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!

Evan extending an outdated looking point and shoot camera in a pub.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

Sinsai.info received 1st place in the Rakuten Technology Awards.

Sinsai.info was created in response to the earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan in March 2011. Congratulations to Hal Seki and the whole Sinsai.info team. The Rakuten Technology Awards, granted to people who have contributed to evolve various technologies, were given last week at the Rakuten Technology Conference. Rakuten (Rakuten, Inc.) is biggest e-commerce company started at 1997 in Japan. They’ve been supporting the Ruby community and holding the technology awards since 2008.

• Sinsai.info’s blog post with a picture of the award!
• Scan Netsecurity article about the award

Hal Seki presented about sinsai.info and his other response activity – a Hack-a-thon event called Hack For Japan. Currently, he is building a non-profit-organization which aims to run sinsai.info and hack-a-thon events. If you are in Japan on December 17- 18, 2011, consider attending Hack for Japan.

Harrassmap.org: UN World Summit Youth Award for “Power 2 Women!”

Harassmap [Egypt]: Winner under the category of “Power 2 Women!”
Harrassmap.org aims to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment and has an active campaign for women to report issues in Egypt. Women can report via SMS anonymously. The team consisted of: Engy Ghozlan, Rebecca Chiao, Engy Ghozlan, Sawsan Gad, and Amel Fahmy. The award was accepted by Heba Habib.

Zabatak.com: UN World Summit Youth Award for “Pursue Truth!”

Zabatak [Egypt]: Winner under the category of “Pursue Truth!”
Zabatak, a non-profit, is an anti-crime, anti-corruption initiative led by group of young people that aim to fight corruption and to make Egypt safe and free from bribery and corruption. The team consisted of: Abbas Ibrahim, Nagla Metwally, Ali El-Hefnawy, Mostafa Raafat, and Amr Sobhy.

Congratulations to all of the winners. You humble us with your drive to change the world. Thank you.

Thank you to Anna Gauto, ICNM – International Center for New Media for the photos of the Harrassmap and Zabatak winners.

Run-off election results on the map

In the days between the run-off and NEC’s first announcement, the Liberia Media Center published unofficial rolling results from field journalists covering the polling places. These initial results were the first and only vote counts available to the Liberian public, and were published right away on the elections instance as “LMC run-off vote counts” (just below categories, under “other layers”). The Elections Coordinating Committee, active observers during the first round, sent out another 1,750+ monitors on run-off day who have now returned to iLab and are diligently recording the events that occurred at Liberia’s polling places. These ECC reports from the first round can be found under the category “ECC election day monitoring”). Second round ECC reports will appear on the map once the data operators have received all polling checklists.

ECC polling station reports from the first round

During the last week, the majority of the map’s reports have been about the events surrounding Monday’s CDC rally turned violent, and minor incidents during the run-off and the following day. Some of the incidents reported include: attempted ballot box stealing, the torn down polling station results, tear gas fired by police when a crowd refused to give up ballot boxes, the closure of three major radio stations on charges of hate speech, the burning of a major radio station that is still under investigation, and Thursday’s release of 84 persons arrested during the rally.

Picture from the map of an opposition rally turned violent

Young voters proud to cast their ballots

Since Wednesday, the Ushahidi Liberia team has mostly been mapping news from the local media and international observers such as the Carter Center and ECOWAS. We plan to continue updating these vote counts until the final results are released. However, with recent news that opposition leader Winston Tubman will contest the results and seek legal action to hold another election next month, this election map may not go quiet simply because the last vote is counted.

Brandon with his son, Hudson.

We are pleased to announce that Brandon Rosage (@brosage) has joined Team Ushahidi! He comes on board as a web designer and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

Brandon comes to us with loads of experience. From traditional journalism and publishing all the way to co-founding a local internet broadcast network, Brandon has been building on the web for the past seven years. In addition to that, Brandon is a huge Detroit Tigers fan and enjoys living in Olympia, WA with his wife and their 1-year-old son.

Brandon’s focus at Ushahidi will be to improve the overall design and user experience of our products. He brings a passion for “mobile first” design and as such will be a huge help as we optimize our products for mobile.

As is typical for new team members, Brandon jumped into the fray feet-first spending his first week designing and coding in a cabin in North Georgia with David Kobia, Emmanuel Kala and I… the results of which will hopefully be revealed soon!

Please join us in welcoming Brandon to the team!

Finishing up a week of hacking with some southern BBQ!

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

We’ve told you a bit about iLab on this blog before, but now we have a visual aid to better introduce ourselves.  We started the space as a way to train people in the Ushahidi platform with adequate connectivity and equipment, and now we’re holding FOSS trainings for the Liberian legislature and serving as the data entry hub for national Elections Coordinating Committee. So many good and unexpected things start with a tool that serves to connect, and to ask people – what is your story?  Now we are asking, who is your community?

It’s an exciting time to be in Liberia – with a presidential election next month, broadband Internet landing offshore in 2012 and increasing overlaps between Liberia’s development and tech communities. We hope you’ll take a look and see what iLab is doing to promote IT access and innovation in Liberia.

Liberia 2011 election instance

The Liberia 2011 election instance received 239 crowdseeded messages from trusted reporters during the Referendum and the following week before official results were announced. These reporters have received training in how to report to the Ushahidi platform using the free “2011” shortcode; among them are local election monitors, Liberian police officers, international election observers and local journalists. Most of the messages focused on the following: a low voter turnout (only about one-third of the voting population), a printing error on the ballot that confused voters about Proposition 2, the high number of incorrectly marked ballots (approximately 12% counted as invalid), the frustration of NEC workers over long hours without break and some incidents of violence. Overall, there were few violent incidents during and after the Referendum; those reported include one ritualistic killing with political motives, an attack on a political candidate as well as NEC staff counting ballots at night, and a few fights that broke out at polling stations over how to vote on the Referendum’s four propositions.

Sierra Leone's Election Watch and ECC observers

iLab Liberia, the tech lab at Ushahidi Liberia’s office, served as a data entry hub for the Elections Coordinating Committee and Sierra Leoneon observers during the Referendum, and in the days following each partner organization that received messages on the election instance used iLab’s facilities to verify and approve reports for public viewing. It became clear as we assisted partners with their data that polling station geo-coordinates were a must for the election instance. Our team realized this months ago, but were not able to locate a data set with more than the name and county location of each polling station.

ECC Referendum observers entering incident reports into their database

Once in a blue moon, data heroes come along when you need them most – and that was what happened the week after the Referendum when a UN officer who attended iLab’s mapping party offered to share a KMZ file with each polling station’s confirmed latitude and longitude. A dream come true! But we ran into a familiar problem – we only had the coordinates and the stations’ code numbers in this file. After a serendipitous trip to the NEC where I ran into the IT Director on his way out, he showed me the pdf with all the polling stations’ descriptive details – and, even better, it was online! But, as was the case with our KMZ file, a crucial piece of data was missing – the geo-coordinates. After a bit of tweaking and rearranging, our team merged the two data sets and placed them on the election instance.

Polling stations for Liberia's election

What is now displayed on the election instance constitutes the first complete online data set of all 1,780 polling stations and their exact locations. We may soon incorporate these stations into the “categories” section of the instance, but for now you can find them by clicking on the “polling stations” layer located just below categories. Each time you zoom in, it’s necessary to refresh the polling stations layer; when you do, and click on a station, you’ll see the station’s code, name of the building, town, county and total voters registered at that site. Other layers on this map include electoral district boundaries for quickly viewing how many reports and polling stations are located in each district.

One of the Referendum’s four propositions suggested a date change for the presidential election; official results revealed the date would stay the same – October 11th. That leaves a month between this dress rehearsal and the main event. The Ushahidi Liberia team is going to be busy preparing with up-country trips trainings for 200+ new reporters, turning iLab into the Elections Coordinating Committee’s situation room and making sure all systems are go for what is perhaps Liberia’s most anticipated event since its first democratic election 6 years ago.

You count on us to provide reliable open source solutions. We apologize for this inconvenience to you and your deployment teams. Our hosting provider is closely following up with us and their data center provider to conduct an incident review and action plan. We, too, are discussing how we can improve.

What Happened:
An ATS (automatic transfer switch) completely failed at our hosting provider’s data center. The ATS is responsible for flipping load between the active and backup power (which is why backup power failed to start as the brain that is responsible for it is fried). A temporary ATS was installed, wired and tested to allow power to be restored. The Colo4 status page outlines their full technical response. Cartika Hosting, our hosting company, provided ongoing updates throughout the incident. We appreciated their communications, which we shared with you via Twitter, our developer mailing lists and our Ushahidi Dev Skype Chat.

Our next steps:
We are thankful for our community members offering to assist us throughout the day. We are determined to use experience to improve and ensure we can provide you with quality, reliable services. To that end, we will be holding discussions and share our next steps.

Thank you again for your remarkable patience during this difficult day.