Weekly: Eye on Amendments,3.0 Dev release and Crowdmap API Wrangling

Deployment of the Week

This week, we recognise the effort of the team at One De Olho Nas Emendas, who are engaging with citizens in Brasilia to track the effect of amendments of the district's budget and highlight cases of corruption.

In the News

World Disaster Report Released

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' 2013 World Disaster Report was released recently. This report focuses on technology and the future of humanitarian action. The full report can be found here.

BRCK and Eclipses

The BRCK team is headed to the Eastern Side of Lake Turkana to stress test the BRCK and live stream an eclipse expected to happen soon. You can track them on this Crowdmap and the BRCK Blog.

Events

Data Ethics Hangout round up

Last week, we continued our series of Google Hangouts on data ethics. You can find Part 1 here. The conversation brought together experts from a wide variety of fields working to use data to create social change. Below is a recording of our chat. We hope you will find the conversation useful to your own work. In the future, we plan on having more Google Hangouts on this and similar topics. Stay tuned!

Crowdmap at MozFest

Evan and I had a great time at MozFest in London this past weekend, getting to meet awesome webmakers from around the globe. Thanks to everyone who came by our Crowdmap API Session, we got some really useful ideas that we hope to hack on in the coming months. Here's a run down of our experience. Added bonus,also got to meet and hang out with our Open News fellow, Aurelia Moser.

Open Government Partnership

Daudi and I are at the Open Government partnership event this weekend. Daudi was part of a panel discussing Public and private partnerships to support open data initiatives, and I'm going to be a part of the U.S. State Department led Tech camp initiative

https://twitter.com/angienicoleod/status/395962522463129600 We'd be happy to connect with any of you attending on the role of tech in Open Governments.

Into the Code

Ushahidi v3

For all of you who've been waiting to get a glimpse of the work that the 3.0 team has been working on for the past few months, we rolled out a developer release of the platform yesterday, as a way to get our community of devs involved in helping us build it out. Grab the code on github, or download it here, then head over to the install instructions. Or just head over to the demo site and have a look. (If you want a quick way to spin up your own demo, try out our one-click deploy and install on Pagodabox). Read about it in our blog announcement. As part of this release, we're hosting a physical meetup in Nairobi on 6th November, 2013 between 5.30p.m and 6.45 p.m. Join us! For all our virtual friends, we're planning on hosting you via G+ and recording the session ;)

Crowdmap

While we were at Mozfest, We built a quick demo app (2-3 hours of dev time) just to give a very basic example of what you might use the Crowdmap API for. In this case, it was a live stream of hashtagged photos from Instagram that were being taken at the Festival, under the MozFest2013 map. We’ve put the code up on GitHub, you just need to update the config file to your API key and pick a map to point it to. We’ve put together a WebMaker tutorial on how you can quickly deploy the demo app on your own web server. Happy Week folks!