Weekly: Hurricane Sandy Mappers, WMS Layers Plugin

Ushahidi
Oct 31, 2012

Happy Halloween! Hopefully, you've had your candy fill for the day. In the weekly report, we've got a Hurricane Sandy map update as well as a new code from the community: WMS Layers Plugin.

Into the Code:

Congratulations and thanks go out to Community members - Seth Kigen and Robert Buckley. Seth has released a WMS Layers plugin. It supports Ushahidi versions 2.5/2.6. (Currently, this plugin is not available on Crowdmap.) This functionality has long been a community need. Already folks are chatting on our Ushahidi community developer chat room about testing and future deployments. Our Next Community Developer call is Monday, November 26th. Details on the wiki: Community Meetings. If you want to get involved in our developer community, please contact us.

From the Community:

Translations /Localization: From Bosnian to Kiswahili

First off, A huge thanks to the Bosnia localization community with our partner, Al Jazeera, for localizing Ushahidi in Bosnian Language in a week: we went from 5% to 85%. Inspired, we are going to adopt a LANGUAGE a WEEK campaign to increase our localization globally. We are very proud of all the amazing participants. Your work will hep local civil society mappers. More on this soon! Now, this week's language goal: Help Translate Ushahidi into KiSwahili. We're at 55% complete. Sample Tweet to help make it happen:

Kiswahili & Ushahidi - you can help translate. Instructions: http://bit.ly/SxEW0f Languages: http://bit.ly/TUFJW2

Deployment of the Week

Deployments of the Week (Shared): Hurricane Sandy Mappers - All of you. From the groups and individuals with a full plan to those of you who tinkered with a deployment and to those who also contacted us but chose not to deploy. Each map is a learning moment which can build on itself. Most of all, you have focused on citizens helping citizens for the low-hanging fruit to support your communities and neighbours. We know that recovery is a long task. Our thoughts are with the citizens and responders. We hope that maps of all varieties can aid you in a few key learnings that we have observed:

The Crisismapping community has created a directory of maps/datasets. I've updated it with all the active Crowdmaps as of today. You can see the wide variety of initiatives and locations. At ICCM RHOK, we created a map of Ushahidi maps. There really is a need for a collective map data plan to share resources, data and plans for emergencies.

The Hurricane Hacking community created resources and ideas for folks to collaborate.

Many of you changed categories, collaborated and moved from response to recovery maps.

The types of maps and various uses show a potential preparedness model. What should communities plan for maps in case of emergency?

More about all the previous Deployments of the Week

Updates on the most active Hurricane Sandy Maps:

National: Huffington Post Huffington Post Sandy Stormwatch  DC: SandyDC From CrisisCamp DC SandyDC Fairfax County (beta) Fairfax County Reporting Map (beta) State of NYC Hurricane Sandy in the Catskills Hurricane Sandy in the Catskills NYC Sandy Coworking https://twitter.com/noneck/status/263691278104027137 Transit after Sandy The Brooklyn Sandy The Brooklyn Sandy  See all the related Maps

Events:

Previous events

This is a great summary from Tech Change on why online and in person events need to be connected: Online First Event Planning Leave the Bagels, Keep the Community. Location should never be a barrier to joining a community. Thanks folks for supporting ICCM! A few weeks ago, Nick Werby of the Cost of Chicken Project presented at the California Science Teachers Conference.

Upcoming events

Our friends at Geeks without Bounds and CrisisCommons are holding Hackathon events throughout the weekend (November 3 -4, 2012. Maybe you can join in virtually or in-person? There are likely to be mapping projects. REMINDER: We are running a hackathon in partnership with IDEO and Social Coding for Good on November 2nd and 9th. Logistics, project overview and Registration: They are looking to build a sanitation map in Ghana using Ushahidi core and doing some interesting stuff with the IDEO front-end designers. We are looking for a trusted Ushahidi developer who is interested in leading a team at this hackathon by being the Ushahidi representative and managing the Ushahidi backend work. Please let us know if you are interested in attending and working with on an Ushahidi deployment with the IDEO team.

And more....

Brasilia, Brazil (Casual Meet-up): November 6, 2012 London, UK (Casual Meet-up): November 12, 2012 Wellington, NZ (Casual Meet-up): November 20, 2012