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.

• Ushahidi needs stronger, unified documentation (a master wiki)
• Provide an accountable customer service work-flow
• Create an open development process, and
• Increase community programming to support mentorship and training.

Who is our community?

Ushahidi is used by five primary groups: international/local development, crisismappers/community capacity/civil society, media/communications, non-governmental/non-profit and governmental organizations. Types of community members can be researchers, academics, policy analysts, software developers, system administrators, logistics, event planners, deployment partners, activists, translators, coordinators, project managers, technical writers, translators, graphic designers, community outreach, videographer, volunteer coordinators, curious and everything! Whew! What an amazing swath of knowledge deployments convene. We are in awe.

What can we improve on?

Ushahidi needs support:

You told us that our support process is confusing and, at times, hard to reach. Support questions seem to be directed to the Developer Skype Chat, Forums, Wiki, mailing lists, individual team members, and etc. So, we are investigating streamlining our communications for technical support channels. We use Tender for all the general contact questions. We use Github, Forums (Vanilla) and Redmine for technical content. We’ve put together a list of requirements for the best fit solution to this. If you have any recommendations on the best tools to use or combination of tools, we’d welcome the input.

Create standards and protocols for releasing news about serious bugs and security risks over email. I don’t have the time to constantly monitor the Skype chat.

Be more responsive, and improve the quality of the product. Meet the needs of the community…

Ushahidi documentation is unclear. Open up the development process.

Make full use of wiki tools, I think we need to construct clear taxonomies to know what it is that is being categorized.

Emmanuel Kala and I have been tasked to determine the next steps with the wiki. Stay tuned on this journey. We’ve been reviewing how our friends in other open source communities keep a healthy, happening wiki alive and relevant. If you would like to help us on the wiki project, please just drop us a line.

…monthly conference calls where developers talk about what they’re working on and members of the community can share their thoughts on what’s working and what isn’t.

Increased programming to support mentorship and training.

I’ll +1 the idea for more videos, more webinars, and more visuals of even simple administration tasks. Ushahidi’s translation community will probably never be able to keep up with the platform/documentation changes in all of the required languages. The visual instruction, even if the verbal instruction is not understood, provides some understand of basic to more advanced functions.

Caleb Bell and I are working on a video channel for our training. We completely agree that video + language is so important to aid in supporting the ever-growing global, multi-lingual community. We will also be holding events and webinars for the various user groups to support the diverse deployment communities.

Also, two people requested More Cowbell. We’ll incorporate that into the next community call to be scheduled for early October.

Thanks to the 55 people who responded to the first community survey and to the countless people who talked with me both online and in-person. We are tasked with addressing these critical pieces to support your work. And, as we formulate the approach, we’ll share and ask for your input to test or improve it.

Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica 2011 is Germany’s largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to 10-20 minutes, the organizers gave us an hour to share our stories. So I’m posting the video of my presentation below for anyone interested in learning more about new media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, live maps, crisis response, civil resistance, digital activism and check-in’s. I draw on my experience with Ushahidi and the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and share examples from Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Japan, the US and Egypt to illustrate how live maps can change the world. My slides are available on Slideshare here.

I landed in Moscow in the end of October. It was still relatively warm, but already nothing reminded the unprecedented wave of heat and smog caused by wildfires that affected lives of entire population of Russian capital and many Russian regions. The primarily goal of my visit was meeting my friends and relatives. My visit, however, turned to be extremely intense due to the “Help Map” project that Alexey Sidorenko and I launched last summer.

The “Help Map” (Russian-fires.ru) was the first use of Ushahidi in Russia to coordinate assistance between victims of this summer’s wildfires in Russia, and citizens who wished to help them. Shortly after the platform was launched, hundreds of citizens wrote in with appeals for help, hundreds of people wrote in offering help, the site had several thousand unique users within a very short span of time, receiving extensive coverage in Russia’s media. A “situation room” that was set up in Moscow coordinated and delivered aid, based on information that “Help map” received and accumulated. The peak of the unique visitors per one day was more than 17 thousand. The total number of unique visitors is more than 187 thousand. We received more than 1600 messages. When the emergency situation passed and wildfires were stopped if not by firefighters then by the rains, the interest in platform significantly decreased. Once the emergence situation has passed, the motivation of its participants decreased as well. Everyone is back to normal life with common concerns about jobs and families.

This brought to a number of situations, every Ushahidi team once experienced. What should we do with the platform that we already have? Should we focus on the further development of “Help Map” or initiate new projects? How to make Ushahidi-based projects sustainable in post-emergency period? Do we need Ushahidi at all, after situation has normalized?? Who can be our partner? Should we find any local organization that will lead the issue?

All these questions turned to be one of the major issues on the agenda of my visit to Moscow.

First of all the visit to Moscow was opportunity to meet the virtual colleagues. I haven’t met ever most of the people who joined to the “Help map” project, and knew the names only from Google group mailing list and Skype discussions.

We met close to Lubyanka Square, a symbol of Soviet power where KGB/FSB headquarters are placed. Unfortunately, the forum was not full without some important people – Alexey Sidorenko, Warsaw-based co-founder of the project, among others. The good news was that Elena Kobyakova, one of the “Help Map” activists, came from Saint Petersburg especially for our meeting. Getting together was important not only for discussion of various issues, but for the fact of the meeting itself.

Ethan Zuckerman suggests Virtual-Person to Person-Virtual (VPV) model for development of networked projects:

People discover the community online, and connect based on their sense of shared identity and values with the people already participating. They come together, face to face, either at the biennial meetings we run or at the other people’s conferences  That, in turn, builds the trust and relationships we need to survive working together for the next months or years until we see each other face to face.

Russian-Fires Help Map Team

The meeting in Moscow was a move from first V to P in expectations of further V-based cooperation.

The meeting discussed the past and the future of platform and raised ideas about continuation of “Help map” as well as about other possible usage of “Ushahidi” that our core team can support and move forward.  At the same time it was also clear that the “Ushahidi” based projects can’t be sustainable based only on core team of “Help Map”. Therefore the visit was not only meeting the old colleagues but also an opportunity to introduce the project to new audience and engage it.

In my opinion, one of the best partners could be students and university programs that focus on research of information technologies. I was glad for any request to talk about the project and Ushahidi.  Giving lectures about social and political aspects of crowdsourcing and “Help map” as a case study at political science departments of Moscow universities –Moscow State University and Higher School of Economics was a wonderful opportunity for introduction of Ushahidi as well as discussion if ICT can create new platforms for governance and civil society.

Another type of discussion about “Help Map” took place at Department of Psychology of Moscow State University. This time the lecture was focused on the evolutionary role of ICT and crowdsourcing as tools that can facilitate network cooperation and mutual aid. Lectures at universities were not only the opportunity to discuss but to find partners for future projects, both on institutional level and among the students.  It’s too early to talk about any results, but the idea of creating experimental platform that will make possible engaging students in managing crowdsourcing projects and doing research is currently under consideration. Some of the students also expressed their interest in writing papers about Ushahidi and taking part in future projects.

Photo courtesy of Alexander Zolotov

Not only universities expressed interest in “Ushahidi” and “Help map” project.  The Civic Chamber of Russian Federation, a governmental body that incorporates leaders of various civil society organizations, held a special meeting “About options for coordination of volunteer activities based on case study of Internet-project “Help Map”. The meeting was attended by representatives of the chamber, leaders of NGO organizations that took part in firefighting and volunteers.

After presentation of the project that we made with my colleague, a head of “Help Map” coordination center Anastasia Severina, a long discussion took place. We were asked if we would like to create our own non-profit organization “Help Map” that will continue working on the project and launch new crowdsourcing platform for facilitation of volunteer activities. The issue if network based project can be facilitated through creation of organizational structure is complicated and controversial. I tried to claim that the power of the project is being based on self-organized networks, and once you try to transform it to organizational structure, it might threaten its networked nature. Another threat that might be caused by this type of transformation is bureaucratic responsibilities that have any non-profit organization.

Later on, another aspect of this question was raised during the meetings with people from e-government community. Should government support development of crowdsourcing projects for emergency situations? Can the resources, cooperation with government structures, and outreach assistance make projects like “Help map” more effective? Or, vice versa, will it threaten the independent self-organized people-to-people nature and will reduce the motivation of volunteers to take part in it? The answer to this question is not easy and ambivalent. It’s clear though that it depends on a political context and a degree of trust between government and its citizens.

At the Civic Chamber we claimed that the most effective way of further development is finding new partners among NGOs and academic community. One of our requests was to support university-based projects for crowdsourcing experimental platforms. On one hand it might create some institutional platform. On the other hand, the non-partisan status of universities can reduce the threat to networked organization. Moreover, it can create new research options and engage students in social responsible activity. There is a doubt if a type of meeting as we had at “Civic chamber” can lead to any significant results, however the main effect of it is raising awareness about role of IT in general and crowdsourcing in particular in emergency situations. Therefore, even the title of the official summary of the discussion that was published by the Civic Chamber “Help map will be developed” might be approached as an achievement.

Another channel for cooperation is local NGOs. Following the discussion in Civic Chamber we had meetings with local environmental groups. We discussed the possible transformation of “Help map” for wildfires to a map that will collect information about any forest-related issues (e.g. monitoring of violations, coordination of restoration). At the same time we will be prepared to provide help again in emergency situation (according to forecasting of Russian environmentalists, the wildfires next summer can be even worse). The Russian environmentalists emphasized the role of crowdsourcing in early warning and prevention of fires. According to their data, most of the fires that destroyed villages started few days earlier in the deep forest, and slowly moved forward towards populated areas.  Local authorities, however, were not ready to take any measures before the fire reached the villages. Therefore, monitoring the wildfires should use crowdsourcing together with the analysis of satellite images (Russian NGO “The transparent world” provides alternative source of satellite images). This solution will not only help to coordinate the response to wildfires, but would also show the real degree of the disaster and make pressure on the authorities to start providing early response.

As a small group of volunteers “Help map” team is not able to create or support many projects. But as those who had an experience of launching and managing crowdsourcing platform, we can make any effort and be as open as possible to share our experience with others.  We already received many requests for lectures and presentations about “Help map” including a conference for regional journalists and conference about the role of IT in improving the life in Saint Petersburg.  In November “Help Map” and “Ushahidi” will be presented at big e-government conference in Moscow and new media readings at Moscow State University. At the same time “Help Map” example makes possible to raise awareness about role of information technologies for solution of social problems within software developers’ community. Pavel Sutyrin, one of “Help Map” leading programmers, already held a seminar dedicated to this issue. We also consider idea of writing a guide of how to use Ushahidi in Russian that will include the story of “Help map” as a case study for launching crowdsourcing projects.

Raising awareness about crowdsourcing is as important as supporting the next projects. We can see some “Ushahidi” chain effect in Russia. A prominent Russian blogger Alexey Navalny works on project for monitoring problems with roads and forcing the authorities to fix it. One of NGOs considering launching a platform that will monitor violations in regard to military service in Russian and provide an option for soldiers to send an SMS if their right were violated. Other group is working on a platform that will collect information about various types of right violations. And certainly another project is the further development of russian-fires.ru as an environmental platform that can also provide response in emergency situations.

Another possible direction of further development is incorporation of crowdsourcing practices within e-government. Despite some concerns and skepticism, we may still hope that platforms as Ushahidi can play a role in bridging the gap between government and citizens. The Russian e-gov efforts already showed few interesting and inspiring projects like rosspending.ru , that in a user-friendly way tell people about the public procurement and main government contractors.  Maybe at some point we will be able to see if Haitian Noula model can work in Russia.

A lot of questions about dynamics of crowdsourcing development are still open… However, we may conclude with a high degree of confidence that after having a significant experience this summer Russia is ready to join to international crowdsourcing and mapping community.

Hearing what works, what doesn’t, what is missing and what could be improved is essential to the ongoing development of Ushahidi. Feedback also plays an important role in building and growing a thriving community. Participating in this process is one way that those who have benefited from using Ushahidi can give back and help us build a better platform for future users. Feedback can include bug reports, technical difficulties, and feature requests as well as strategic insights and practical considerations.

A sample of feedback we have received includes requests for: language localization; customized themes; better configuration of email, SMS, and RSS alerts; improved alerts functionality such as the ability to subscribe to alerts for more than one location at a time or for a specific category; enhanced reporting tools to produce reports, graphs, bar charts…and more. You can see how these suggestions were incorporated into the roadmap for the Mogadishu release by visiting our wiki.

We also launched our community resources page in response to feedback from non-technical users.

We glean feedback from a variety of sources: we encourage our users to exchange information on our forums, welcome guest posts to our blog and appreciate when people who have deployed Ushahidi take time to complete our online surveys. In fact, we are currently revising our install survey and our post-implementation survey. Please feel free to let us know what you think of the questions. Do they make sense? Anything else we should ask?

Also, as part of our ongoing efforts to improve our capacity for gathering feedback, we are currently seeking volunteers to join our team. We are particularly looking for bilingual (English + local language) volunteers from Central and South America, Europe and Asia. If you are interested in learning more about how Ushahidi is used in the field, becoming a feedback volunteer will give you the opportunity to engage and interact with deployers who are actively using the platform. It’s also a great way for people without technical skills to contribute to shaping and improving the platform. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, please contact me via email to sarah [at] ushahidi [dot] com.

I am still a few miles away from one of the worst floods in the history of Pakistan.  Still, I could not figure out the meaning of life and hope after losing your loved family, losing everything you built in your life in front of 30 feet high flood wave, where everything is completely devastated for millions of people. I do not know how to save hopes of people in current situation. But as a technology and social entrepreneur, I have read hundreds of case studies and talks that a SMS is a ray of hope and decided to setup SMS based incident reporting.

I want to bring first line of incident reporting live for millions of people in Pakistan. This requires technology, spreading the right word to millions, building team, Logistics, resources and coordinating all the incident reporting. The last week was spent on the technology front.  So, after sleepless nights, power shortages, worst news written on faces everywhere, the effort continued. With the help of few friends, I got access to short code 3441 in Pakistan.  Next the Crowdmap was launched at http://pakrelief.crowdmap.com.  Then, the short code integration was done. And the technology milestone is achieved.

Then, I started carefully spreading the message to select forums and people about the SMS and incident reporting platform, people from all over the world are joining us that is bringing a hope on a SMS message. Team building is on way and spreading the message to millions of flood affected people is next big challenge. Remember, the mission is to save one hope by one SMS message at 3441.

The message to spread is simple. “Text your observations about the disaster and your location so we can put this on a map.” People can report their observations by texting 3441 and starting their message with “FL”.

One hope will be saved, if this message is properly understood, mapped by humanitarian agencies, people or anyone in the world looking to help flood affected populations in Pakistan. We need your help, please join our team (email us at pkfloods@brightspyre.com) and lets try to save one hope with one SMS message.

Last week, following an unprecedented heat wave, wildfires continue to threaten much of western part of the country, including the Moscow region. At least 40 people were killed, 77 towns or villages were damaged, thousands of people were left without homes and have lost everything they had. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev declared emergency situation in 7 regions, however it looks like the authorities have significant problems coordinating information, assistance and providing prompt help to the victims of the wildfires.

The Russian online community including bloggers from Livejournal.com blogosphere are very active not only in covering of the tragic events, but also self organizing in order to provide help to those who need it. A special community “Pozar_Ru” has been launched for those who are interested in helping. However, unlike the situation of earthquakes when most of the damage caused in one moment, wildfires create dynamic and complex reality. New epicenters of fire emerge almost every hour and it happens in a very wide territory. As consequence, it creates information overload and makes coordination of help by the online community more difficult.

Russian Internet has few platforms for monitoring of wildfires distribution, a notable exception being “Pozhar“.  What is missing, is a platform that assists with coordination of information flow and hopefully, with help efforts. On July 31, I wrote in my blog a post titled “Wildfires require using “Ushahidi” in Russia”. I wrote of the role of Ushahidi in Haiti and Chile and argued that applying this platform is even more appropriate for the current situation in Russia. In a few hours, the post was reposted by a well known Russian oppositional blogger Marina Litvinovich and circulated within the pozar_ru community. It attracted a lot of attention to the platform and created a dynamic discussion. The next day, Alexey Sidorenko, a blogger on Altz-gamer and an editor of Global Voices Runet Echo project launched Ushahidi.

Russian-fires.ru

The website is Russian-fires.ru under title “Russian fires 2010”. He used the Russian version that was translated for use in Kyrgyzstan. Sidorenko also called for Russian programmers to join him in further development of the platform through a popular Russian IT blog Habrahabr. Marina Litvinovich also called for volunteers to join to the team that will manage and contribute information to the new platform.

The main purpose of the platform, is not mapping the wildfires, but primarily building the bridge between those who need help and those who wish to help. It is reflected by categories of the map that includes “What is needed” (subcategories: need home, need clothes, need food, need evacuation etc.) and “I wish to help” (subcategories: “I have clothes”; I have transport; I have food etc.). The map also presents “Centers of assistance” and places where people who lost their homes can stay.

“Russian Fires 2010” is the first time when Ushahidi is being used in Russia for this particular purpose, and probably the first time that Russians online have turned to independent crowdsourcing platforms. The project has been live for only one day, but it already has a strong core team and dozens of reports.  Please note that there might be some bugs on the site (character encoding issues to be sorted out) and other early stage problems, but the team hopes to solve the problems, study the platform and look for additional assistance.

We can’t be sure if the first Russian Ushahidi will be a story of success, but it is already clear that Russia is a unique place for using “Ushahidi” due to high degree of activism and mutual aid among online community. The speed that “Ushahidi” was launched proves it. “Let the technology let us to help each other” says the “Russian Fires 2010” website. Let’s hope that this vision will come true.

For any assistance, advice or any type of input you can write to Gregory Asmolov, gregory dot asmolov [at] gmail dot com or Alexey Sidorenko sidorenko[dot] a [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you, and please let others in Russia know about the site.

To date Ushahidi prides itself in it’s origin as an African innovation (though now applied to varied situations across the globe and developed by programmers from different continents) and we place great value on local developers and their contribution to the project. We would love to see even more developers involved as we seek not only to grow the project but also pull up the cadre of local developers through involvement in such Open Source projects as Ushahidi and SwiftRiver.

If you will be in Nairobi on the 23rd of June (Wednesday) feel free to pass by iHub between 5.30 and 7.30 PM. To help us figure out how many pizzas to order, please register on this link.

The brief overview will cover:

• Setting up a development environment
• Introduction to MVC and the Kohana (PHP) framework
• Working with GIT
• Overview of the Ushahidi database schema
• Editing the code
• Working the Bug/Issue list

Computer Professionals’ Union is using the Ushahidi platform amongst other tools  to empower people in the Philippines with the ability to orient the masses in the nature of the Philippine elections. Anyone who has witnessed or knows of an incident has the power to text or email in and report electronic voting monitor/document occurrences of electoral fraud and promotes candidates and parties that subscribe to the politics of change.

Through VoteReportPH citizens are able to strengthen democracy by ensuring their voices are heard. The group behind this instance is also providing voter education, which is very important as tools are only one part of the equation. The offline strategy is always something other organizations should keep in mind when they use technology. More information on that is on their site. An excellent interview with Rick, the lead on the project is available on TechTransparent.

For the community in Phillipines:  To Report Fraud:
1. Send SMS to
09274004190 (GLOBE) or
09995178201 (SMART) and
09223913567 (SUN)
2. By sending an email to votereportph at cp-union .com.
3. By sending a tweet with the hashtag/s #aes2010 or #kontradaya or #votereportph.
4. By filling a form on the votereportph website.

The elections in Togo are being held today, and Kokou Etou set up this implementation to help aggregate information. He partnered with IFES (international Foundation for Electoral Systems) and other organizations working in Togo to visualize the info and put it online.

For some background on the Togo Elections, read this piece by Amourlaye Touréand Paul Chick of IFES/Togo.

There are three ways to submit information
1. Text your location and info to 0012673935789
2. Email info@togoelection2010.com
3. Submit reports on the site

Do support this initiative and visit their site here, please do let others know within Togo to check the site for information. This will be particularly helpful to Kokou and his partners as they have already done some preliminary outreach through online forums and radio ads.