8th Continent Conference Circuit: A post from our Open News Fellow, Aurelia Moser About 8 months ago, I joined Ushahidi as an Open News Fellow, splitting my time between Mozilla, Internews Kenya, and Ushahidi-proper. I unofficially joined the team just after the Westgate attack, to contribute to an organization often operating in crisis, building some pioneering and prolific soft/hardware projects in response to that crisis context, and thereby contributing to the global crisis-aid community. Projects like Ping, BRCK, and CrisisNET which have subsequently amped up and/or launched publicly, are remarkable illustrations of how the team at Ushahidi mobilizes around a need and delivers aid accordingly. I’ve been ever-inspired and humbled by this as a developer and a fellow on the periphery of some of these projects. One thing that’s been a pretty persistent part of my experience is the general dynamism program and my opportunities to work on pretty awesome software. I’ve been seeing a lot of ‘8’s lately, related to static and software mapping, and in this 8th month, of the year and of my fellowship, I started thinking about some of the retrospective radness I’ve been able to experience as a result of joining this awesome team. I wrote pretty o.k. blogpost reflecting on that dynamism, via parallax, for our Open News application push two weeks ago. But for this short post, I thought I’d loop in some multimedia captures of the cool conferences and events I’ve had the privilege to participate in, and by syllogism the rad communities in journalism and tech that we continue to reach with our awesome project stack. These past months have had me pitching lightning talks at a slurry of conferences. The topics range a bit but mostly cluster in the technology-journalism space: from data-munging workshops, to operational security panel discussions to more general ignite sessions on mapping topics. So here’s a link drop of some of the cool journalism and hacker communities I’ve been connecting with on behalf of our awesome team. I kept it pretty bullet-pointed for optimal skimming! Peace! Aurelia MIT Civic Media (Boston, June 22nd-24th) The MIT Civic Media Conference was a small technology and media policy conference in Boston at the MIT Media Lab, themed aroung the “Open Internet and Everything After.” I gave a short Ignite talk on Mapping and Teleporation, naturally. The audience was mostly policy makers, Knight and Mozillla Foundation folks, open mappers, developers, and civic-minded technologists. Aurelia Moser: "Teleportation" and Home from MIT CMS/Writing on Vimeo. HOPE-X (New York City, July 18-20th) Hackers on Planet Earth, is a biennial conference at the Hotel Philadelphia in New York City; it attracts hackers, lock-pickers, security-software developers, privacy policymakers, and polemic technologists and hacktivists. This year features Edward Snowden as a remote speaker as well as a host of niche specialists in the security and grey-hat hacking space. I participated in a panel discussion with Harlo Holmes, of the Guardian Project, and Barton Gellman, of the Snowden media coverage-fame, on Radical OpSec (Operational Security) for Journalists and gave some Ushahidi plugs along the way. SRCCON (Philadelphia, July 24-25) SRCCON was the inaugural conference for SOURCE, Mozilla’s Open News blog and resource for tech-journalists who run and write-for open source software journalism outfits internationally. I gave a workshop and talk with Chris Keller about data munging and cleaning in the newsroom, called “How Not to Skew with Statistics.” We’ll be migrating those materials to a github repo shortly. For now, here’s some notes and coverage from our talk. Follow all my conferences and projects here! Thanks for reading!