This post is about what to consider when you are planning a pilot project to test a bigger data collection project. Data collection can provide information to power your campaign and the process of collecting it can win communities’ support. But it’s not easy to set up a data collection project to inform and power an advocacy campaign.

It’s challenging to identify the right strategy and tools. It’s easy to waste time, energy, money, and contacts with an over-reaching project that hasn’t been tested with a pilot. Have you heard yourself describe your project and think: “That project would be amazing if everything worked out perfectly. But I have no idea if it will succeed and I don’t even know where to begin.”? Thinking through how to effectively pilot may be the next logical step in launching your project.

But what is a pilot, and how can you go about designing one? This post aims to work through the biggest problems in designing a pilot, and provide some guidance for how to do it effectively.

Informative Failure

Failure can be a wonderful thing. To fail well, it’s important to design a project so that when something always breaks, you can tell what piece was responsible for the failure. For failure to be informative, you must be able to isolate the cause.

Anticipating and embracing failure, and isolating its causes can be challenging, but it is much easier if you design a pilot that starts small, changes fast, and is well-documented. If a project starts out too large, it won’t be clear what variables were the source of the failure. If a project changes too slowly, it will be challenging to eliminate the points of failure or stumble on innovative and effective methods. And if a pilot isn’t well documented, it will be much more difficult to identify and monitor failure.

But what does it mean to start small? And what pieces and parts of a pilot should you consider in your design and planning?

Pilot Project Components

1. Scope and Issue

Starting a project that covers every issue from the outset is bound to fail — and not in a good way. Saying you want to monitor and support citizens in tracking every component of government service delivery will lead to frustration and chaotic failure. Picking a very focused issue area (rather than maternal health – access to pre-natal vitamins, rather than election “fairness” – opening and closing time of polling stations) can make success easier to track. Selecting small subsets of issues leaves you with tangible data about a specific issue, and it also means more targeted engagement with communities. It gives you great statistics, and it also increases the chances that your campaign will resonate. The next time you ask a maternal health related question, you want pilot community members to remember you and your project.

• Do be as specific as possible with your issue that you want to cover in your pilot. Also have a general idea about what outcomes you need to understand how best to scale. An informative pilot is a success in its own right.
• Don’t set yourself up for frustration and disappointment by picking an issue to tackle that is too broad.

2. Geography

Geographic scope of a project can play a huge role in the success of a pilot. Starting with a whole country, or even a whole city can doom a pilot. Think about a dead Ushahidi map with 40 reports across a country of 40 million people. That broad geographic scope makes it challenging to get others involved, and it makes the project easy to ignore. Choose one neighborhood and get everyone involved in a pilot, and then you have a story. You can establish relationships with the community and get feedback on what their expectations are for your project. You can carefully document who engages. We’ll talk more later about making sound choices when selecting geographic scope, but keep it in mind when considering other variables.

• Do think small. Make sure you think about the smallest, most feasible-sized place to test your project. Pick a geography that you have the resources to cover and cover well. Think about the place where your strongest and most supportive constituency can help you test your idea.
• Don’t pick a geographic scope that you don’t have the resources to cover. Don’t introduce your organization or project to an entirely new constituency in a place you don’t know well. And don’t go too big to test variables or make your team feel like they haven’t accomplished anything at the end of the pilot. You want a win and you want a success story.

3. Data Gatherers or Contributors

Your data collection project won’t succeed without people to collect and contribute data. If you already have a community or group of people who you know will be good data gatherers or contributors, start there. If there are other groups of people who already work together or associate who would be good for these jobs, speak with them about collaborating. It might be easiest to work with a group of people who are located near one another. If you know of a well-connected group that doesn’t live near one another, that may work well too.

• Do let the pilot community know what you are working towards. Do collect contact information and make sure to follow-up with the community if outreach and community building is a component of your project.
• Don’t collect unnecessary information or information that will put your pilot community at risk. Why collect national ID numbers if you don’t need them? If you are planning on sharing information you collect, make sure you tell the people you are collecting information from. There is no better way to burn bridges with your pilot community (and your larger project) than betraying their trust.

4. Audience

Who do you want to win over and who are you trying to reach? Before you step out on a limb and scale a project, it is important to provide likely supporters the chance to help out (through volunteer hours, donations, awareness raising, etc). It is also critical to understand who your message and project are meant to reach. There are lots of resources to do this. Here is a simple starter site for stakeholder analysis. Are you trying to influence government? The general public? Civil society? Women living in poverty in rural areas of your country? Knowing who you want to reach is the most important part of designing a project.

5. Supporters

Some people you reach out to will be more supportive than others. You won’t need to convince them of what you are working on, and you may even be able to get them involved in the project. Will you need more volunteers for the next phase of the project? Then you will need to target your pilot community to build a network of people that are not only willing to participate in your pilot project, but also so committed that they are willing to work with you in coming phases of the project. Is there a vocal politician that can champion your cause? Is there a well-networked neighborhood that would be a helpful, captive audience interested in making your project a success?

6. Budget

Pilots are hard to budget because they change so fast and are hard to predict. Always be on the lookout for hidden costs. Just because the software you want to use is free does not mean that it won’t cost time, energy, and resources to get up and running and to maintain. While technologies make it technically feasible to contact just about everyone in your country, don’t let the reach of technology distract. In mobile projects, starting a data collection campaign with a blast of SMSs to a huge list of numbers is popular. This kind of SMS blast is very expensive. A pilot is a good way to test a project idea on a small sample, and use the pilot as a way to iterate before spending a lot of money on a larger, follow-on bigger blast. Keep in mind that pilots are a great way to prove a concept before your boss or donor spends the big bucks on it. It also shows that you are keen to not waste money.

7. Incorporating a Pilot Phase in Project Proposals

It’s common to include a pilot phase in project proposals, and this is a good first step. But, having a paragraph on piloting won’t help the project if the rest of the proposal still commits to specific activities that haven’t been tested by the pilot phase. Proposals can include flexibility by openly describing the way a pilot may influence the development of the project. Make sure that project benchmarks are specific enough to be useful, but open enough to be adapted when you learn from the pilot phase.Donors like to see openness and honesty about how a project will unfold and how you are preparing for unpredictability. Flexibility is key. And while it can be challenging to plan flexibility into your projects, showing donors that you are considering how to test ideas and design as you learn from testing will show them that you are thinking ahead and thinking creatively.

• Do try to use clear and frank language about the importance of running pilots. Be clear about challenges and opportunities and how you plan on managing a responsive and evolving project while also staying on course to meet your obligations to donors. Try to structure pilots in proposals so that they have real capacity to influence the way projects are planned and rolled out.
• Don’t just say you are running a pilot as part of your project because you think it sounds good.

8. Results and Narrative

Documenting impact in a pilot project is critical to justify and design scaling. What results do you want your pilot to have? What do you want to learn from your pilot? The outcome of a pilot can be a subset of the outcome you want out of a project, or it can be tangible proof that the project will work (even if you expect the project to work differently than the pilot did). Document, document, document. After a pilot project it’s important to have a compelling story to tell. Who did you reach? What statistics and hard numbers can you show to document your work? How will this pilot function if scaled? What would you change if you could do it again?

Let us know if we missed an element of pilot design or if you want to share an example of a successful or failtastic pilot project. We will be putting together a decision process for pilot design as a next installment. We are also happy to talk to you about your project if you want help thinking through how to design a pilot to test your concept.

Also, thanks to Chris Albon at FrontLineSMS for helping me think through some of these issues!

Deployment of the Week – The Love Map from Taiwan

Environmental Mapping

Anna Hrybyk joined us to share the story of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. The small non-profit has been active since 2000. They have built some environmental programming around using Ushahidi for citing water stewardship and pollution issues. Some of the biggest needs they have include funding to support their Rapid Response Teams for water testing and hyper local outreach. Their map, I Witness Pollution, is one of the longest running Ushahidi projects. More from Anna, including a BUCKET demo:

Upcoming Events

Thursday, May 23, 2013 – Stockholm Internet Forum (live steam/ virtual)

Juliana is participating on a panel about Transforming international development through ICTs at the Stockholm Internet Forum on May 23rd (Tomorrow). It will be streamed at 11am CEST. You can also follow along using the #SIF13 hashtag.

Also, check out the event readings on Internet Privacy and Security..

THIS FRIDAY, May 24, 2013 – San Francisco Casual meetup

A few of the Ushahidi team will be in SF. Join us on Friday, May 24, 2013 for a casual meetup and chat. We’ll share details about the latest projects.

To join the SanFran Meetup

Wednesday, May 29, 2013 – BRCK Google Hangout: Dive into the Technology and Product Design (virtual)

Our Product Lead and Software/hardware Engineers for a chat about the BRCK. Learn about the next steps.

To participate, we’ll host this Hangout on Air (Youtube and G+)

Upgrade Days – May 30 – 31, 2013

We posted about Upgrade Days earlier this week. Consider it an Upgrade matchmaking service - if you need help or can help!

Tuesday, June 4, 2013 – NYC Casual Meetup

It has been a year since we last hosted an NYC meetup. I’ll be in town for Personal Democracy Forum.

To join the casual NYC Meetup

****

The Monthly Community Update was sent to our various mailing lists yesterday. Take a read about BRCK, Crowdmap and upcoming wiki changes.

We thought the call would be a bust. But this week was different: our Nairobi team had a BRCK! We set up a small network in the iHub, and while the rest of the city was disconnected, only able to get access through their mobile devices, our team had Skype running smoothly and was able to plug away at the code to our heart’s content. We have tried to tether our phones, in the past, but the connection is never strong enough. Today we had the whole team linked up to the BRCK, and it was truly remarkable.

This was a landmark moment for us because this is exactly why we built the BRCK. We were sick of not being able to connect.

We want to extend our gratitude to everyone who has supported our project. Thank you for believing in us, and helping us make the BRCK a reality. We are more convinced than ever that this is a game-changing device that is only going to be more important as more of the world begins to engage in the web.

Learn more about BRCK (Google + Hangout)

Join our Product and Technical teams for a deep dive with BRCK. We’re hosting this Google + Hangout to answer questions and show more ‘under the hood’.

Date: Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Times: 9:00 PDT/ 12:00 EDT/ 17:00 BST/ 19:00 EAT

To join the G+ hangout, see our Ushahidi event page.

Can you support BRCK? Join us on Kickstarter

Why should you upgrade to v2.7?

• v2.7 is compliant with the recent changes to the twitter API. Instructions on how to set up twitter feeds are available here
• We’ve made improvements to how theming including abstraction and optimization of the default theme
• The reports upload and download feature has been reworked, with support for XML format being added in.
• A few fixes have also been made to the API, custom forms feature, the scheduler, and email alerts

This release also includes a critical security patch.

You can have a look at the complete list of features and bug fixes on the changelog.

Don’t be afraid

We know that upgrading on your own can prove to be a daunting task. Have no fear, this is why we have Upgrade Day. Members of the Ushahidi team and community will be available around the clock on to help you out. The auto-upgrade plugin will also go along way in easing some of you upgrade pains.

Do you need help or Can you help?

We’ve set up a schedule to help match deployers in need and developers. Some deployers have become pros when it comes to upgrading your deployment. Help us get your fellow deployers on the latest version (and make them pros too ) Upgrade Day is for two days across multiple timezones.

Sign up, and be sure to add your contact information on the schedule

For reference, read about the upgrade process, and migrating to a newer version of ushahidi.

See you on the May 30th – 31st, and Happy Upgrading!

Translators without Borders facilitates the transfer of knowledge from one
language to another by creating and managing a community of NGOs who need
translations and professional, vetted translators who volunteer their time to help.

The Translation Project

Translate Ushahidi software completely in KiSwahili

In January, our localization for KiSwahili was at approximately 60% for Ushahidi_Web and our mobile apps. We partnered with Translators without Borders for Uchaguzi Kenyan Elections project. The result is that now any Ushahidi community member can use this language set at 100% for their projects. Each organization had a community and toolset to get us there. Translation Without Borders team members used the project to try out a new tool: MemoQ. Ushahidi’s community uses Transifex for our translation community. Leading up the election, you can see the edits for March in our translation dashboard.

Support Real-time translation of SMS messages for Uchaguzi live mapping

(March 1 – 7, 2013)

While having our software in KiSwahili is a priority, the most intensive and exciting parts of this collaboration was the “Real-time translation.” I’ve written previously about how our community has changed us:

“The Translation team is a combination of trained professionals at Translators without Borders and digital participants from Kenya and beyond. The transition to being deeply inside a software deployment had a steep learning curve. But, it was fantastic to see reports quickly translated. Being fast paced on global teams is hard enough, try doing it in a few languages like these folks.”

Rebecca Petras, Translators without Borders, and I had a talk a week ago about the big lessons that we learned in our collaboration. Truly, this applies to the whole project, but especially our mighty translation team.

• Real-time global collaboration is a new for most people.
• Ushahidi software needs optimization for translation workflow.
• We taught our collective communities: new tools, new workflow, and new collaboration methods
• The community was in “make” and “edit” mode. This means we mentored and learned from each other.
• The Translation team almost had triple the work as they did all of the above in multiple languages.

For the whole project, some of the key barriers and ‘growing joys’ were:
language barriers, cultural norms, digital literacy, different skill-sets, global 24/7 time shifting, new relationships, new partnerships, multiple tools, and, of course, the fast pace of information.

Getting into the flow and incorporating all of these elements some time and tenacity, but the win was in the words and reports. Rebecca advised that Translators without Border’s team strengthened because of their participation. Ushahidi’s team and community (including the Translation without Borders team) were able to provide citizen voice to multi-lingual reporters because of the efforts and quality that our translation communities delivered. Thank you.

احب الخريطة…J’aime les cartes…Maps are Love…ramani ni upendo

Here’s to more adventures in localization:
To get involved, you can learn more on our wiki.

Today we are happy to release version 3.1.6 of Ushahidi Android app to the Google Playstore. This release includes

• Integration of the Ushahidi Java SDK
• Updates to user navigation menus – including admin dashboard access from the app
• Support for Google maps v2 for Android.

Ushahidi Java SDK

We have removed the verbose code in interacting with the Ushahidi API to a stand alone Java library which we are calling Ushahidi Java SDK. This will enable Java developers to easily work with the Ushahidi API in their Java projects. We have gone ahead and integrated the  SDK into the Ushahidi Android app Core library in the spirit of eating our own dog food. What this means for developers is that, they can easily extend the core features of the Core library. You can head over to our github repository for documentation on the public APIs exposed by the SDK.

Google Maps v2 for Android

Additionally, we have-added Google Maps V2 For Android and removed support for the old Google maps for android. This allows us to take advantage of  the new APIs. We now have support for OSM and Mapbox tiles.  If you go to the settings screen, you should be able to set which map tile to use. By default Google is selected.

User navigation menu updates

We have also added Menu Drawer support to provide quick and easy navigation to other areas of the app, regardless of which screen you are on. To access the menu drawer, swipe from the left side of the screen  or  simply tap the Ushahidi icon on the action bar — top left.

You can access your deployment Admin Dashboard from the Menu Drawer. This makes it easier to administer your Ushahidi deployment on the Go.

There’s more…

As always, there has been a ton of bug fixes. See the changelog for the complete list.

Thank you

Big shout out to the  folks at geothings.tw for their immense contribution in the development of the Ushahidi Java SDK and many thanks to the Ushahidi community for their constant feedback and bug reports.

Interested in contributing?

Both the Ushahidi Android and Ushahidi Java SDK are open source projects. Check out their respective github repo to access the code. Your contributions are welcome.

Go on,grab this version of the app and take it for a spin.

Happy mapping!

Evan Sims – gif star

Our team was also drooling a bit this week over the shout out on a favourite podcast, The Frequency. Hope you can support them!

Reminder: Have Ushahidi developer chops? Please be sure to let us know if you’d like to do some contract work. We are often contacted by community folks who need a hand. We’d be happy to connect you. Drop me a line with some basic details (Hleson at ushahidi dot com). I have two pending requests on this.

Deployment of the week: Art, Junk and Bikes

Community building means connecting the offline to online. We love the work that Placeworks from San Francisco is doing. Congratulations to our Deployment of the Week. Could you do this in your city?

Also, hats off to Trashwag, a previous Deployment of the Week, for ongoing efforts to build their local community network in Toronto: make junk into art!

Imagination abounds – Ushahidi is being used for BIKE OPERA!

Upcoming Events

TODAY: Environmental Mapper Hangout featuring the Louisiana Bucket Brigade‘s project – I Witness Pollution and Wansoo Im on Community Mapping.

• The next Ushahidi community developer call is May 20, 2013, Join us (Africa and Europe friendly time zone).
• Upgrade day for v2.7 is May 30 and 31, 2013. Join the community and team to lend a hand to upgrading. We’ll be sharing more details on this event on Monday.

Community Updates

We love it when our community shines. Ajay Kumar and Svend Jonas Schelhorn have been at ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) this week participating in simulation workshop and being Ushahidi mapstars!

Joao Porto de Albuquerquem, Ajay Kumar and Svend Jonas Schelhorn

The @gdacsmobile simulation concluding discussion. Here’s the final @ushahidi sitrep #ios #iscram twitter.com/ajuonline/stat…

— Ajay Kumar (@ajuonline) May 15, 2013

Research and Paper reminders

Are you interested in research about open source, commons and open internet. There is still time to share your knowledge at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2013 (due May 24, 2013). or participate in Citizen Lab’s Connaught Summer Institute (due June 1, 2013). Keep us posted if you’d like to write about Ushahidi. We’d love to support your research efforts.

Thanks to Transparency International for their review on Technology against Corruption.

Into the Code

SwiftRiver

With work on the new UI almost done, team swift is working on integration of CrowdmapID into the system for purposes of authentication. Data migration from the old version to the new version should also be done in the coming weeks. Watch out for fresh documentation on the wiki, with code samples on the way .

Mobile

We are all geared up for the release of v3.1.6 of the Android App on May 16, 2013. See the issues tackled in the upcoming release on the github issues page.

BRCK

It has been an incredible first week, we are truly thankful for all of you that have supported us and helped to spread the word. We are about 66% of the way to our goal with 20 days to go.That’s with 582 backers and $86,555 raised – thank you!! Here is a visual representation of how we envision the BRCK as an onramp for the Internet of Things.

You can read more on our recent update on Kickstarter.

Ushahidi Core

The team has made more strides towards having V3 API work done, including OAuth integration and Sets (to be merged in after review). Our docs are on the wiki and our github repository. Contact us via via the dev mailing list, skype chat or even personal email to dive into the code.

Crowdmap

Bug squashing is ongoing, so keep sending in your feedback to the team, as it will go a long way in helping make your experience on Crowdmap even better. You can also file bug reports and feature requests on our github issues page. Work on the API is also ongoing, and we’re aiming for documentation in the coming weeks.

Happy mapping,

Heather and Angela.

There was a general feeling of excitement and optimism about the new role of technology to promote transparency and accountability at the Transparency International SpeakUp! event which I attended in March 2013. There was quite a buzz about online denunciation tools in particular, and different Transparency International chapters are looking into ways to embrace new tools or improve existing ones to encourage citizens to report corruption cases.

Tarik Nesh-Nash

In February 2012, Transparency Morocco launched the online platform Mamdawrinch.com (which means “We will not bribe”). The aim was to provide a tool for anonymous denunciation to encourage people to speak up and discuss corruption in public. Today, corruption is becoming a mainstream topic and even the government claims to be ramping up the fight against corruption. We are considering moving Mamdawrinch’s mission beyond anonymous reporting to enable interaction with legal advice centres and educate the public on empirical cases and practical tools to fight corruption.

This blog post shares some of the thoughts exchanged on Transparency Morocco’s online reporting tool.

Technology cannot fight corruption. People can.

An online site is not a solution. It is merely a tool. One cannot iterate this statement enough. Technology can empower citizens, raise awareness and pressure authorities. Yet, technology cannot fight corruption; it cannot change cultures, detect problems, propose solutions or amend laws. People can. As we are building online tools, we should remember their raison d’être: they should be part of a broader strategy of engagement and participation.

The author as he explains the idea behind mamdawrinch.com at a global meeting of over 70 representatives of Transparency International’s legal advice centres around the world.

Measuring success

Closely related to the first point, it is important to set clear objectives to measure the platform’s success. In my opinion, objectives should move beyond statistics on the number of site visits to more functional goals. For example, one could look at the number of online visitors who meet with a legal advisor working with one of Transparency Morocco’s legal advice centres in person, the number of online visitors who pursue legal actions – or even better – the number of successes such as a cancellation of a corrupt tender or the dismissal of a police officer who solicited a bribe.

Responding to corruption – feedback and user interaction

Having a feedback loop is crucial. When citizens report corruption cases, they expect at least a reaction, if not a solution to their problem. This is one of the most difficult challenges to tackle when building a reporting tool. In the case of Mamdawrinch, citizen reports are currently published on the site, pinned on a map and shared on Facebook and Twitter. We are realising that this is not sufficient. Users often ask for guidance or label their experience incorrectly as corruption. The site should also provide documentation and interact with users.

A dedicated team

Technology has a cost. In addition to the cost of technical development, the cost of human resources should not be underestimated. Although there is a plethora of free open source software, a successful online experience requires technical work and it certainly requires human support and follow-up to keep analysing and reacting to the reports. Unlike other timely crowdsourcing efforts like crisis mapping or election monitoring where volunteers contribute their time and skills, fighting corruption is a long-term fight. The energy and the excitement tend to wind down with time. In my opinion, it is important to have professionals who keep building the community, bringing the topic to the spotlight and reacting continuously to current affairs. A high quality follow up requires professional dedication from legal advice centres’ staff.

In the case of Mamdawrinch, we learned the hard way that the site could not function without a dedicated team who provides daily support. Today, Transparency Morocco has a full-time person that manages its online presence, and a dedicated legal advice centre team which receives requests through its hotline and offices in Rabat, Fes and Nador. We are now looking into coupling the work of the legal advice centre and Mamdawrinch so that the internet will be another two-way communication channel for legal advice centres.

Decide on strategy before choosing technology

Cool technology is not necessarily the best. A common mishap is to pick the technology before deciding on the online strategy. Engineers are naturally inclined to prefer cool new technologies but this may not be the right fit for what is needed. Here are two examples of cool technologies that were debated when setting up Mamdawrinch: Geomapping and SMS.

Geomapping has become a buzz word and Ushahidi proved to be a powerful, accessible and mature platform. Yet we realised that geomapping hotspots may not be the best way to visualise corruption. It may even be counterproductive: the use of exact geo-location information can be defamatory and unless it is sustained with solid proof, it could lead to legal action. Also, the lack of incidents reported in a geographic area may be interpreted incorrectly as lack of corruption in that area. We are currently considering adding new visualisations to identify hot sectors and trends.

Another cool technology is the use of SMS. While the technical platform is available and mature, its implementation in Morocco would require a continuous payment to the telecom company and another non-trivial cost from the citizen. High costs from both the development and user side can hinder the widespread use of SMS, but with a 120 per cent phone-to-citizen ratio, it is definitely worth exploring.

Working with online leaders

Use social media and build online leaders. If we take Morocco as an example, many young people spend hours per day on social media sites. In this space, we are witnessing the emergence of new types of leaders: online leaders. People who believe in the cause and voluntarily promote the fight. Kudos to people like Layla Barrit, Rachid Adil and Selma Sabaa who are spontaneously raising awareness about transparency using social media and setting examples for other young people. This is an area that deserves more innovation. In 2011, social media users organised popular protests against corruption. This powerful energy should be supported to continue the struggle for transparency and accountability. Continuous improvement. There is no magic solution that can be successfully replicated. If we knew how to efficiently fight corruption, we would have already done so. We should promote innovation and risk-taking to come up with new alternatives. In the software development industry, the ‘Agile Software Development’ methodology is often recommended for problems with changing requirements. Corruption is a perfect example of a shifting field where as soon as we find an antivirus, the virus evolves and a new antivirus needs to be invented to fight it.

I am hopeful that technology will result in systemic change and strengthen transparency and accountability. With the growing use of IT by the government and all sectors, transparency measures will become embedded in the system.

Yes, we still need your help to get to 100%, and appreciate you sharing the Kickstarter link widely.

It’s been a big week at Ushahidi, with the launch of the New Crowdmap, along with the BRCK Kickstarter and the announcement of the MAVC partnership. Everyone on the team is taking a welcome respite from the blitz over the weekend, as we gear up for next week’s follow-up.

During these times of added attention, it brings other voices and eyes to your organization. Sometimes it takes other people looking at what you do, and then talking about it, to better understand yourself. That happened this week with a brilliant post by Nat Bullard titled, “Backup / On ramp / Good enough” where he crystalized what really makes us tick with this:

“We use technology to define the function.  Ushahidi uses function to drive the technology.”

The BRCK as backup generator

This idea of a seemingly simple problem of internet connectivity in the parts of the world which have shaky power and net infrastructure is what led us to question the solutions put before us: routers and modems made for the more developed parts of the world. That’s the first part of the story of the BRCK, and it’s the thing that drives us to make it real, as we feel this pain every day ourselves.

The BRCK as glue

The second part of the story on the BRCK leverages that idea of simple connectivity and pushes us to use our core competency, which is web development. It’s where we see that the BRCK is really the glue between the cloud and the internet of things, where you can connect your devices and sensors in the real physical world, and control them from anywhere.

In the Media

There have been some fantastic media pieces this last week, where it seems like the BRCK has struck a chord with people around the world. There will be a few more newsworthy items over the coming weeks before the BRCK campaign ends as well.

MIT’s Technology Review started the week off by digging into how this simple technology makes sense to come from Ushahidi, with our background in crisis/disaster.

Quartz really understood the value of third-party applications and hardware connectivity.

Forbes gets into the details about being offline when the power goes out, and why that doesn’t need to be true.

Since I was in Germany to speak at re:publica, it was great to have coverage by Spiegel.

Matt Berg wrote up a good post, on what excites him about the BRCK, and questions he has for the team.

There were a lot more, you can see them here:

• Engadget: Insert Coin: BRCK wireless router packs a fallback 4G connection, internal battery
• Geek.com: BRCK, emergency internet access that works without electricity
• All Things D: Ushahidi Raising Kickstarter Funding for Rugged Hotspot BRCK
• The Next Web: Meet BRCK, a piece of hardware that will bring you the Internet when all lights go out
• Tech President: Internet You Can Actually Stick in a Suitcase
• Digital Trends: ‘BRCK’ is a backup Internet generator for when the power goes out
• Discovery: Backup Device Keeps the Internet Up in a Disaster
• TechSpot: Meet BRCK – the rugged backup generator for the Internet
• Tech Central (South Africa): A new Kenyan project on crowd-funding site Kickstarter is garnering big attention and is fast raking in contributions.
• T3: Kickstarter for BRCK, connect to the internet without electricity, goes live
• Golem.de (German): Brck sorgt für Netz und Strom
• AIT News (Arabic): “BRCK”: جهاز جديد يوفر الاتصال بالإنترنت مع انقطاع الكهرباء
• Aliqtisadi (Arabic): تطوير جهاز جديد يوفر الاتصال بالإنترنت مع انقطاع الكهرباء
• Alibaba (China): 神奇的上网设备BRCK：无需电源也可连接互联网
• Origo.hu (Hungary): Egy téglaméretű kütyü segít, ha elmegy a net
• IT Web Africa: Ushahidi turns to Kickstarter to raise funding for ‘BRCK’

Google Hangout

We did a Google Hangout for the BRCK this last week too with Heather, Rob, Jon, Angela, and Nat this last week. Here’s the recording:

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.

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?

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.