Community Update: Environmental Mappers, 2.7 in the Hopper

What an amazing journey to spend this past month with three of our largest community bases: Election monitors, anti-corruption and crisismappers. Each have unique and, sometimes, similar needs. Each has provided input into software, toolkits and programming needs. Before I get into the community round up: Have you sign up for your Crowdmap Beta account yet?

Getting connected

We are making some changes to our wiki, forums and community sites in the coming month. These are improvements to meet the feedback from the community survey. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a quick reminder of the Community Connection chart. We have a number of real-time skype chats and an IRC (#ushahidi on freenode). Meet folks from around the globe: Ushahidi developer community, Ushahidi Mobile Chat, SwiftRiver Chat, Ushahidi Research and, happily, a General all things Ushahidi Community chat.

From the Community

Deployment of the Week

Spring is on my mind as I think about Deployment of the Week and environmental mappers. We're happy to recognize two new Deployments of the Week focused on reuse and protecting our planet. As well, we recognize our friends from Transparency International and Anti-corruption mappers. April 2: Wish20: Ecocide: A global citizens initiative to end ecocide by 2020 (global) March 26: Trashwag: Wood and Materials Salvage (Toronto, Canada) Trashwag received some tremendous coverage. The team will be building on this in the coming months. Also, they really do win for spring cleaning planning. CBC radio here and now. Techvibes Wired Fast Company (FastCoexist) BlogTO March 19: Draw a Red Line: Join the Fight against Corruption (Macedonia) (See last week's post from the Draw the Line team)

Help Wanted

Lidia Cibor needs your help. She started a project named 'Health and Diseases - real-time reports from Africa'. They want to monitor the health situation in Africa: outbreaks, health system improvements. Website is based on Ushahidi-crowdmap. They need folks to manage news, searching info and to manage Facebook fanpage. If you want join to the team, please send information to: africacrowdmap@gmail.com.

in the news

Tech President interviewed Daudi Were for their article: "Kenya Technology proved useful, not reason for Peaceful Elections." Uchaguzi community team member, Bradley Cleveland wrote about his experiences in "Social enterprise working for democracy and humanitarian relief." Professor Colette Mazzucelli is quoted about crisismapping in Shari Smith's article on "Deconstructuring Prevention: the theory of policy and practice of Mass Atrocity Prevention". One of the longest running and successful deployments from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade was featured in this recent piece. "St. Bernard Parish sulphur dioxide spikes lead to calls for better DEQ alerts." We will be hosting an Ushahidi Research discussion in the coming week featuring some of these topics. Stay tuned for more details.

Into the Code

We have some great things coming in the code. The next release for Ushahidi platform is a bug fix release (2.7) set for the end of April. See github for details. Take a listen to March's Community Developer call to hear the latest about Ushahidi 3.0, Crowdmap Beta and SwiftRiver. (audio recording link on the wiki.) The next Ushahidi Developer call is April 23/April 24th pending your timezone. Come with your questions, discuss your projects and more. Sign up to join the next Ushahidi Developer call. Happy Mapping.