Community update: Plans, Events and Code

Google hosted their first Google Big Tent Event on July 2nd in Sendai, Japan. Ushahidi was invited to participate in the panel: "Managing the crowd: benefits and challenges of social media in a disaster". We were honoured to talk about verification using Ushahidi. Plus, it gave us a chance to highlight the amazing efforts of the Sinsai.info volunteers whose "brainsourced" effort identified and geo-located over 10, 000 reports for the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. When asked about verification, I cited the 5 T's of successful deployments:

team

training

test

trust

tenacity

While every deployment and project is different, these themes keep rising.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Tasukeai Japan prepared this short video about sinsai.info @ Google Big Tent (Video also features Hiroyasu Ichikawa and Taichi Furuhashi of the sinsai.info team.) For more coverage, see the Google blog and NHK (Japanese media). Thanks again to Google, World Vision NetHope, OCHA, the other sponsors and participants for this opportunity to connect and share. The Sinsai.info team had over 100 participants, created their own user manual and divided into teams with moderators. Their technique to approaching verification is similar to the StandBy Task Force. ****** While in Japan, Hal Seki and I hosted an Ushahidi Casual meetup in Tokyo. We were joined by 16 attendees (not all attendees shown in the photo) including members of the Sinsai.info team, Japan OpenStreetMap Foundation, DataKind , Citizen Lab and a few academic researchers. The Ushahidi team, and we think the world, has been completely inspired by the dedication of the hundreds of volunteers who made the Sinsai.info project a success. The community continues to plan for future collaboration. We also got a preview of OpenRelief's amazing Robot. (photo taken by restaurant staff on our behalf)

More Community events

Tomorrow we're hosting concurrent Design Jams will take place tomorrow (July 10th) in Seattle and Nairobi. There's still time to join us. David Kobia is speaking at OSCON and we are looking forward to connecting with the Portland mappers and the OWASP community. If you are attending OSCON, we'd love to connect and learn more about your projects. We're holding a casual Ushahidi Meetup in Portland, OR on Friday, July 20th. Join us for a late afternoon post-OSCON chat.

Help Wanted:

Ushahidi is looking for a community person to do some paid desktop publishing. If you have the skills, please send a website and more details to hleson at ushahidi dot com. Bonus points if you have design chops too.

Deployments of the Week

We've run the Deployments of the Week Program for almost a year. Here are some of the most recent maps of note: July 6: End Slavery Tennessee (Door Hanger Placement Campaign) June 29: Orasulmeu: Mapping Traffic in Romania June 22: Korupedia: Mapping Corruption in Indonesia June 15: Contamos: mapping the Mexican elections

Into the Code

*SwiftRiver Beta has started. To give feedback, add your notes to our spreadsheet. And, here's the SwiftRiver sign up to get cracking. *Thanks to Simcha Levental for building up our documentation for Deploying Ushahidi on Amazon Web Services. Edits are welcome. *We've updated the software for the Forums to combat spam. You may need to update your password when you log in. Sorry for this inconvenience. ****** More from the Ushahidi Weekly Reports [Ed. Note: I was on course for the past few weeks. Community Weekly reports and the Community Developer call will return to normal schedules this month]