Weekly: Iran Voices, Data Ethics & Crowdmap Topics

Ushahidi
Jun 12, 2013

In the weekly: We've got upcoming events for Ushahidi Developers and Crowdmap users. Data is on our mind, so tune into our Data Ethics in Research conversation. And, we've got Topic of the Week for new Crowdmap and our Deployment of the Week from Iran. ***** I've been riveted by all the events in Turkey. My thoughts are with citizens and activists. There have been a few questions to our community about who is mapping. Protest and conflict mapping is very hard and complex, please be safe. See Security in a Box. Here are a few examples of projects related to OccupyGezi: Crowdmap "classic": There are two active mapping projects: Istanbul Violence and Global Gezi. New Crowdmap - Search Istanbul, OccupyGezi and Turkey for posts. *****

Crowdmap: Topic of the Week

With new Crowdmap, You can now send an email and have that post to your map directly. The "Topic of the Week" is to add a Joke to new Crowdmap. You can tag with #TOW (Topic of the Week)

How to

Send an email to jokes@in.crowdmap.com will put up a post on https://crowdmap.com/map/jokes/

Example Post

fg

Add on your map

You can test this out on your own individual maps by sending an email to [map_name]@in.crowdmap.com.

Events

Crowdmap User Forum - Get a Demo, Ask Questions, Give Feedback. Our next hangout is June 18, 2013 at 09:00 EDT/ 17:00 EAT Getting Involved in Ushahidi needs a reboot. Join us for our community developer call to share your input. June 17 at 21:00 EDT.

Data, Data, Data

Ushahidians work with data every day. Today we hosted a chat with our friends at the engine room and ihub Research about some of the ethical considerations that data researchers need to consider.

Summary:

Christopher Wilson, the engine room, rightfully pointed out that this discussion could lead into many sessions. Simply put, there is a myriad of critical topics. In our discussion of Internal Review Boards (IRB), we considered how each runs differently and don't have real-time standards. As Jennifer Chan of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative pointed out: "the IRB cycles might not match the ever-changing real-time flow." There is no one source to get the data standards, guidelines and research ethics for best practices in development. Anahi Ayala Iaccuci, Internews and Standby Task Force, and others are creating a Tech Salon series on this Ethics in Development. This will provide a resource for the wider community. Anahi advised that:

"it is shocking that in the digital space - organizations don't understand. Sometimes folks just give up. It is hard to incorporate all the data ethics standards and keep up with the technology and ethics."

Ihub Research will be releasing their Umati report next week. We look forward to sharing this important research into monitoring dangerous speech.

Intro - Data Ethics in Research:

Dr. Collette Mazzucelli, Adjunct Associate Professor, Center for Global Affairs @ NYU, was presenting today at Montreal Institute of Genocide and Human Rights - Concordia University: https://twitter.com/MIGSinstitute/status/344871180471242754

Iran Voices: Deployment of the Week

Iran Voices and echoes collected news and reports from different cities of Iran are less media attention has been created. We recognize their difficult work as Deployment of the Week. Hat tip to Global Voices for helping amplify this project. iranvoices Previous Deployment of the Week winner, Aztecast, an application that allows the SDSU community to view, post and share events happening on and around San Diego State University, has new mobile apps in Android and ios.

Swiftriver

Emmanuel's rolling out the upgrades made over the past few months to the main site. Propagation of the data is taking some time, but we're hopeful that this can get done within the next few days or so.

Ushahidi Core

We managed to knock out two big issues that have been affecting 2.7 users:

CSV Upload issues

Custom form validation issues

These fixes have been propagated on Crowdmap classic due to their urgent nature. If you are using custom installs, you can pull in changes to test them out. A huge shout out goes out to Neil Horning and his HimalayanTechies team, who’ve worked on the KML Filter and Export Reports plugin. You can download and test these two plugins out from their respective github repos listed below:

Export Reports

KML Filter

Ushahidi 3.0 aka the next generation

On the 3.0 front, in line with Robbie’s thoughts on designing the v3 API, work on authentication is ongoing. Have a look at some of the work being done on access control functionality on the 3.0 Github repository.

Mobile

Henry’s managed to fix an issue on SMSSync that causes the app to slow down and crash when trying to import messages. See the github issue here. The next SMSSync release is expected to be June 20, 2013.

BRCK

Didn’t get to order a BRCK during the kickstarter campaign? You can now preorder yours today! Happy Mapping!