Weekly: RHOK hackathon and more!

Happy Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) weekend! RHOK's mission is to create a self-sustaining global community of innovators building practical open technology for a better world, and to ensure their work creates impact in society. RHOK Bangalore (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Vancouver (Canada) will each be featuring Ushahidi Hacks. The types of projects range from Violence against women, Safety and corruption tracking. We're delighted to have a number of Ushahidians very active in the RHOK community. And, to welcome others to kick the Ushahidi tires and give our software a spin. RHOK Nairobi (Kenya) is partnering with Transparency International. Daudi Were, Ushahidi Program Manager for Africa will guide the team for project assessment highlighting Ushahidi's toolboxes to help deployers plan. Seth Kigan, Dunstan Machoka, and Accadius Ben will be guest hacking as our local community leaders. (Thanks guys!) Transparency Hacks - Summary of the Problem Statements (PDF) Also see the Transparency International Kenya website. RHOK Bangalore (India), supported by Ushahidi community leader Shemeer P. of Maps4Aid.com and Praveen Selvasekaran, will work on an Ushahidi install for Amnesty International. They've been tinkering away in our Ushahidi developer Chat getting ready for the big day to start in a few hours from now. RHOK Vancouver (Canada) will be collaborating with Harassmap Team to test the following project: Use the main Ushahidi map, but then have layers of indicated safe zones. They may potentially add badges for community helpers. Some of the code they might play with includes layers. The Full Harassmap Challenge is listed on the RHOK site. Have a great event!

From the community

Congratulations to our Deployment of the Week: ICT in Conflict & Disaster Response and Peacebuilding: Who is who in ICT for conflict & disaster response and peacebuilding applications. This project is over a year old and even has incorporated an annual survey to ask their users for feedback! They've tracked groups ranging from Access Now to YaLa Young Leaders. ***** Internews released their online guide SpeakSafe: Media Workers’ Toolkit for Safer Online and Mobile. The guide provides journalists, citizen reporters, bloggers and media workers with a series of simple yet effective practices to maintain control over their information and communications. Also, see our list best practices and security tips on the wiki. There's been some great articles this week: The people of Syria and those community mappers are on our minds this week. Patrick Meier posted a piece about USAID using Syriatracker. The comments include an interesting discussion. Emmanuel Kala presented in Madrid about Ushahidi.(article in Spanish) Ushahidi is being used for Crowdmapping Water Contamination in Peruvian Indigenous Communities (Article by Susannah Villa of Engine Room on Global Voices) Jennifer Chan of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative wrote a piece about How to make Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief Work Better (focusing on the Hurricane Sandy response and various mapping projects) In Uganda, WOUGNET is Mapping Social Accountability issues using Ushahidi platform

Translations: Focus on Albanian localization: 86% complete!

This week we're excited to see Albanian translations increase thanks to a few volunteers. Can you help finish the repo? How to use Transifex and help localize languages.

Into the code

We've on a mission to help you get upgraded to the latest version of Ushahidi. Join us on Upgrade Day - December 5/6, 2012. Swift documentation updates: we've been working on the docs for Swift Rest API. Next week, we'll have new mobile code. But in the meantime, take a look at Slayer and the GeoThings Team's code to make it easy to upload photos with the Ushahidi Android app . (Note: there is no recording for the Ushahidi community call this week.)

Research and a Challenge

Internews released the final report (PDF) evaluating their crowdsourcing mapping project in Central African Republic. The Tech Challenge is open for applicants: USAID and Humanity United has Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention encourages individuals from all backgrounds to bring new perspectives to some of the most daunting issues surrounding atrocity prevention. (Patrick Vinck) Take a look at the missions and challenges set out on the TechChallenge site. Maybe you could use Ushahidi as part of your project plan? **** Thanks so much for citing Ushahidi's blog as one of the Top blogs in Kenya. We are honoured to be in such great company.