Weekly: ICCM & Community Developer Call

Happy week! We are awash with news from the community about participation, awards and upcoming events. Does anyone else feel like September just turned into a roller coaster of action? Here's some news to keep your head spinning:

From the Community

International Conference of Crisis Mappers 2012

A reminder that the International Conference of Crisis Mappers is October 11 -14, 2012 in Washington, DC. There is still time to get involved.

Key Dates:

September 27: Random Hacks of Kindness - Hackathon Challenges Due October 1: Ignite talks: Apply to give Ignite talk on your Crisismapping work. October 1: Registration for the ICCM Conference and Pre-Conference Training. October 8: Registration for Random Hacks of Kindness Due

For those wishing to virtually attend the ICCM RHOK event, we will work on skype, irc, ustream and google hangouts to connect you, simply register to join online:

Congratulations to the GeoBeyond team!

Since I live in the land of winter (Canada), it is especially grand to announce that Ushahidi community leader, Francesco Bartoli and his GeoBeyond team have won 1st prize in Best Service Challenge for the GMES Masters European Earth Monitoring Competition for their Snowmonit project. About his project: SnowMonit is tailored for the integration and improvement of current services that treat snow avalanche information, snow accumulation and derived parameters (i.e. snow water equivalent) for mapping the management of resources (hydropower, water) and the predictability of mountain hazards.This near real-time service will be able to enhance the situational awareness of nowcasting and forecasting products at local, regional and cross-boarder level. I'd like to see this used in Canada and other snowy lands. Francesco will keep us posted on his next steps.

Thank you to the Standby Task Force and Ihub Communities

The Standby Task Force (SBTF) and ihub members joined the Ushahidi team for the Uchaguzi simulation on Monday, September 17, 2012. We were incredibility impressed with their dedication, their skills and participation. The SBTF has great training and methodology for any group planning for a large scale deployment. We learned much and look forward to further partnerships in the future. Some of the participants reorganized their work and personal time to make this a success. We are in awe at the large number of virtual, global participants. Thank you. Here's a picture of the reports team hard at work in the ihub:

Translation and Localization Update

Thanks to community members we have increased our Russian and Ukrainian localization this week. There have also been great strides in Italian, Spanish (Argentina) and Romanian. Thanks to these amazing participants. To contribute, see our wiki and the Transifex translation site.

Deployment of the Week:

Amplifying women who work in technology organizations is the mission of our Deployment of the Week: See all previous Deployments of the Week.

September Is Innovative Mapping Month

Imagination for the People has a month long campaign - Mapping Social Innovation. Their recent blog post highlights open mappers: Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, Standby Task Force and Net2Plan. (en francais). Also watch the #innmap hashtag on Twitter.

Into the Code

Ushahidi Community Developer call

The next Ushahidi Community Developer call is September 24/25, 2012. We'll talk about upcoming releases, roadmaps and your questions about Ushahidi, Crowdmap and SwiftRiver. Time: Monday, September 24, 2012: 21:00 EST, 18:00 PST, Corresponding UTC (GMT): Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 01:00:00 (We alternate timezones monthly.) Your local times: Toronto/New York: Monday, September 24, 2012 at 21:00 PM EDT San Francisco: Monday, September 24, 2012 at 18:00 PM PDT Seoul (South Korea) Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 10:00 AM KST Wellington (New Zealand) Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 13:00 PM NZST Jakarta (Indonesia) Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 08:00 AM WIB Tokyo (Japan) Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 10:00 AM JST

FrontlineSMS to Ushahidi hack day

Together with our friends at FrontlineSMS we are hosting a full hack day to make our services more interoperable. If you are in Nairobi, please join us. We are looking for developers and testers in both communities. Registration. The hack day plan:

Get the Web Connection feature in FrontlineSMS 2.0 to push incoming SMSs to an Ushahidi deployment/Crowdmap

For contacts in FrontlineSMS that have location information, append this to the SMS before its pushed to Ushahidi

Using FrontlineSMS for sending out alerts; two-way communication for SMS (incoming and outgoing)

On the wiki, How you can help

Thanks to Ushahidi community member, Solstag, we now have improved documentation on how to use Ushahidi on Fedora! Anyone can edit the wiki. As we all know that improved documentation can help someone around the world. Thanks. Juliana Rotich rolled up her sleeves during the Uchaguzi simulation to create some draft documentation on how to use the SBTF methodology of Media Monitoring with SwiftRiver. Give it a try and let us know how we can improve by editing the page.

What we are reading

One Year later - Occupy Wall Street

Occupying Wall Street, Places and Spaces of Political Action from Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder on Vimeo.

There are two new articles which may interest you: "Occupying Wall Street: Places and Spaces of Political Action" and "Mapping Liberty Plaza," by architects Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder. Among the unique contributions here are an infographic that visualizes Occupy Wall Street activities online and axonometric drawings of the transformation of Zuccotti Park into Liberty Plaza.

Liability of Digital volunteers

The Wilson Center, Commons Lab has released report on liability for digital volunteers in disasters. This report is detailed, but very important for everyone to consider as communities grow. To download the "Responding to Liability" report. ********* Time to get cracking for tonight's Toronto meetup. Don't forget there is one in Seoul, South Korea in a few hours too. Heather