation, now we have too much and it needs a little organizing. We’re getting a tech writer to help us write better guides, howtos and tool documentation.
5. Community website – we’re also cleaning up our community site, to allow you to share all your cool addons, plugins, extensions, along with listing ‘nice-to-have’ features that you can help us work on.
We're going to be sending out a community survey, within the coming week to gather some of your thoughts and comments as we plan our engagement strategy for this year. We still have a lot more work to do, beyond the points mentioned above. As always, your feedback is highly appreciated, and do feel free to chime in of you have any thoughts on how we can work better with you.