Above is an image of Patrick, with others from the community, who joined us at our very first community meeting to figure out what Ushahidi should be, and where we should go next with things back in early 2009.

This week Patrick announced he will be joining the Qatar Foundation (Computing Research Institute) to work on the next generation of humanitarian technology solutions. We couldn’t be happier for him, though of course we’ll miss him greatly.

The Qatar Foundation have been interested Patrick for some time, after all, there are few people in the world who have a high level of expertise on the intersection of crisis/disaster, mapping and crowdsourced information. It’s a unique skillset, especially when paired with Patrick’s ability to communicate clearly, whether he’s speaking or writing. We’re very excited as we know that he’s going to have a huge impact on the Qatar Foundation, as well as a continued impact within the CrisisMapping space (ICCM, Standby Task Force, etc).

I’m personally excited for Patrick too, as I’ve seen him in action so often, and have been the recipient of the ideas and lateral thinking that he brings to any discussion. I know we’ll keep working with him, now through the Qatar Foundation, and I know he’ll also bring in some of the other great minds there to help us solve some of the big problems that we’re trying to solve at Ushahidi.

Finally, as I said at the beginning, Patrick is a friend – a good one that I’ve not been able to spend as much time as I’d like as we’ve always lived in different places. We get to meet in random places, such as Lamu (above), Camden, Miami, and London, and those times have been some of the highlights of my year. It’s in these times that you see the true humility of an open thinker, one that aspires to change the way the world works, and has the audacity to try by working at the edges.

Funnily enough, my greatest claim to fame might be that I was the one that suggested that Patrick start a blog, which became iRevolution, one of the best resources on crisismapping and revolutionary new thinking in the information space in recent years.

Patrick, we all wish you the best of luck at QF, and thank you for your 4 years of amazing contribution to Ushahidi.

Building on a partnership established during Liberia’s 2011 General Elections, Ushahidi Liberia has been working with the United Nation’s Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) to create an Ushahidi instance that facilitates information coordination for UN field-based operations across West Africa. In collaboration with Lt. Col. David Foster, founder of the UNMIL Situational Awareness Visualization Environment (USAVE) Initiative, Ushahidi Liberia has developed a pilot instance populated with sample data from the Mission. If it proves useful, the instance will be further customized to serve as the Mission’s primary information management tool. “USAVE is not a thing or a single website,” says Foster. “It is a change of organizational culture and processes, powered by existing technologies like Ushahidi. Using existing tools and a streamlined approach will allow UNMIL personnel to rapidly share, view and understand relationships between operational datasets and the environment.  See, share, act! – This is the focus of the USAVE team, and Ushahidi is the central element enabling our vision.”

USAVE instance customized by Ushahidi Liberia

The USAVE team is compiling a centralized data repository from a variety of UN sources (UNMIL, UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNOCHA and UNFAO) that will not only allow UNMIL staff to view reports geospatially but also see relationships between reports and across departments. Correlating reports will allow users to quickly identify trends that would be virtually impossible using standard reporting mechanisms such as written reports, as is the custom at the Mission in Liberia. Currently no centralized repository exists and information known by one department in UNMIL, as well as other UN agencies, may never be known by another.

The USAVE instance is intended to better position Liberia’s UN agencies to make decision-grade analysis more efficiently, thus allowing UN resources to be even more effectively directed. The USAVE instance not only contains UN-gathered data but also links to other Ushahidi deployments in Liberia such as Liberia’s Early-Warning and Response Network that constitutes the most comprehensive source of early warning data in the country. Foster states, “The value of linking to other instances cannot be understated.  The eyes and ears of our teammates improve UNMIL’s ability to truly understand the environment in which we are providing humanitarian services.  For this we are most thankful.”

Countrywide alerts

In particular, the USAVE team has been making good use of the alerts feature on their customized instance to receive timely notifications. Ushahidi Liberia has customized this function to allow users to create alerts that would cover the entire country of Liberia since many users at the Mission do not work in one region but rather countrywide. Normally alerts are limited to a radius of 100km; now USAVE team members can have the latest information pushed to them from across Liberia. The alerts function also allows the USAVE members to filter what they receive by category to prevent information overload.

At this point, UNMIL and the USAVE team are looking at ways to automatically upload batches of critical information into the Ushahidi instance on a daily basis; UNMIL is also evaluating current information needs to see what other ways of sorting and storing information on the platform could be accomplished.  Because this initiative has captured the attention of other UN agencies in Liberia, it will soon be re-branded to better represent the diversity of actors involved. Many of these agencies have had success using tools and processes to collect, manage and share information on a small scale.  Their processes, coupled with USAVE requirements and the Ushahidi platform may very well change the way UN missions around the globe “See, Share, Act.”  The Ushahidi Liberia team is excited to move forward with the pilot and explore ways of supporting USAVE for the people of Liberia and beyond.

Code:

• A vulnerability has been discovered in the Ushahidi Admin API. A fix has been issued, please update your deployments. Full details. (Crowdmap was updated.)
• Evan Sims and Brian Herbert moved Crowdmap to new infrastructure. Databases are now properly replicated, the webserver has been switched to Nginx and is being load balanced. Crowdmap will now be able to handle larger loads of traffic and should have less disruption to individual deployments in the future.
• Robbie issued the security patch for the API. He is also working on fixing google maps layers.
• Technical Help needed: Volunteers for further work on WMS layers or mapbox plugin. Someone to help with unit tests (this is boring but helpful). Check in the developers mailing list or join our Ushahidi skype community developer chat.
• Robert Colombo needs help on batch upload data with custom fields: data is not being imported from custom fields (fields are empty). Also Queries on custom fields and Plugin based fields (i.e. report status). Download pic and video names when download reports could be a must (for GIS analysis).

Community and Deployers:

• Deployment of the Week: Mind the News Gap
• With the assistance of Michael Coates, we have started a Security Working Group. Thanks to community members on the dev call for offering to assist. We will be collaborating the OWASP community to test, identify and patch potential security issues. Let us know if you would like to participate.
• The Our Rio20 project, created by Manu Kabahizi continues to make outreach noise online. Have you added your thoughts on #thefuturewewant?
• Congratulations to Anahi and team for the Internews project in the Central African Republic. It was featured on the HPDT website.
• Roger Huder mentions Ushahidi’s use in Haiti in his recently published book Disaster Operations and Decision Making. For more research items, see the community research site.

MapStars – Congratulations to the Harassmap, Qiantang River and Offline/Online teams:

Ushahidi is honoured to share news of mapstar teams: Harassmap, Qiantang River and the Offline/Online App teams:

Harassmap won a BOB for Best Use of Technology for Social Good

Part of the Ushahidi team in Kenya recorded this short video to congratulate Harassmap.

Qiantang River Map won the Technology Application Award of the 2012 China Intel Social Innovation Prize and its US $16,000 prize money.

The Offline Online App has been submitted to the finals for the International Space Apps Challenge in the category of Citizen Science. Voting is open, can you help support them? Here is their video:

Ideas / Plans:

Gabriel White of Small Surfaces is consulting with the Ushahidi team to research and provide some User Experience feedback for Ushahidi products. He previously assisted us with the feedback from the Ushahidi Evaluation and Ushahidi Toolkits. We are attempting to incorporate deployer feedback better into our software designs. You can continue to add your thoughts on the wiki.

Community changes:

Have you joined the Community mailing list? See list.ushahidi.com for details.

Events:

Hosting: Ushahidi is hosting a casual community meeting in Panama City on May 10th

Attending:

Citizen Lab, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Open Net Initiative are hosting a Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop: Issues for Latin America in Panama. Heather Leson will be presenting about Lessons Learned from Emergency Response and Election Monitoring. (May 6 – 10, 2012)

World Economic Forum on Africa: Representing Ushahidi in dialogue about Crowdsourcing, governance and growth. Juliana will be meeting with various organizations and individuals from May 9th-11th.

Ushahidi will also be hosting a small roundtable on Education, Technology and Open Data at the iHub on the 15th of May.

For more Ushahidi weekly, see our wiki.

Citizen Lab Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop

Citizen Lab, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Open Net Initiative are hosting a Cyber Security Research and Policy Workshop: Issues for Latin America (Panama). I’ll will be sharing some Lessons Learned from Emergency Response and Election Monitoring.

Miradorelectoral Guatemala

(note: this website auto-plays radio)

I’ve collected a summary of blog posts and research from deployers. If you have any comments or feedback for the researcher, feel free to share. I will add your comments into my presentation with credit.

Crowdmap Maintenance: Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 (GMT)

We will be performing Crowdmap maintenance beginning on Thursday, May 3rd at 2:00am – 8:00am GMT (other timezones). We do expect downtime during this period so please plan accordingly. We will be moving our databases to new servers for better resiliency to prevent downtime and failure moving forward. This is one of the steps we are taking related to unexpected downtime from our hosting provider mentioned here and here on the Ushahidi Blog.

Security Patch

On April 27, 2012, Dennison Williams reported a security vulnerability with the Ushahidi web application. The vulnerability allows unauthorized users to gain admin access to Ushahidi deployments through a fake authentication cookie. Session data was stored in a cookie, and while encrypted, the encryption key is never changed. This leads to any Ushahidi session cookie being valid and usable on any other Ushahidi installation.

More details. Please update your deployments.
(Crowdmaps have been updated.)

Thank you Dennison for your leadership.

Community Developer Call

The Ushahidi Community Developer call was on April 30th/May 1st. Attendees (16) provided overviews of OpenGeo SMS, Offline/Online Applications and OccupyMap. Dale and Henry answered mobile development questions. Then, we did a deep dive on security issues and how to improve our workflow and software. Great feedback and participation: Monthly Developer Community call (audio recording is about 1 hour and 12 minutes). Slayer wrote a great summary.

Read the Ushahidi weekly

More in the Ushahidi weekly report for April 24- May 1, 2012.

We post all our Ushahidi weekly reports on the wiki and community site. It is open for anyone to talk about their deployments, presentations and ideas (if related to Ushahidi community).

How can we serve a global community? Ushahidi is translated into 18 languages and has been downloaded in 159 countries. We’ve grown fast and our community of translators contributed to many great projects from U-shahid to Qiantang River. Ushahidi’s translators need a new engine with fresh coat of paint. We’d love your input as we navigate this complex issue.

Does not Translate

Imagine you are a deployer in an emergency situation. You download Ushahidi or set up a Crowdmap. On the settings page, you select your language default for the deployment. What if the localization is incomplete? How can you change specific fields and easily contribute to the localization while in the middle of the deployment?

This is exactly the situation that occurred with Cyclone Giovanna Crowdmap. While Ushahidi has been translated into French, there were some incomplete fields. The translator worked with our developer Robbie to fix it during the emergency, and provided some insightful feedback into our tool-set and the mind of a translator.

In Istanbul, I met the creator of Mechulogrenci. Based on his feedback and that of our intern, Michelle Lee, we are on a journey to better meet our localization community needs.

Users before software changes

Ushahidi had an in-house tool called Tafsiri, which we used from 2010 through late 2011. Our mobile developers used spreadsheets to translated the mobile applications as Tafsiri was not useful for their needs. We started to develop Transifex to use for translation but ran into some road blocks with arrays (code). As part of this move, we closed down Tafsiri before Transifex was in place and asked translators to use Github as a temporary workaround. Github is not very translator-friendly.

We own that our migration to Github/Transifex from Tafsiri was a failure. While it was easier for developers to add language to arrays (code), it was a huge barrier to entry for deployers and translators. The move to Transifex did not occur as fast as we intended. We’re sorry for this.

Mind of a Translator (Michelle)

To translate a website means to localize it, it is the way to make the website be accepted by local people and the way to spread the information/knowledge, even more so, the way to collect local information.

For translators, the translate tool must be easy to use. Few minutes tutorial is fine, but if people have to spend two hours to learn how to use it, it will not be the proper tool for the translators. In additional, most of the translators probably don’t have a technical background, it means that if the translate tool needs coding skill, then it will keep the translators away.
The tool should has its own database that can help people to translate most part of the content smoothly, and some specific functions like highlighting the word to get the meaning of if, or can be used both online and offline.

I used to help to translate a business website, we used excel to translate EVERY WORD on the website, it’s annoying and wasted lots of time. And actually, the business site was very simple, no maps or video. Therefore, for a powerful and interactive website like Ushahidi, we need a more powerful translate tool.

Localization Research and Needs

Our friends at Mozilla serve large scale open source localization projects. They’ve provided us with some feedback on how to serve both translators and developers.

Meedan’s experience shows the complexity and opportunity of real-time translation. George Weyman, of Meedan, submitted a Knight Challenge called the Translation Desk.

If only software localization was as easy as Universal Subtitles! (We use this tool for video translation.)

Robbie and Henry are investigating how to connect Transifex and Pontoon. This means that we are still working on a solution to make localization possible for our community.

Localizations

The next steps:

Being global can be a bumpy road. We aim to meet the deployer and translator needs. The software has to work around this mission, but we think we are on the right path now. One of our major goals this year is to have Ushahidi translated into 25 languages. This means some braining on ways to make it easier and sharing what hasn’t worked.

• Localization and Translation research: Do you have any recommendations or feedback on translation tools?
• Best practices resources for open source organizations?
• Translators: Can you help us define the translator requirements to make your participation easier? Add you comments to this blog post or to our Localization project wiki page.

Heather and Michelle

OccupyMap launched in November 2011, the night before the November 17 Day of Action. We got some impressive coverage in the technology press that morning and the site saw a fair amount of usage around NYC form both web submissions and people tweeting with the #occupymap hashtag. However, after that initial burst of activity, site usage fell off sharply, and NYCGA Tech Ops (the working group that develops and maintains the map) was left to come up with a new strategy for how to use the site. We all felt that since Ushahidi was a crowdsourced, anonymous tool, it was a good match for the horizontal, distributed nature of OWS and it’s success was just a matter of finding the right fit for it in the Occupy.net set of tools.

Lessons learned

One lesson we learned early on was that using Ushahidi for tactical real-time information took more training and coordination than we could accomplish from people participating in direct actions – we tried this on our December 17 re-occupation attempt, but the effectiveness of a private, real-time deployment of Ushahidi was negated by unclear lines of communication between autonomous teams in the streets.

We decided that the best use case for the map would be as a storytelling and archival tool for the movement, and we should build new features that would streamline the process for adding content, and make the thousands of photos and videos lurking beneath the surface of the site easier for a casual user to discover. About two months ago, Tech Ops teamed up with a group from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College to work on usability and design for the May Day redesign of the site.

Here’s a rundown of the new features we’ve deployed for OccupyMap, May Day Edition:

Auto-complete: Using Soulmate to improve search

This is provided by a Ruby-based web service called Soulmate (courtesy of SeatGeek.com – check it out at Seatgeek in Github). Soulmate runs on a minimalist Ruby framework called Sinatra, and a key-value store called Redis. Together they combine to hep Soulmate do one thing very well – integrate easily into your website to provide fast, relevant search results for a variety of content types. When you enter a search term on the main search menu, it returns results for Cities, Locations, Incidents, and Tags. Selecting each of these content types will trigger different actions on the site. (For example, selecting a city name zooms the map to that city, and shows activity, key dates, and photos from that city. Selecting a location takes you to the homepage for that location.)

Activity Streams

There is now a menu on the homepage that will show you the most active locations globally, or for a specific city. It also shows historically important dates (based on activity) both globally and for individual cities. Clicking on a location name will take you to the homepage for that location (more on this below), and clicking on a date will manipulate the timeline to show only incidents from that day. With these 2 new features people will be able to both see new developments at a glance (through new “active locations” appearing in the stream) and get the historical overview of significant days in the course of the movement.

New Scale: Location and City

By default Ushahidi has 2 “scales” for viewing content: the global scale (the default map) and the point-specific scale (a single incident). We’ve added 2 more layers of navigation and organization that fit how people think about Occupy events: the “City” and the “Location”. Selecting a city from the search auto-complete menu will trigger the map to go into “City” view. Here you will see the same layout as the “Global” view, but with activity, key dates, and photos specific to that city (see Oakland or Chicago). If you enter the name of a specific place, intersection, or address (like “Oscar Grant Plaza“) , “5th Avenue and 14th St” or “600 Atlantic Avenue“, you’ll see a homepage for that location, complete with an expanded map view, videos and photos for that location, and an option to submit a report (or “Story” as we call them) directly to that location. After May Day, we’re hoping that people will go back to the homepages for all of the actions, marches, and pickets that happened on that day, and collectively add their media to create the history of that day.

Submitting reports

On the “submit a report” (or “Add a Story”) page we’ve significantly reduced the amount of work needed to get relevant content into the system. Dropping in a link to a Vimeo or Youtube video will trigger the title and description fields to be completed automatically with info from the video itself. It will also drop in an embed code for the video player. This was accomplished with the use of the Video Embed plugin combined with another Sinatra app (this one homegrown) to act as a gateway between Ushahidi and the Youtube / Vimeo API’s.

Search

The search page also uses Soulmate to auto-complete locations that other users have previously entered into the system – when you start entering a location, you’ll be prompted with existing locations that match. We’re hoping that this helps to increase the accuracy and standardization of location info in the system, and prevents users from being discouraged if they don’t have the correct street address info for their story.

Mobile

On the mobile side of things, we’ve extended the activity stream and location homepage features into the mobile theme. If your mobile device is location-aware you can see the most recent events happening near you (sorted by distance from you) as well as a distance-sorted list of all Occupy-related places in your city or town. You can also view incidents through a homepage for each location, and submit reports directly to that location.

We’re hoping that these new features will encourage people to submit more stories during the May Day General Strike to build awareness of events as they happen, as well as provide a streamlined platform to publish and catalog the massive amounts of media that are certain to be generated on that day.

Code for all of these enhancements are available on http://github.com/occupynet/occupymap.

Lend a tech team hand

Unfortunately, due to putting expediency over good coding practice, OccupyMap is currently an incompatible fork of Ushahidi due to many modifications that were done to core files such as the reports controller and “main” controller. Once things settle down after May we’re hoping to “un-fork” our deployment, and move all of our enhancements to plugins or standardized external web services. After that, we’d like to start building out more features to help people discover relevant content and visualize the spreading of trends in the Occupy movement. We can always use more help from LAMP or Ruby developers, Linux admins, and anyone who wants to help us curate and moderate content. Send an email to maps@nycga.net or drop by the nycga-techops IRC chatroom on Freenode.net if you’d like to get involved.

Thanks to Ushahidi for providing such a great product and for the support they’ve given their developer community, and thanks to all who have donated time, money, servers and promotion for the Occupy.net Tools.

See you in the streets on May Day!

…….

On behalf of the Ushahidi team, congratulations and thank you to the whole Occupy.net tech team for the advancements on your OCCUPYMAP. You are changing and inspiring us!

[Guest post by Manu Kabahizi, creator of OurRio20 map. As an entrepreneur, researcher and self-taught technologist, he is a partner and Director of Business Development for AxIS, a mobile and web application firm based in Kigali, Rwanda. ]

Rio+20 is covering has a broad reaching agenda for sustainability and development with themes as far reaching as Urbanization and Food Security to Energy and Green Economy yet there’s very little public participation. The work by “The Future We Want” and other organizations have been very internet focused with organizers of the summit encouraging use of social media. I have dared myself to think beyond myself and the people privileged with internet, and share voice with the majority of the affected humanity through inclusive of the +5.4 billion mobile phones. With few spared moments and lots of self-reflection, Our Rio+20 has captured, filtered and mapped 3,249 messages from hundreds of locations around the world in just three weeks. The messages are mostly tweets and I am setting up an SMS gateway for organizations and individuals to relay text messages to the site.

Ushahidi fits this initiative on many levels. Principally, it’s a technology for the people and this is a people problem. Additionally, it’s a crisis management tool and the state of our planet is in crisis whether you look at it from an environment perspective, or whether you look at it from a human development perspective. Rio+20 is a recognition that the state of our ecosystem is unsustainable, and we need to be crowd-sourced the solutions.

………

How to help Our Rio20 Project

Manu and his team need to scale to support their amazing project.

• Join the team: Can you help them review tweets and add reports to the map? Email Manu directly: manu AT ourrio20 DOT com
• Outreach: This project needs to be amplified. Share with your friends:Sample tweet: “What is the #thefutureyouwant, Add your ideas to the OurRio20 map. “

Thanks Manu and the OurRio20 team. You are inspiring.

(See our previous post about RIO+20)

• Cleaned up database Schema – There have been some redundant fields in some of the tables which this release has addressed. In addition proper documentation of the schema has been done, see more on here.
• Improvements on the installer – This includes the introduction of an admin login email configuration, hiding of admin password once installation is complete and finally few fixes on the .htaccess file.
• Editing in the Dashboard: Added HTML editing and more attributes to the page editor.

While this is mainly a bug release, we sneaked in a few features. This includes functionality like ability to pull geo-data from tweets if it exists and save with the message/tweet.

Early this month, our team traveled to the Redlands and worked very closely with ESRI to look at ways we could work together for the benefit of our communities. Some of the results of the hackathon are included in this release. More will be announced in due course as they are completed.

We added ESRI base layers to increase the default map options for deployers. This is available only for the downloadable version of the Ushahidi platform, we are working on testing and providing the option on Crowdmap.com hosted deployments in several weeks.

(IMAGE: map example with integrated ESRI layer)

IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE

Finally, there were some security vulnerabilities reported which involved Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). In our investigation, we found that the patch had been completed but had not been added to download.ushahidi.com. These changes have been incorporated. Please update your deployments.

IF you elect to not update to the latest download, please update the security patch.

On April 13, 2012, Exploit DB reported two security vulnerabilities with the Ushahidi web application. The two issues discovered were Cross-site Request Forgery and the Cross-site Scripting. In our investigation, we found that the patch had been completed but had not been added to download.ushahidi.com. These changes have been incorporated. Please update your deployments.

Advisory ID: SA-WEB-2012-003
Project: Ushahidi-Web
Version: 2.2.1
Date: 2012-04-13
Security Risk: Critical
Vulnerability: CSRF and XSS
Patch File:(Download)
MD5: c31060c26474060ede11498c16916e23

Fix/Patch:

Patch your installation with the contents of this file (patch_2.2.1.zip).

Instructions:

• Unzip patch_2.2.1
• The files to change are stored in the conventional Kohana folder structure.
• Upload and replace your current files in the folders that correspond to those in the patch.

(Crowdmap has been updated to include the security patch. Features noted above for the Ushahidi platform will be added to Crowdmap at a later date.)

Thank you!

Special shout outs to ESRI, Robert Buckley, Nigel McNie, shpendk, and the Ushahidi developer community for making this release happen. Thank you for your help in testing, bug reports and pull requests.

‘Bijoya’ means ‘Victory’ in Bangla language.  A ushahidi powered crowdmap called Bijoya was launched on the 16th December 2011 to coincide with the Victory Day of Bangladesh to see victory for women and girls in that country  against social evils such as dowry, rape, harassment, fatwa, eve teasing, acid throwing etc. Till now 208 reports had been published covering 476 locations in Bangladesh.

Myself and another Bengali colleague of mine had been working in digital communications in an international human rights organisation to devise innovative and relevant techniques to use technology to uphold and protect human rights. We had been thinking hard and fast on how we can do something for the country where we come from i.e. Bangladesh, as part of our CSR (Citizen Social Responsibility). We considered the booming mobile phone penetration in Bangladesh, the density of population, the male-female ratio and we thought to combine our love and belief in crowdmaps and user generated content to target a key social evil present not only in Bangladesh but almost in every society – violence against women. Thus Bijoya was born from our desktops and the free instance of crowdmap.

We would like the general public of Bangladesh to use easy and affordable technologies available to them (such as SMS) to report any incidents against their sisters, wives, friends, mothers, fellow female citizens. We would like to use Bijoya to identify the most vulnerable locations in the country where incidents against girls and women are on a rise. More importantly we would like authorities concerned to use this map, in conjunction with other established sources of information and evidence, to take preventive measures in order to ensure security and safety of women. Finally we would like NGOs, women’s organisations to use this map in their development work for women and girls.

We are still at a very early stage in terms of letting people know our intentions and aspirations. Many NGOs in Bangladesh do appreciate our effort but are treating us as one of their competitors thinking we are also an NGO and may eat away donations destined for them by foreign donors. Some of them are also wary of upsetting local government authorities by allying with a citizen movement which may expose deteriorating law and order situation in certain areas of the country, thus making the local authorities look responsible. I think it is very early still for organisations, even newspapers to wake up to the fact that ordinary citizens in home and abroad can still initiate and sustain a social network for social good by virtue of simply cognitive surplus, good will and technology – to bring about social change. A form of organisation and structure helps, but may not be necessary.

To roll things out in ground, we would like to have a team of 10 volunteers to start with from every district of Bangladesh. They will become the sensors on behalf of their district to make sure that incidents against women and girls in their district don’t go unnoticed and authorities concerned take measures to punish the culprits and prevent recurrence of similar events. We want to call these people District Bijoyis (District Victors) following closely the model of the SBTF.  Similarly we want to label incident free districts as Bijoyi Districts (Victorious Districts) to instil a sense of achievement in the community that at least their district is free of social evils – it is important to install a peer to peer check on social issues and crowdmaps can play a vital role here.  Finally we want to create Bijoya cells in schools/colleges/universities hoping to make youngsters our early sensors against the social evil of violence against women. We want to inspire young minds to take charge in arranging workshops in their respective institutes, families and neighbourhood so that the message of Bijoya is ingrained in the root.

The experience of the last 4 months had been interesting. Mainly from the interactions in the Facebook page and from a presentation we gave during a Software exposition earlier this year, it seemed that there were more male participants who wanted to get involved with the initiative. A lot of thought provoking observations had been made by well-wishers in relation to usage of technology to report domestic violence. Many women think that by reporting such incidents to a crowdmap, it may aggravate the threat of being a victim of abuse and may put not only herself but also her family members in danger. Many expressed their opinions that women are the main threat against fellow women. Some journalists and local authorities are doubtful about the process of verification and authenticity of the reports being published and treat such efforts as unreliable or as a threat to their own credibility.

To gain more winds behind our back, we have joined hands with similar initiatives in other countries – harassmap in Egypt had been the key inspiration for the Bijoya concept. We also have maps4aid in India, Zanala Bangladesh who has agreed to sponsor our web hosting, an ICT4D company called BIID, a women’s portal called Maya – have all came forward to partner with Bijoya to bring about a combined social change.

I always thought that ‘crisis’ in the context of mapping – can be of two types – God made and man made. We are aware of many crowdmap instances in the context of God-made crisis such as earthquakes, cyclones, floods etc. What we are more interested in is the man-made social crisis which shapes up over a period of time – corruption, gender violence, general crimes etc. I hope Bijoya will set up an example in the context of Bangladesh in that how a crowdsourced initiative with the help of maps can be made sustainable to deal with at least one key social evil – incidents against women.

Offline Online Team - Italy

Ushahidi Mailing list Changes

We are merging mailing lists to have two instead of many:

Community@list.ushahidi.com

Developers@list.ushahidi.com

The biggest change for this is with all the Ushahidi developer groups: Swiftriver, Mobile, designers and more. The main technical developer connection list is now – developers@list.ushahidi.com. This gives all technical community members a chance to learn and engage across the various tools. We hope you will join us. To sign up, go to Send email to developer-subscribe@list.ushahidi.com.

And, we have a new community@list.ushahidi.com mailing list for all things Ushahidi – how to deploy, community topics, best practices, map topics, developer topics (if you wish) and more. This will incorporate academic groups well. We aim to have deployers of all types and organizations to meet and talk. To sign up, go to community-subscribe@list.ushahidi.com.

The legacy mailing lists will be retired on May 4, 2012. We hope you will move to one of two lists.

Upcoming Ushahidi Community Developer Call

A one-hour audio discussion about the latest in Ushahidi development.

When: Monday, April 30 or Tuesday, May 1:

May 1: 00:00 UTC, 01:00 BST (UK), 02:00 CEST, 03:00 EEST, 09:00 Seoul, 12:00 (noon) Wellington
April 30: 20:00 EDT, 17:00 PDT
in other time zones

Topics: Ushahidi, swift, and Crowdmap development, hack days, special focus will be Mobile Development

Duration: One hour.

Where we need some help:

Localization

We’ll be writing more about localization woes later this week. We’d love a hand. Are you a translator? Do you have a technique or process you can share with us? Tips?

Bugs/Features:

We are a small group and feeling the stretch. Our community has listed a large number of bugs and features. Can you help on some of these? How can we make it easier for you to be engaged?
There’s been a great buzz/fixing on the Ushahidi Community Skype Dev chat about WMS, Mapbox and new deployers. Thank you. We’re looking for some Open Layer muscle too.

Are you an Expression Engine junkie? We need some help with our website. Ping hleson At ushahidi dot com if you can contribute.

Feedback loops

We’re working to improve our feedback loops. The base layer of moving to Github Issues and with enhanced Wiki is a start. We’re grappling with how to sync forums and transparent rating feedback. What are your favourites?

Community Projects

The Community Offline/Online project, led by Francesco Ciriaci, participated in the International Space Apps Challenge. Thanks to Francesco, Michelangelo, Riccardo, Charl and Aaron for joining Robbie and I for the event. This project continues. See the project on the wiki and stay tuned for more updates.

For more Ushahidi weekly details, see our wiki.

Heather