Weekly: Mapping Syria, Data Help wanted, and 3.0 peak

Angela Oduor Lungati
Jul 10, 2013

Happy Week! We've got three great community meetups coming including Mapping Syria Discussion. Our Deployment of the Week seeks to eliminate waste and increasing sharing. Also, we've got a sneak peak at 3.0. On a more personal note, one of our Ushahidi community members from Malyasia uses maps and videos to give voice. His rights are under distress. We support him and his team through this difficult time.

Deployment of the Week

Food and access to food is a right. We recognize Food Sync as Deployment of the Week. Their mission:

"We believe in using existing resources coupled with the power of technology to systematically reduce the problems of waste and hunger in our community."

Food Sync

Upcoming Events

We have three upcoming events next week. Join us for chats about conflict mapping, research on election monitoring and a casual Portland hangout. Mapping Syria (July 16) This one hour session will feature the work of Syria Tracker, Women Under Siege Syria and Syria Deeply. To join, register on G+. Uchaguzi Monitoring and Evaluation (July 15) Last week iHub Research released their Uchaguzi Monitoring and Evaluation Report. Join us for a G+ discussion about the findings. Mapping Friends Pub (July 19) We're in Portland for the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON. Join us in person for a casual Portland meetup with Maps, Hacks and Data Friends. OSCON (July 24) The Ushahidi team will be OSCON sharing our story as part of a session on Become a Digital Humanitarian: Open Data and Open Source for Good . We'll try to record the session for you.

Data Help Wanted

Tate Words (Photo by Heather @ Tate Modern) We're braining on both data expeditions or software ways to help you clean up data to share it. The Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellows (at the University of Chicago) are spending the summer digging into this topic. Can you lend them a hand? 1) The team has a tight timeline (until late August), with the goal in this program is to make something immediately practical. Their ambition is to create a useful toolkit/library for Ushahidi rather than a paper or presentation. The code will be open-sourced and will hopely be beneficial beyond this immediate project. They seek some feedback on the tools from this community before the summer is out. Would anyone like to be involved in this hands-on feedback process, in late July and early August? (No technical skills necessary.) 2) Do you have data from your own Ushahidi instance that you'd be willing to share? The team will use this data to train our machine learning algorithms? So far, they have about 20 datasets, in various languages and from various events (election, natural disaster, etc). However, more data will help them improve the machine learning algorithms, so the tools are the best they can be. A CSV dump of reports would be useful, but an SQL dump of the deployment would be ideal since they are interested in making suggestions based on the original messages (SMS, emails, and tweets) before they have been labeled. Please do let us know if you can share your datasets with us. To reach the team - http://dssg.io/ Twitter @datascifellows

Into the Code

Mobile

Henry just pushed out an update for the Android app. Have a look and feel free to share feedback.

Ushahidi 2.x

Since our last release of the current version of Ushahidi platform, there are some bugs and feature requests pending fixes. The next release for 2.x will be in late summer/early fall. We could use some help with the following Github patches. Here's a list of some of the bugs we think you can tackle:

Zoom level limits

Site tagline runs under "Submit a Report" button

Actions triggered on 'Report Added' don't catch all reports

Bing maps initialises to wrong zoom level

Log timestamp issue

We always welcome help, send pull requests: other issues on the list that you feel you would like to fix, and we'll be happy to merge in your changes!  Ushahidi 3.0 Team is working on wiring up the UI into the application in preparation of releasing a minimum viable product by the end of this month. Here's a sneak peak (Note: it is being hacked daily by the team) Viewing reports in 3.0