Really, having technical tickets (issues, bugs, features and pull requests) and commits in the same place will help with the two big things: transparency and collaboration. We want to make it easier for you to see what we are working on, submit a ticket and lend a hand when you can. If you are busy creating great code, we’d like to know about it and be able to incorporate it into the core. Or, make it more visible for others to use your code for their Ushahidi-related projects. Git Issues is directly connected to our GitHub – Ushahidi. (E.g. Ushahidi core issues live under https://github.com/ushahidi/Ushahidi_Web/issues).

Migration Help and Schedule:

Our team has reviewed the Red Mine and have flagged issues to be migrated.

Please add a comment to any items that you think need to be migrated to Git Issues. We’ve added the document to our new beta wiki for your review. Every coders eyes will help us capture the active tickets/issues. Ping Hleson at ushahidi dot com if you have a questions.

Migration Schedule:

• Community Feedback on Issues to be migrated: February 8 – 15, 2012
• Migration Freeze on RedMine: Februay 15 – xxx
• Ushahidi Community Developer Skype Chat (time to be announced) Wednesday, February. 15, 2012
• Deprecate Redmine. February 29th, 2012
• Team cleans out the Github store procuring all the sweet Github Octocat hoodies. March 1st, 2012

Getting Help:

Tool soup is confusing. Duplication is less fun than collecting Nyan Cat mash-ups. Here’s a cheat sheet:

Forums: “How do I….”, “I’m troubleshooting”, “General Support”
Wiki: “Where are the documentation, best practices” and “How do I…”. Bonus points: document and share your knowledge
GitIssues: “Houston, we have a problem.” “Nyan, Ushahidi would rock it if…” (Issue/bug/feature)
Github: Commit, Pull Changes, Fork
Contact: General questions (eg. Erik’s favourite ihub story, business endeavours, events, press etc.)

Steps to get help:

Technical Issues:

1. Search the wiki or forums.
2. Collaborate with the community skype or dev mailing list. (This is a real-time stream of global chatter)
3. Search Git Issues for existing issues.
4. Add a Git Issue: (bug or feature) request.

Non-Technical Issues:

1. Search the wiki or forums.
2. Add a forum post for questions.
3. Share your knowledge on the wiki.
4. Collaborate with the Channel for Academics, Researchers and Community Skype Chat or mailing lists.
5. To ask general non-technical tickets, you can drop us a Contact note (http://ushahidi.com/contact-us).

We will review all Git issues weekly and assign priorities. The priorities could include assigning to a team member or requesting community help. More details as we get closer to launch.

To sum up: GitIssues, flag your tickets for migration, Octocat hoodies and Nyan Cat.

These badges are broken down into “badge packs”. For example, the Locations pack is a simple grouping of badges that follow a travel theme, with badges highlighting landmarks from countries around the world. The Ushahidi pack is a group of generic badges that the Ushahidi team has put together. New packs are expected soon, with contributions from the community and designers from other projects as well.

How can you use this as an Ushahidi administrator? Deployers of newer versions of the Ushahidi Platform and current users of Crowdmap have access to all of these badges already. Simply log into your admin panel and browse to the Manage->Badges settings page to get started. As an example, you may award the 25 Star badge to a user who has sent in 25 approved reports. This can be a manual process where you assign badges to users or set up Action Triggers to do this automatically. Just experiment with the platform to come up with interesting achievements to award your users.

We need your help! This collection of open source badges belongs to the community. If you’re a designer, developer or just interested in all things badgy, you can support this initiative. Your efforts will impact a multitude of projects, ranging from projects that crowdsource information in crisis and disaster situations to projects that reward people for submitting delicious pictures of cheeseburgers. Please check out our badge site for more information.

We’re really excited to see what everyone comes up with. We hope to see the badge image repository grow so other projects can get some value out of our open source badge initiative. Let us know in the comments what you come up with!

In September, I began teaching my first upper-level University course at Grant MacEwan University. Having taken some (and heard about some other) lack-lustre undergrad Software Engineering courses, I really wanted to make this course practical, project-based and interesting for the students. One inspiration was the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Project (UCOSP) where final-year students select a project and are mentored by faculty across Canada to work on an open-source project for course credit. I also loved the practical approach of the Software Carpentry course taught by Greg Wilson and Paul Lu, which I was involved in a few Summers back and frankly preferred to some of the “Ivory Tower” Software Engineering that is common in undergrad courses.

It was Greg Wilson that pointed me to Ushahidi, and I felt Ushahidi’s humanitarian focus would be a great added benefit to my students. Computer science is so often focused on science, business, marketing and advertising that I felt this was an opportunity to show my students how a small group of dedicated people can use software to make a difference in humanitarian way. There were other great projects suggested too, such as the Sahana Foundation, but I made up my mind to go with Ushahidi once I was introduced to Heather Leson and got to peak in on a Ushahidi hack-a-thon from Nairobi via Skype. The energy of the group was obvious and very exciting.

Organizing the Curriculum

With much enthusiasm, I jumped into trying to build a course using Ushahidi as the core project component. The first major hurdle was that 3rd year computer science students have minimal system administration experience. Except for a few exceptions, they haven’t run a database or a web server on their own. Moreover, PHP is not part of a course curriculum. The sysadmin challenges were answered by using Harvard’s CS50 Virtual appliance. This VM is based on Fedora Linux and comes with PHP, Apache and MySQL already installed. The VM runs on VirtualBox, which is free so students could install it on their laptop (this is how most students ran it). As for PHP, I felt that PHP was accessible to undergrads coming from a Java background. It’s syntax and object-oriented are quite similar to Java.

Our courses at Grant MacEwan involve a weekly three-hour lab component. The first lab was used to introduce PHP with some sample programs. The second lab was used to introduce Kohana and the MVC framework. After the second lab, the first assignment was given. The first assignment consisted of 4 simple tasks

• Apply a patch to get Ushahidi to work with non-clean URLs
• Change the site name and tagline on the admin page to match the main page
• Modify the labels in the API stream
• Add a ‘’pirate’’ response type to the API

These assignments helped the students become familiar with how MVC web servers work. I also felt that the API was an important concept for them to understand well. In the end, this assignment was a bit too easy in some ways. In general, it’s very challenging to judge the level of difficulty when working with an existing code base. To this point, most of my students would have only written programs from scratch (similar to most undergrad CS courses).

It was also to determine what kind of hints to give. For example, problem #4 from above become quite trivial once you show students how to search (using grep) through a code base. Without that hint, students will try to trace the code manually and search manually. So the dividing line between dozens of hours of work and 10 minutes is literally the knowledge of how to use grep effectively. Once the students had completed the first assignment, it was time to throw them head first into Ushahidi on some more significant projects.

Picking the Projects

One advantage I had was that there were only 10 students, which enabled students to work on separate projects based on their interests. Mistakes with a course of 10 students are much more fixable on the fly than with, say, 40 students.

In trying to gather project ideas, I searched the feature requests on the Ushahidi development site and also I asked the Ushahidi community for ideas for projects. Projects from the feature request list included selecting multiple categories and multi-coloured dots. Others came from the Ushahidi group, such as 2-way SMS communication, OpenStreetMap integration and white-labeling the J2ME app. Some were my own creation, such as the SQlite back-end.

In general, is very difficult to carve 10 appropriate projects from an actively developed open-source project like Ushahidi for the following reasons:

• Ushahidi developers are focused on moving the project forward, adding real features that users care about. As such, they are typically not willing to risk those features not being developed by leaving them to an undergrad.
  Course projects are in 3 month blocks whereas actual development in the project focuses on small increments or “many months away”, so carving off a piece that fits nicely into a 2-3 month course project is hard because that is not how developers think. Developers, from what I gather, focus on the next few week or two, or they may focus on large scale goals (significant re-writes of subsystems) which again are difficult to break down into course projects.
• The knowledge gap – real developers know the code, my students do not. This gaps adds to the difficulty of developers creating projects that can be handed off to an inexperienced student to complete.

Even with the above challenges, our results show that it is possible and extremely valuable to use real software in an undergraduate course project. I believe that our projects on Ushahidi went as well as I could have expected for three main reasons:

The Ushahidi developers cared enough to try and suggest projects. Some projects were fine just as suggested while others could at least give me ideas that I could try and distill into projects. In the end, my responsibility is determining and setting the educational goals, so this worked well. The developers were of a great help, quick to respond to questions and supportive of the students, and I can’t thank them enough for this. My students were willing to accept the “ups and downs” of this kind of project. They knew the alternative was a canned, built-from-scratch project that no recruiter would care about. I was able to convince them that saying they had worked on (and got patches accepted to) a real software project would be of at least some merit over a typical SE course project.

There were certainly some bumps in the road in terms of some projects being too easy (to which I would assign further work) or too hard (a completely working project was not required in some cases). In then end, the students were able to make significant progress on some real problems that the Ushahidi community cared about.

Student Project Review

All that said, let’s talk about the projects, cause they’re really cool.

Dale Douglas (code) added the ability to allow reports to be edited on the main display. His implementation was not secure by any stretch, so may not be deployment ready, but was an interesting project. Dale wished that plugins could overwrite system files so that he wouldn’t have to modify the main Ushahidi codebase.

Brett McKay (code) white-labelled the J2ME app. He also discovered that the J2ME app was in the middle of re-write. So he added the functionality to the new re-write version to add a deployment site and fetch reports. This an example where a student had to take on additional tasks once his initial task (white-labelling) was complete. Brett was challenged in there is actually no documentation of the J2ME app at all

Richard Laan (code) added the ability to select multiple categories on the main map page. Richard’s learning curve was even steeper in that he had to learn Javascript for this project. In the end, a very successful implementation. Tracing the javascript was the most challenging aspect for Richard.

Joel Joseph (code) added a search functionality to the API. This feature allows an API query to search and return results for particular keyword. Joel’s first project was a refactoring suggested by one of the developers. This was another example of a project that needed to be extended once the initial task was complete.

Ranjoat Panesar (code) added a plugin to support 2-way SMS communication between an SMS user and the system. For example, the could stop and start notices or search for incidents related to a keyword. The motivating idea was having a user search for incidents around their current area, but we didn’t get that far.

Alex Molzhan (code) Alex added a button that allowed the incidents to be shown in their incident colour when being displayed under All Categories. Richard Laan is currently continuing to work on this feature in relation to his “Select Multiple Categories” project.

Chris Proulx (code) Chris added an AJAX-based interface to the reports editting page under the administrator. The features chris avoided reloading all the reports when one was deleted. His changes made the reports editing noticeably snappier.

Wilson Liang (code) Wilson created a standalone Java app for the desktop. His application would follow a particular deployment. It may be useful in a situation when connecting to a particular deployment may have intermittent connectivity.

Ruben Estevez de Freitas (document) Ruben worked on getting OSM installed locally and working with Ushahidi. Most instructions for OSM are for Ubuntu, so Ruben learned about the mess that is Linux package management and the difficulty in translating Ubuntu package names to Fedora package names. Ruben’s submission is not a github repository, but simply a document describing all the steps to get OSM working with Ushahidi on a Fedora virtual machine.

Andrew Gergely (code) worked on creating an SQLite-based database for Ushahidi. Andrew ran into two major issues. The first was that the configuration scripts presumed MySQL and were difficult to debug. The second issue was that MySQL and SQLite SQL queries are not completely compatible with each other. The lessonhere was that “standards” such as SQL are sometimes not that standard.

The course ended with project demos some of which the students put up for recording. The students have all made their code available and some are continuing to work on their projects.

I think I can say that the students all enjoyed working on a real software project and found it valuable. There were certainly challenges that the students mentioned. The most difficult was the lack of an up-to-date, detailed technical description of how everything works. The lesson here is that such a document rarely exists, especially on open-source projects. For one, the document would be too massive to read or to keep updated. Updating is especially difficult due to the incremental nature of open-source development where developers’ time is already stretched thin. Know-how comes from mostly from doing and playing with the code, not from documents. Although, as always, more documentation would certainly be helpful both in the code itself and external to it. In particular I think a “How to get started with Ushahidi” document would be helpful for new developers. Second, I think a curated “To do” list for various levels of experience (new, novice, advanced) perhaps on the new wiki, would help with new developers looking for a way to get involved (or for a university professors looking for projects ).

In the end the course went extremely well. I learned a lot about Ushahidi, got to interact with some great people and, of course, some great students. A big thank you to Greg Wilson, Heather Leson, Dale Zak, David Kobia, and Aaron Huslage for all their help and interaction over the last several months.

********
Contact Cam Macdonnell via email

To Cam, all the students and Grant McEwan University:
Thank you being the first class of students to focus an entire semester on Ushahidi open source software development. Your hard work has taught us much about how to integrate Ushahidi software development into classrooms. We are close to launching more changes to make it easier for people to contribute, including more Git love aka a “To Do” list. And, a special thanks to Greg Wilson for advocating open source in Canada’s universities.

To the Ushahidi Community Developer Skype Chat folks:
Thank you for supporting this initiative and answering Cam’s and his student’s questions. We hope to do more of this in the future and hope that you will join us on that journey.

This week several members of our team attended the 3rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland and we were blown away by the turn out (Follow #ICCM on Twitter). This community has grown substantially over the last 3 years – when we attended the first conference held in Cleveland, Ohio back in 2009 there were about 100 attendees. Now there are more than 400 gathered here discussing crisis mapping and the challenges they face. There are really 3 main things that we keep hearing as it relates to GIS and mapping:

• How to collect and organize data from the crowd around the globe as it relates to crisis
• How to enable action from this data
• How to build, collect, and maintain reference data for crisis

Collecting and Organizing Data from the Crowd

As for the first topic, collecting and organizing data from the crowd, there is a good tool developed by our partner Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a platform that takes crowd sourced information like SMS messages, categorizes them, and displays them on the map as a point or cluster of points showing relevant location. The result of this effort is a point map that begins to illustrate where individuals are vocalizing need or disseminating information.

Enabling Action

While points are a good start, we have been working with Ushahidi and a focus group comprised of both GIS and Crisis Mappers to define requirements for new tools that will support analysis of this data. We have heard the need for spatial and temporal analysis tools within the Ushahidi platform as well as the need for tools to bring Ushahidi data into ArcGIS where analyses can be run.

We are very excited to announce that we have made the first tool available to support these requirements-the ArcGIS add-in for Ushahidi which can be downloaded and quickly added to ArcMap. This add-in allows you to connect to a Ushahidi instance with the API enabled, convert text between languages, and download the Ushahidi data into a geodatabase. This opens up the feed of data being captured in Ushahidi to the rich spatial and temporal analysis tools within ArcGIS allowing users to empower action and inform decision makers using a sound scientific approach. Curious how this might work? At the bottom of this blog is a good write-up of using this tool to analyze information coming in from the current Thailand flooding.

Reference Data

Having this information and resulting analysis is great, but without good reference/basemap data as a backdrop, it is hard to understand the context of any situation. A common theme discussed here in Geneva is the isolated and rural nature of many locations and the lack of base data. While there may be global vector and raster datasets available, they are often either severely dated or at a scale that does not support local action.

One data set that supports crowdsourcing of basemap data is OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is constructed and edited for all types of use by a global user community, and yes you can join! Crowdsourced basemap data is particularly valuable during a crisis response where current and often high resolution data needs are compounded.

In support of this open source effort, Esri offers a desktop tool for ArcGIS that allows you to join the crowd by editing and publishing to OSM from within ArcMap. This tool also allows you to download OSM data over your area of interest directly into ArcGIS for use in a disconnected and offline environment common in response. You can download the ArcGIS Editor for OSM.

Esri is committed to supporting the crisis response community thru our Esri Disaster Response Program as well as thru the continued evolution of ArcGIS to support the collection, management, analysis, and visualization of data in a collaborative environment. While these tools don’t solve all of the problems we face as crisis mappers, we hope you will find them valuable in your arsenal and as a starting point to a dialogue around enhancements to and construction of additional tools or data. We are already looking forward to ICCM 2012 in Washington, DC!

ArcGIS Add-in for Ushahidi

Getting Started

To get started, first download the Esri Add-in for Ushahidi. Once you’ve installed the Add-in you’re ready to add it to ArcMap. Go to the Customize menu | Toolbars | Customize… located at the very bottom of the list.

In the Customize dialog, click the Commands tab| type Ushahidi in the Show commands containing: text box. You will see the Ushahidi2ArcGIS Add-In listed in the Commands pane.

Drag the Ushahidi2ArcGIS command to any existing toolbar in your ArcMap window. You must drag this command onto an existing toolbar, not just onto the map. You will see a new button with a blue circle icon show up on your toolbar.

Connecting to a Ushahidi Instance

To connect to an Ushahidi instance click on the Download Ushahidi Reports to ArcGIS button and enter the parameters.

The key parameter to enter is the API Endpoint. This is the main URL to the Ushahidi instance, such as Thailand Flood Crisis Information Map or Bushfire Connect. You also have the option to translate the data (using Bing Translator) for either just the categories or all the incident data. Note that the more you have to translate and the more records you have the longer the time it will take to download and create the data.

Once the data is downloaded it is added to a layer. The tool automatically sets the data to render on Unique Values in the Category Title field and uses the default colors from the Ushahidi instance.

Additionally the HTML Popup set and the description of the layer has been populated to reflect the source, date and time the data was downloaded. This is critical temporal information for Crisis Mappers.

Perform Further Analysis

Now that the Ushahidi data is downloaded you’re ready to perform further analysis. You can look at data over time, limit your focus on specific categories, or do more in depth spatial analysis.

For example if we wanted to get a better understanding of the reports of flooding around Bangkok we can focus on those reports (i.e. just one category of the incidents).

We can then visualize the data as a “heat-map” (by using the Kernel Density tool).

To get more detailed information on the data and to further determine significance of the reports we can use spatial statistics to determine if there are non-random spatial patterns and statistically significant hot or cold spots in the data. To do this we can use the Spatial Autocorrelation and Hot-Spot Analysis tools. The basic workflow is shown here in ModelBuilder:

The results of this analysis are highlighted in blue on the map as areas (1 km^2 ) that have statistically significant clusters of flood reports (in this case 8 to 27 per km2 ). These are the high priority areas that should be focused on first. Then we focus on questions like why are there so many reports in this area? Is there a single authoritative source of SMS feeds on the ground or is there a large group of people that need help?

This is just one type of analysis that can be run in ArcGIS Desktop from Ushahidi data. We are interested in learning more from you in the type of analysis that you’ve run using this tool. Please use the comments section of the tool and let us know how the tool works and what needs to be improved.

*****

Thanks to the ESRI team for creating this valuable plug-in.

I’m Kuo-Yu slayer Chuang from ITRI, a government funded research institute in Taiwan. We developed an open standard for exchanging location information via SMS among mobile devices called Open GeoSMS, which has currently been adapted officially by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Several use cases of this standard are shown with the following video:

We introduce Open GeoSMS with a quick and real example. Noritsuna-san is a friend of mine from Japan and a guest researcher in our company. One night, I got an SMS from him saying that he can’t get taxi home since it’s too late. I had no idea where he was and he could not read the street names in Chinese. I thus asked him to send me an Open GeoSMS with our free application. I then got an Open GeoSMS with the coordinate embedded in URL that points to Google Map service. At the end I totally new where he was and drove my little car to rescue him.

In the previous case, Open GeoSMS sent as a peer to peer message between mobile phones. It can be also used between mobile and server in disaster management. Users who have smart phone with GPS for incident report can attach coordinate in SMS with Open GeoSMS format (usually, with an App such as Ushahidi app on Android that we hacked).

This feature enables users to do incident reporting without a data connection. We know some volunteers bring their own smart phones and work with expensive data roaming fee. This feature also enables the backend server to auto-process the geo-tagged report, and insert this POI to map automatically. Rescuing activity or the resource transportation tasks can be assigned with Open GeoSMS for more specific location information. Especially with the offline map supported such as Open Street Map, POI-based information exchange can be easily achieved through Open GeoSMS.

As for the notification, the server doesn’t need to care if the receiver is a smart phone user or not. Open GeoSMS notification is just an SMS and that works for almost every phone. On a smart phone, Open GeoSMS can bring out more information via URL. The latest spec and code are available on Google Code. If the SMS with coordinate is compliant to Open GeoSMS, other applications or services can easily parse it and get the x and y coordinates. Last month during a cyclone simulation of Samoa, PinPointAlerts provided Open GeoSMS as a notification option on http://www.SamoAlert.com so the simulation notification could be sent with this open standard. Our team also shipped five smart phones to Samoa with an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi app installed or this Cyclone Simulation activity. As a result, not only could the general SMS-based incident reports be made, but also the Open GeoSMS style geo-tagged SMS could be sent to server for the possible automation afterwards.

Our team has hacked an Open GeoSMS enabled Ushahidi Android App, now we are working with Ushahidi mobile app team on additional projects to merge our technologies. Our next step is to implement a plug-in for Ushahidi to parse Open GeoSMS in order to gain the automated processing ability. Further objectives include working with offline maps such as Open Street Map (OSM) so users can have a better understanding re incoming Open GeoSMS. For more information and our latest activities, please visit our facebook page.

We really hope this tiny handy open standard can help people in various way

Being part of a global hacking community supporting open source software is very important to Ushahidi. Community members participated in various cities or virtually. They answered questions, taught each other, and happily, gave us feedback on how we can improve. We hope to support some of the project leaders as they continue to work on these initiatives.

Here are some of the weekend highlights:

Water Quality reporting

The co-winner of RHok Montreal, Watervoices, collaborated with RHoK Toronto to build an Ushahidi deployment focused on giving people voice about water quality in Northern Canada. The WaterVoices project was co-lead by Steve Sauder and Melanie Gorka. The teams in both cities included front-end and back-end software developers, international development specialists, emergency managers, graphic designers, open data advocates and researchers. The prototype is currently offline, but you can follow their twitter account (@mywatervoice) to see how they will proceed. To learn more, see a WaterVoices video featuring the RHoK Montreal team members.

Another highlight of this project was testing an easy-to-use application that lets people use Tropo to input data into Ushahidi via SMS. Thanks to the Tropo team for this! It is now available on Github for other people to use and test.

Offline to Online Communications

How to give voice when technology is unavailable is a huge quandary. There were a few hacks that worked with existing solutions testing to Ushahidi. The Reflab team with Francesco Ciriaci leading the charge built an HTML5 hack for reporting Offline/Online. This hack is something that Ushahidi would like to see continue. During RHoK, the DRC map was unable to receive SMS reports due to connection issues. We will be connecting with the various hackers and groups involved during the weekend on this to see how to move it forward, including Geeks without Bounds, Reflab, Mozilla, Tropo and more. The RHok Zurich team worked on Message Carrier (another offline/online communication tool). The code is listed on github.

Also see Francesco Ciriaci’s post on his Mobile Web App for Ushahidi.

Other Ushahidi RHoK Hacks

RHoK Montreal worked on a Security Alert App for Humanitarian Workers. Medicins San Frontieres provided invaluable use case input to the team who created this Ushahidi prototype using Tropo. To learn more, see their presentation and videos (see Part 1 and Part 2).

For two RHoK events (including Rhok Portland this month), Pascal Schuback has been hacking away on SAARRA: Situational Awareness and Rapid Assessment Application using Ushahidi. He continue to work away at this and would really like to know how to have the ruby app work with Ushahidi software. If you have knowledge and can assist, let us know.

Luis Hernando Aguilar, RHoK Bogota lead, had a team of people collaborating on the “Sistema De Control de Simulacro” using Ushahidi to test within official humanitarian simulations.

RHoK Boston participants lead by, Rufus Pollack, hacked on a Pybossa to Ushahidi Geodoing Microtasker (github link).

And, lastly, we’re really excited to see Open NASA’s multi-partnered efforts with The Catalyst Map. Various cities built prototype on how actions plus activists can be connected to big data. Stay tuned for more on that topic.

RHoK in over 30 cities can be very hectic with global collaboration and juggling hacks. If we missed any active projects that used Ushahidi at RHoK or if you want to elaborate on the detail, please add comments below.

We’re excited to see these projects come to fruition and hope to see the next steps!

Evan extending an outdated looking point and shoot camera in a pub.

Evan brings a unique element to the team with his background in game design. He worked on projects like Conduit 2 for the Wii and The Grinder for Xbox 360. This is not to say that Ushahidi is planning a FPS any time soon! Evan has years of experience in all aspects of web development, from great looking front end work to building servers that scale. His latest personal project manages a quarter million World of Warcraft game items on WoW Instant.

Evan has already been hard at work testing out different scaling technologies in conjunction with Ushahidi, fixing bugs and taking names. All of us at Ushahidi are excited to see what Evan conjures up for Crowdmap and the platform as a whole!

Advisory ID: USHAHIDI-SA-WEB-2011-002

Project: Ushahidi-Web
Version: 2.1
Date: 2012-12-12
Security Risk: Critical
Vulnerability: Unapproved reports show up in search
Fix/Patch:
Replace /application/controllers/search.php with this file.

To see all security alerts, please see: http://security.ushahidi.com/

This information will also be shared on our Ushahidi Developer mailing list, skype chat and social media channels.

UP headquarters in Paynesville burned

In the last week, the Ushahidi elections instance has also been updated with new features.  As of last Friday, the instance has been upgraded with latest version of the Ushahidi platform, version 2.1 (Tunis). One of the most exciting features of 2.1 is the Powerful Reports Filter that allows users to quickly sort through reports according to certain dates and categories, verification, media, location and more.

The new Density Map Plugin

Another new feature on the instance is Ushahidi’s first Density Map plugin by John Etherton. Located on the right side of the homepage, just above the categories, the Density Map option makes it easier to separate reports by geographic region – in this case, by county. All reports that have been associated with a particular county will show up using the Density Map. This feature was requested by UN OCHA as well as other local partners, and serves as a small step towards making the Ushahidi platform a data analysis tool.

ECC data operators at iLab

The Elections Coordinating Committee, based at iLab Liberia during the last week, has been compiling detailed reports from monitors at each of the country’s nearly 4,500 polling places; these are being uploaded to the elections instance and can currently be found under the category, “ECC polling place reports”.  The National Elections Commission (NEC) has released preliminary results during the last week that can now be found as layers on the elections instance (go to “other layers” section under the categories listing).

The Ushahidi Liberia team was curious about who was looking at the elections instance, how they got there, and where in the world they were sitting when they looked at it.  After studying our instance’s Google Analytics, we found that in the last week the map has received 3,533 unique visitors that spend an average of 3 ½ minutes perusing its contents. Interestingly, more than half of this traffic is routed via the Liberian Observer, a national newspaper popular on the ground and online. The majority of the traffic came from the United States (not surprising considering low Internet penetration in Liberia), but what peaked our interest was where in the States: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Georgia – states with the large Liberian Diaspora communities.

Elections instance viewers in the US (graphic via Google Analytics)

This was our team’s first indication of the Diaspora’s engagement with the electoral process from abroad (not to say there haven’t been many), and it widened our perspective on the instance’s audience. Perhaps, in a country without much local Internet access, it cannot be simply stated that a tool like Ushahidi is irrelevant. In today’s world, a country’s borders extend far beyond political boundaries, and interactive mapping tools such as the Ushahidi platform start to reveal the interconnected webs that criss-cross our globe.

This evening, the NEC announced that 99.9% of the presidential votes have been collected; with no clear winner, Liberia faces a run-off election on November 8^th.  The first round saw an impressive voter turnout rate of more than 70% (of registered voters), making many hopeful that Liberians will come out in full-force next month. The Ushahidi elections instance will continue to track the electoral process for Liberians at home and abroad, and for all of us who care deeply about the outcome of this country’s first self-run democratic election.

Liberians waiting to vote on election day

Meet “Polaroid”

For this theme, we wanted to really break from the traditional map + categories layout found in many Ushahidi deployments. Our goal was to highlight the individual report location and also create a seamless viewing experience for the full report details. We can see this theme working especially well for couple of use cases:

• A Travel Log: Having small maps associated with each report provides a nice visual for someone documenting all the places they visit on a trip.
• A City Mini-Guide: This theme would be great for someone wanting to create small city guide. Via the web or our mobile apps, you could quickly set up several points of interest along with pictures and video.

These are just a couple of use cases that came to mind but there are sure to be a zillion others that will show up too!

Live Demo

Go to http://ie.ushahidi.com/ for a live demo.

The Technical Nitty Gritty

Compared to the past two themes we released, this one has a little bit more going on under the hood:

• Lines of CSS: ~270
• Number of Images Used: 2
• Files Changed: header.php, footer.php, main.php, reports_view.php and the addition of a custom block used on the home page (polaroid_reports.php).
• Third Party Tools: Google Static Maps and Map Style API’s for individual report maps, Colorbox for the report detail modal windows.

How To Get It

Download it here! Also, it’s been added to the master branch of the platform on Github so feel free to pull it down at your convenience.

We hope you enjoy Polaroid!