Weekly: Iscram update, Art and Gifs

While we are pushing code left, right and center, we've been know to have a few smiles with our own Gif Star. It makes for fun reading on github.

Our team was also drooling a bit this week over the shout out on a favourite podcast, The Frequency. Hope you can support them! Reminder: Have Ushahidi developer chops? Please be sure to let us know if you'd like to do some contract work. We are often contacted by community folks who need a hand. We'd be happy to connect you. Drop me a line with some basic details (Hleson at ushahidi dot com). I have two pending requests on this.

Deployment of the week: Art, Junk and Bikes

Community building means connecting the offline to online. We love the work that Placeworks from San Francisco is doing. Congratulations to our Deployment of the Week. Could you do this in your city? Also, hats off to Trashwag, a previous Deployment of the Week, for ongoing efforts to build their local community network in Toronto: make junk into art! Imagination abounds - Ushahidi is being used for BIKE OPERA!

Upcoming Events

TODAY: Environmental Mapper Hangout featuring the Louisiana Bucket Brigade's project - I Witness Pollution and Wansoo Im on Community Mapping.

The next Ushahidi community developer call is May 20, 2013, Join us (Africa and Europe friendly time zone).

Upgrade day for v2.7 is May 30 and 31, 2013. Join the community and team to lend a hand to upgrading. We'll be sharing more details on this event on Monday.

Community Updates

We love it when our community shines. Ajay Kumar and Svend Jonas Schelhorn have been at ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) this week participating in simulation workshop and being Ushahidi mapstars!

https://twitter.com/ajuonline/status/334680187163791360

Research and Paper reminders

Are you interested in research about open source, commons and open internet. There is still time to share your knowledge at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2013 (due May 24, 2013). or participate in Citizen Lab's Connaught Summer Institute (due June 1, 2013). Keep us posted if you'd like to write about Ushahidi. We'd love to support your research efforts. Thanks to Transparency International for their review on Technology against Corruption.

Into the Code

SwiftRiver With work on the new UI almost done, team swift is working on integration of CrowdmapID into the system for purposes of authentication. Data migration from the old version to the new version should also be done in the coming weeks. Watch out for fresh documentation on the wiki, with code samples on the way ;). Mobile We are all geared up for the release of v3.1.6 of the Android App on May 16, 2013. See the issues tackled in the upcoming release on the github issues page. BRCK It has been an incredible first week, we are truly thankful for all of you that have supported us and helped to spread the word. We are about 66% of the way to our goal with 20 days to go.That’s with 582 backers and $86,555 raised - thank you!! Here is a visual representation of how we envision the BRCK as an onramp for the Internet of Things. You can read more on our recent update on Kickstarter. Ushahidi Core The team has made more strides towards having V3 API work done, including OAuth integration and Sets (to be merged in after review). Our docs are on the wiki and our github repository. Contact us via via the dev mailing list, skype chat or even personal email to dive into the code. Crowdmap Bug squashing is ongoing, so keep sending in your feedback to the team, as it will go a long way in helping make your experience on Crowdmap even better. You can also file bug reports and feature requests on our github issues page. Work on the API is also ongoing, and we're aiming for documentation in the coming weeks. Happy mapping, Heather and Angela.