Weekly: Uchaguzi Hangout, Code of Conduct & Testing 2.7

Happy Week! We are a mission to share best practices and co-create a Code of Conduct. Plus, we have two Deployments of the Week from Venezuela. The biggest Ushahidi news this week is that we are in TEST MODE for 2.7. After months of bug fixes and many long nights/days, the developer team has crushed bugs and need your help to test before we launch. We are also tackling an intermittent bug in Crowdmap for logins. More in the report:

Uchaguzi - Election Monitoring Google Hangout

Join Daudi Were and the Ushahidi team to talk election monitoring, research, and learnings from the Uchaguzi Kenyan Election: Date: Monday, April 22 2013 Time: 15:00 EAT, 08:00 EDT To join:

Code of Conduct

Ushahidi used a Code of Conduct/Collaboration for the Kenyan Elections. We would like to propose this Code be used for the Ushahidi community. Please provide any feedback and edits by April 30th either in the comments of this blog post or on the wiki. Or, please feel free to drop me a line - hleson@ushahidi.com. We have a skype Ushahidi Community group and will open up the discussion there. Please add heatherleson to be connected. Draft Ushahidi Code of Conduct (draft)

Deployment of the Week

The Elections in Venezuela continue to be debated. In the past month, there have been two projects focused on giving voice to occurrences surrounding the Venezuela Elections: Votoreporte and Defiendetuvoto. We recognize these projects both as Deployments of the Week:

Help Wanted

"In Southern Italy, thanks to crime in toxic waste traffic, people are over-exposed to high risk of several diseases and dying as a consequence of a massive environmental pollution evolving the food chain, the soil, the water and the air." About La Terra dei Fuochi Project. (Facebook page) The team is seeking programming expert volunteer in PHP and iOS with knowledge of the framework Kohana and Ushahidi. Please refer via Skype to: angeloferrillo or via Email to: direzione@laterradeifuochi.it.

Research

Matt Stempeck is working on his MA at the Center for Civic Media (MIT). He is building a workflow to aggregate crisismaps and other online volunteering projects that respond to major crises. Would you help a community in crisis via the internet? Do @mstem a favor and take this survey to help his research.

Into the Code

Reminder: The next Ushahidi community developer call is scheduled for April 23rd, 2013.(North/South America and Asia friendly timezone). Be sure to join us, and bring a friend if you can.

Ushahidi v2.7: Upcoming Code Release

As we prepare for the 2.7 code release, there will be a code freeze from April 18th, to pave way for testing. Key dates: Code Freeze: April 18, 2013 Community testing: April 18 - 23, 2013. Bug Fix April 24 - 26, 2013 Crowdmap upgrade to 2.7 code: April 27-29, 2013 Ushahidi 2.7 Code Release Date: April 30, 2013 We need your help testing all the bugs/features that the dev team has been working so hard to get fixed! Add your findings on this testing spreadsheet. Also, please join us via Skype or irc to co-test. As always, we promise to dig in and followup.

Ushahidi v3

Didn’t get a chance to here about what the 3.0 team is up to? Robbie Mackay explains it in his blogpost here. The team needs help with handling API Authentication and adding support for other databases, particularly PostgreSQL/PostGIS. You can share your thoughts and suggestion on the dev mailing list, on the github repository, or by getting in touch with anyone on the team directly.

Crowdmap

The team is working on an annoying intermittent bug that forces users to get constantly logged out of their Crowdmap Classic deployments, or throws an ORM error. It’s been hard to figure out the problem, as it does not happen all the time, and there hasn’t been a definite course on reproducing the bug. We have a hunch it may have something to do with corrupt cookies, but will get to the bottom of it. We’re working very resolve this issue, and apologize profusely for the deep inconveniences caused by this. We’ll keep you posted on progress! Workaround: Clear Crowdmap cookies from browser session. Remember: You can sign up for a beta account for new Crowdmap.

Swift

Team Swift is working hard on building in analytics into the application over the coming weeks, as well as fine tuning search functionality and rolling out the new UI soon. Be sure not to miss out on the upcoming SwiftRiver event on the (April 25th, Nairobi based, not online). We'll host a larger online event on May 11th, 2013.

Mobile

Henry’s been polishing up on Google Map v2 integration into the Android app. He’s also managed to fully integrate the Java SDK into it as well (woohoo)! Stay tuned for documentation on how to build the Android app and SMSSync from the source.