Welcome back to the Weekly! In this digest: OSCON, testing 2.5, next Community Developer meeting and more about the amazing work of the deployment community:

“Social Capital is your Capital”. Dave Eaves keynoted at OSCON this morning about the power of community. We’re delighted to be here to get a fresh injection of OS goodness. This is especially critical as we work to redesign Ushahidi.

At OSCON, we are co-hosting a Birds of Feather: HFOSS @ OSCON: Wednesday, July 18th at 20:00 PST (TONIGHT). For the past few months, we’ve been part of an HFOSS Community Working Group. Together with Benetech, SocialCoding4Good, Mifos and OpenMRS, we’ll be sharing how developers can get engaged in our projects.

On Thursday July 19th, David Kobia will be presenting about “Pivoting an African Open Source Project”

Into the code

We are testing 2.5 for Code Release next week. Take a spin? You don’t have to be a developer to dig in. If you have used Ushahidi or Crowdmap, your feedback is invaluable.

The next Community Developer call is:
When: Monday, July 30, 2012 / Tuesday July 31, 2012

Times:

Corresponding UTC (GMT): Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 01:00:00
London (UK): Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 2:00:00 AM BST
Portland (U.S.A.): Monday, July 30, 2012 at 6:00:00 PM PDT
Nairobi (Kenya): Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 4:00:00 AM EAT
Tokyo (Japan): Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 10:00:00 AM JST
Wellington (New Zealand): Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 1:00:00 PM NZST

From the Community:

Deployment of the week:

Krymsk (Mapping floods in Kuban, Russia). The Krymsk team has a large volunteer base, planned workflow and managed high volumes. On the technical side, they contributed updated Russian localization, some important Crowdmap bug, tested our new high load servers as well as provided some important design feedback. See all the Deployments of the Week

Every week it feels like “Spin the Globe” when I write about community deployments. It is a big of a “headspin” to move from Italy to India to Tunisia to Belarus. We could not be more honoured to be on this journey with these people who are making small incremental changes in their communities:

• Francesco Bartoli of GeoBeyond presented about GeoAvalanche. He created this graphic which demonstrate the power that deployers can exercise to customize and inform in their projects.

Ajay Kumar’s PowerCuts has been nominated for mBillionth Award South Asia 2012 under the Category: m-News & Journalism along with 5 others. Keep your fingers crossed for July 21st.

• Yezzi maps and monitors corruption in Tunisia. They recently received coverage on Global Voices.
• Electby returns to Belus

Our friends at the Open Source Initiative are now open for membership. We are only as good as those who support the greater mission. Join me?

More in the Ushahidi Weekly on the wiki.

*****
At OSCON, I’ve been collecting best practices for building community. It is humbling to meet and learn from such Open Source community leaders as Jono Bacon, Dave Eaves and Asheesh Laroia and Karen Rustad. One of the things I’ve observed is that large or small OS communities have similar growing “joys”. Ushahidi has much to learn from our OS friends, but more importantly, we are at a critical pivot point with you. I’ve felt this for months. We talk about code, design and deployments, but the biggest thing we can do is refocus our priorities to better serve and mentor the community.

Have a great week,

Heather