Weekly: Umati & BRCK Videos, Crowdmap in Action

Ushahidi
May 10, 2013

What a Week! The whole team wants to fall over with all the product delivery. In this week's report, more about BRCK and Crowdmap Public Beta. Plus, we've got a Deployment of the Week from Pakistan and a google hangout all about monitoring Dangerous Speech with the Umati Research. We've started to host more Google Hangouts to better support our busy, global community. Please share widely and keep the questions coming!

Deployment of the Week

The Pakistan elections are tomorrow, May 11th. We recognize Jaag Pakistan as Deployment of the Week. Jaag Pakistan is a crowd-sourced citizen journalism effort to make a free and fair election a possibility in Pakistan by reporting each and every rigging incident in the country using an online platform. The rigging incidents reports, sent by PTI ground teams and general public, are plotted live on the map on the website by our team of dozens of GIS/Mapping volunteers. Jaag Pakistan (election monitoring) Also, see the Haalaat map, which includes some election reports. This team has a wider mandate. Shan has been working hard on his deployment alongside our Ushahidi Developer community.

Upcoming Events

Our monthly Environmental mapper hangout is May 15th. Join us for an afternoon (or evening) session. The next Ushahidi Community Developer call is scheduled for May 20th, 2013. It is scheduled to be Europe and Africa timezone friendly. Join us! Upgrade day is scheduled for May 30 -31, 2013. Need help upgrading your deployment to v2.7 of Ushahidi? Join the community and team to lend a hand to upgrading. We’ll share more details as we move closer to the date!

Umati - Monitoring Dangerous Speech

The Umati team presented their ongoing results monitoring Dangerous Speech in Kenya. It is the largest project monitoring Hate Speech in Kenya. Their dataset is massive. Angela Crandall and Kagonya Awori shared results and answered questions in this Google Hangout to air:

Into the Code

Crowdmap is in public beta. Did you see the video demo/Q&A? Crowdmap maps are love Kellie Merritz wrote this about her experiences: With the new version of Crowdmap, it's easy to predict that mobile users worldwide will collectively breathe a sigh of relief. Personally, I've always had a difficult time accessing and efficiently using Crowdmap while on my mobile phone. When I logged into the “New Version” for the first time I was ecstatic to see the improvement when I got to the beta page. Have questions about new Crowdmap? See our wiki docs and drop us a line at support at crowdmap.com.

Introducing the BRCK!

We recently launched a kickstarter campaign for one of our newest products, BRCK. It will be the easiest, most reliable way to connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world. We’ve crossed the 50% mark in just two days, and are excited to see where this will take us. Thanks you profusely for all your support. We are already rolling up our "delivery" sleeves. Take a listen to our Hangout for more details:

Ushahidi Core

The team is hard at work crushing bugs in preparation for v2.8, scheduled for release towards the end of June. The Usahidi 3.0 work continues. We promise to have some things to show in the next week. See the code in progress on github.

SwiftRiver

Team swift is looking into Launching the new UI, probably in the coming week. This week they hosted a large project event with a client. We're looking forward to sharing more about this. The big headline is: A group has built an app on top of the new SwiftRiver API.

Mobile

Henry’s been working on a lot of UI changes for the Ushahidi Android app, including adding admin support into it. He’s also managed to fully integrated the Java SDK into the app, and is hoping to release the next version of the app in the coming week. Happy Mapping.