Weekly: FoodSync, Tech for emergencies, and Plugins!

Deployment of the week

We applaud the efforts of Foodsync.org, utilizing the power of technology to reduce waste and connect surplus food to the hungry by mapping out food donations from participating vendors and delivery of these donations to organizations in the US.

Tech Tools for Emergencies

The recent terrorist attacks in Nairobi shook all of us to the core. Thankfuly, all members of the Ushahidi Kenya team and their families are safe. The full team met on Monday, to figure out the best way we could use our tools and skills to help out in emergencies, and came up with two ideas.

Ping App and Blood Donation Kenya

We set up a crowdmap deployment to map out all locations of blood drive centers, in an effort to match these areas with those willing to help, dubbed Blood Donation Kenya. We also built "Ping” , which is basically a binary, multichannel check-in tool for groups.It's an easy way for small groups, families and companies to quickly check in with each other. We quickly wireframed out a list of needs, some design basics, and an architecture plan, and got a rough product up and running. The code is on available on Github.

If you’d like to help out with either one of these projects, get in touch with us.

Twitter Alerts!

Whenever news breaks out an emergency, government agencies and emergency responders jump into action on the ground and on Twitter, delivering critical and timely information and engaging with citizens. It becomes a source of important, and reliable information. This was the case in the recent Nairobi attacks.It was through twitter that we knew to stay away from the danger zone, of where to donate blood, of where to volunteer, and received updates on the rescue operations from the Kenyan government. Twitter Alerts, a new feature that helping users get important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren’t accessible, was just launched.

Ushahidi is proud to be one of the initial participating organisations. Read more on the Twitter alerts blog post announcement.

Support for Kenya

One of our community members, Justine Mackinnon, set up a crowdmap to collect messages of support and hope for Kenyans from across the globe. "Many within our tight network of crisismappers and humanitarians around the world were rocked by the cowardly terrorism in Nairobi. It's difficult to feel so powerless when people you know are hurting. In the spirit of fellowship and solidarity, this crowdmap has been created to share comments of support from around the world to the people of Kenya. Please feel free to add any thoughts you'd like to share. #SFK also works through Twitter "

Events

How Useful is a Tweet ? *iHub Research is hosting a cocktail event to discuss “How Useful is a Tweet?: 3Vs Crowdsourcing Framework.” Africa Hack Trip @iHub The Africa Hack Trip team is visiting us in Nairobi, and are holding a barcamp and hackathon on the 26th and 27th of September. https://twitter.com/whiteafrican/status/383173041934848000

Map Kibera Needs your help

Are you a pro at upgrading Ushahidi deployments? Would you be willing to help our good friends from Voice of Kibera(running v2.0b3) upgrade their deployment? Drop me a line: angela AT ushahidi DOT com

Into the Code

The team at SkyTruth just deployed Ushahidi for tracking damages to fracking equipment during the colorado flooding at http://coflood.skytruth.org. As part of that project they also wanted to publish all report photos as a photo-stream on Flickr. So, they built this plugin to do just that. Feel free to take it for a spin and share feedback! Happy Week, folks. Stay safe!