Ushahidi Weekly #1

At Ushahidi, we move fast. We have two weekly internal team meetings (whole team and tech team). We've heard from you that the barrage of content is overwhelming and that you would like an Ushahidi Weekly Summary. Now that the wiki is launched, we have a permanent home for collaborative weekly reports for the community and core team. (Get your own user account now.) Thanks to OpenStreetMap and Mozilla's Matt Thompson for the inspiration. All the updates will live on this wiki page.

Ushahidi Weekly Report #1

We are a growing community. This weekly report is for the whole community and team to share what you are working on and what you need help with. Highlight your presentations, events, code and more. These reports will go out every Tuesday. Date: March 19 - 26, 2012 (For next week, add content here)

Ideas / Plans:

About: What code are your working on? What needs help? The feedback loop for Ushahidi's community needs improvement. We added Github Issues for technical tickets. Now, we are investigating Stack Overflow, code like ideas.occupy.net and merging forums. We want to give people a chance to contribute to the community by rating items important to them. What do you think? Ushahidi has too many mailing lists and will be merging them into three in the coming month: Ushahidi Developers and Swift. We have half of our lists on google groups, so we will migrate the remaining there. For other community members, we are looking into ways to merge feedback rating and forums into one place. Input is welcome.

Community changes:

About: This section is for any major change announcements. We added a new wiki and two video programs for your use. More details on our blog. Both the wiki and the video channels (using Miro (video aggregation) and Universal Subtitles (video subtitling for localization) are both works in progress. To help build these, review and join the wiki or review the video project. The enhanced wiki makes it possible for you to have a user account to connect, lead and share with other Ushahidi community members. Edits welcome! Github Issues: Apparently, GitHub does not have tiered label access. We will add labels weekly for all issues posted. All issues labelled "Community tasks" are items that a community member can assist. TechChange is doing an Ushahidi course including training by community leaders. More Details.

Events:

About: Events, presentations and hosting by Ushahidi Core, Community. Share your presentations, your videos etc.

Hosting:

Heather Leson was in NYC and hosted a casual Ushahidi NYC meetup on March 20th. David Kobia, Dale Zak and Heather Leson represented Ushahidi at the Internet of Things Water Hackathon. This event is co-hosted with Pachube, Public Laboratory, Citizen Sensor and Don't Flush Me.

Attending:

Erik Hersman will be at the CDAC event in London this week (Mar 22nd), and at Skoll World Forum (with Patrick Meier) the following week, also running a session during the Oxford Jam on Wed 28th at 3pm. Heather Leson attended the OWASP NYC meetup on March 21.

Community and Deployers:

About: What are you working on? What do you need help with? Deployment of the Week: Which Team are you rooting for? (See all the Deployments of the Week) Long term community members: Mark Belinsky, Sara Farmer and Jaro Valuch attended some of the NYC events. Their participation was invaluable for those new to Ushahidi. Thanks!

Code:

About: What code are your working on? What needs help? Robbie is working on security bugs to improve the software. (Thanks to John Etherton for the code patch). There will be a security patch this week. Brandon is reworking the UI for SwiftRiver. Angie is working on DB analysis. Dale is working on an IOS 2.0 release. (He needs mobile testing help). Linda is decoupling the timeline from the map to improve map load times. Emmanuel and Brian M. are working on SwiftRiver security and adding new UI to Swift. Brian H. is working on topical Crowdmaps. David worked on Pachube sensor plugin for Ushahidi core (this will allow more dynamic forms in Ushahidi.) He is also working on SwiftRiver core items. Henry is working on Ushahidi Core Auto-upgrader and Mobile app releases. We're taking feedback here on Ushahidi 3.0. Francesco Ciriaci, Commmunity member, is building his project for a Offline to Online App. Heather Leson and Francesco are investigating including the hack in the NASA Open Space Hackathon. At the Water Hack, David and Dale collaborated with Pachube and other sensor hackers. David created a plugin for sensor data. Dale worked on a mobile android app for sensor data and Heather curated the story content (pictures, videos etc) as well as ran the event.

Meetings:

About: Ushahidi core team will share about their meetings to improve the Community experience. If you are meeting about Ushahidi, feel free to share too! Heather attended meetings with Access Now (increased content for deployers about security) and OWASP-NYC (to learn about OWASP and determine next steps for connecting Ushahidi to this community.) The School of Visual Arts team also provided some feedback on how we can improve our Plugin community and documentation.