Weekly: Urban Planning, Disaster Preparedness and Ushahidi at OSCON !

From increasing transparency of urban planning projects in Prague, to creating awareness on disaster preparedness in Indonesia and Geeking out at OSCON(among others), here's your weekly fix of all things Ushahidi and community.

Deployment of the week

This week, we recognise two amazing projects as deployments of the week. MediaCenter creates awareness about distasters in indonesia, in an effort to create awareness of how to prepare people for natural disasters to come.

Prague Watch creates awareness on Prague’s controversial cases of urban planning, big development projects, parks and allotments under threat and alleged cases of corruption and clientelism.  Congratulations to these two amazing projects!

LA Bucket Brigade needs your help

LA Bucket Brigade folks need support on their work for clean air and healthy communities in Louisiana. Make your pledge to their cause here.

Research

Maria Grabowski Kjær recently handed in her Masters thesis on Social Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, dubbed "Hopeful Action - an Anthropological Take on Ushahidi, Digital Activism and Hope". Her thesis explored how deployers use Ushahidi to organize and communicate, with interest in how the online and offline 'feed' into each other.

We are live on Social coding 4 good!

Ushahidi has begun a partnership with Social Coding 4 Good to build our developer community. Social Coding 4 Good aims to build awareness of Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS), connect software professionals to established, non profit communities, bridge communities for good, open source, corporate, nonprofit, academic and more. See the Ushahidi Project page on the Social Coding 4 Good website. Heather and I will be sharing more on this in the coming months.

Into the Code

Here's a post by the design team on some of the work they've put into Ushahidi v3 so far.

Evan also posted a little insight into the Crowdmap infrastructure, have a look!

Ushahidi @OSCON

Heather and I were at the Community Leadership Summit, prior to OSCON, in Portland, Oregon, this last week. The community leadership summit is an unconference focused on community management and leadership. There was lots of sharing on best practices in the open source community and how to keep our communities engaged from our open source "big brothers" :). Notes from the entire event can be found here. OSCON was an equally phenomenal event, with 6 days of geeking out and learning.

Heather ran a Birds of a feather (BOF) session to introduce attendees to the concept of HFOSS. She was also part of an all female panel on Becoming a Digital Humanitarian, including Kate Chapman from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, Sara Farmer from Change Assembly, Lindsay Oliver from Geeks without bounds, Thea Aldrich from SecondMuse and Pat Tressel from the Sahana Software Foundation. Have a look at Heather's presentation on slideshare.

Needless to say, OSCON was amazing. We're going to be taking all we learned this past week and strategise on ways to make the Ushahidi community even more vibrant and engaged. Heather and I will be posting on this in the coming months, so stay tuned. A big and heartful thank you goes out to the Github Team for granting me a scholarship to attend OSCON.

Angela with the github team and other Github Scholarship winners
Courtesy: Tim Berglund