On Tuesday I woke up a bit before 7am in Berkeley, California where I live. I made some coffee and went over to my computer to start my work day. I checked my Slack and the news and quickly found out that there was an ongoing terrorist attack at 14 Riverside Complex in Nairobi, Kenya.

We are excited to announce that The Rockefeller Foundation recently granted funds to Ushahidi for our “Closing the Loop - Machine Learning for Humanitarian and Development Response” project. Read on to learn more about the challenge we are addressing, our shift, and our solution.

We sent out the Ushahidi Open Source Survey 2018, to get a better understanding of who our open source user and contributors are, their experience using and contributing to our tools, and what we can do to improve your experience.

We sent out our survey on 4th October 2018, with an initial deadline for feedback of 19th October 2018. In a bid to garner more feedback, we extended the period to November 9th 2018. However, even with the extension, the feedback turn out was still lower than expected. Nonetheless, those who participated in the survey shared some useful insights that will feed into our open source strategy moving forward.

Based on our own experience and our expertise from years of dealing with chaotic situations in the field, here are seven best practices to not only building a crisis response and emergency alert plan but also to making it useful and workable.

Last week, Ushahidi launched our first grassroots fundraising campaign, geared towards raising support to enable us to continue to support hundreds of grassroots organizations using our cutting-edge open source technology to make their work 10x more effective.Over the next couple of days, we'll be featuring some of our grassroots partners, learning more about the projects and how they're using Ushahidi.

This week, we feature Penang Hills Watch, run by Penang Forum, whoo have been using Ushahidi to raise awareness about environmental impacts of hill land degradation while engaging with government authorities to take action against unsanctioned or non-compliant acts of hill clearing in Penang State.

Here are some thoughts from Rexy Prakash Chako and Dr Kam Suan Pheng, co founders of Penang Hills Watch