Weekly: Mini-grants, Community news

Ushahidi
Sep 5, 2012

The Fall season is upon us. Programs, events and software projects are growing. If my inbox is any indication, you are all a busy lot. In this week's report we have our Deployment of the Week from Nepal, a few ways to support your project and some upcoming events.

Deployment of the Week: Nepal Monitor

Neil Horning is leading development of Nepal Monitor: Monitoring Nepal's human rights and security situation. He has been an active member of our Ushahidi developer community and we've watched his project grow over the last few months. And, we've had some great discussions about issues and features over on Github. We are delighted to name Nepal Monitor our Deployment of the Week: Nepal Monitor See all the Deployments of the Week

Support your Mapping Project with help from friends

There are a few grants available for Crisismappers and Corruption Mappers. A number of mappers have hit the "growth wall" for their projects. They don't fit the pure "NGO" model or the "start-up" model. They are somewhere in between. We are very excited to have friends like Google, Ashkoka and Transparency International recognize their potential> The International Conference of Crisis Mappers is coming soon. Google is offering CrisisMappers Fellowships! CrisisMapper Fellows receive a free return flight to the 2012 CrisisMappers Conference, free registration, free participation in the Pre-Conference Training Sessions and are provided with mentorship before, during and after the conference. Here's the application for the CrisisMappers Fellowship Program: (due date is September 7, 2012 (Travel visas may unfortunately not be possible.) Transparency International, Ashoka and the International Anti-Corruption Conference Series are launching a global competition for new project ideas to boost transparency, strengthen accountability and fight corruption. The three competition winners will be awarded a mini-grant of 5,000 Euros to support the kick-start of their new anti-corruption project. Projects pitches will be accepted from now until 1 October 2012 and no later. We will announce the winners between 25-31 October, just enough time to make it to Brasilia for the Competition Award Ceremony at IACC. The International Anti-Corruption Conference is November 7 - 10 in Brazil.

Ushahidi events

We were honoured to participate in the successful Hacks/Hackers event in Buenos Aries last week. A local bike advocacy group used Ushahidi to help connect the growing Buenos Aires bicycling community. While in town, Rob Baker met with some of the team of our previous Deployment of the Week's team, AgroTestigo. Rob with Agritestigo AgroTestigo is a project that's been using the platform to connect farmers. It was recently featured in Mashable Business.

Upcoming events

Day of Swift Event (virtual event) - Saturday, September 8, 2012: Toronto Connect Event (Toronto, Canada) - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 Community member Simcha Levental will represent Ushahidi on an e-waste Big Data on September 21 - 23, 2012 in NYC Ushahidi's monthly community Developer Call: September 24/25, 2012 (September 24: 18:00 PDT, 21:00 EDT/September 25: 10:00 KST, 13:00 NZST) ICCM RHOK (CrisisMapping Hackathon, Washington DC) - October 13 - 14, 2012: If you have a challenge to submit for hacking, please do so by September 27, 2012.

In the Commmunity

Help a Deployer

Francesco Bartoli, of the GeoAvalanche project (an Ushahidi deployment for snow and avalanche safety), has entered in the GMES competition http://www.gmes-masters.com/service-application/snowmonit. If you give him 5 stars, he will be eligible to win a great amount of satellite data.

Oludotun Babayemi for presents Ushahidi at the Google MapMaker event.

He mentions his participatory mapping efforts with Ushahidi's software (pages 18 - 25).

Some other posts of interest

Help document monuments in South Africa for Wikipedia. Dan McQuillan: "In Critical Hacktivism, I outlined an approach to the affordances of social technology that evades capture by existing institutional and knowledge structures. In this post I'll look at the next challenge; how can these social innovations scale in a way that is 'prototyping a new society in the shell of the old' without becoming completely assimilated by existing institutions." ****** Am I the only one who wishes I was at State of the Map #SOTM12 in Tokyo, Japan? They have ustream live for those in need of map love. Have a mapping time, folks! Happy Week, Heather