Hacking on Crisis Data: Our Open Source Day experience at GHC 2014

“The Mecca for Women in Tech” – That’s what Linda terms the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing to be. It probably is :). Linda, Chris, Brian and I had the honor of being able to attend this year’s celebration in Phoenix, Arizona.

For the first time this year, Open Source Day decided to host a session committed to helping women grow their skills and interest in using open source technologies at GHC, and we’re glad that Ushahidi was one of the organisations chosen to participate. It provided a unique opportunity for us to not only share the impactful work we do with Ushahidi software, but also helped to strengthen the work Linda and I do to encourage women to take up careers in technology.

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Ushahidi session at the Open Source day #ghc14 #ushahidi #crisisnet

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The code-a-thon was focused mainly on CrisisNET, our global firehose for crisis data. We got the students to understand what opportunities the CrisisNET API presents for them to access data on any global issue/crisis, and helped them think through the kind of data they want to visualize. Some of the major themes 5 groups decided to work on included:-

Syria – Creating a playlist of any online videos around the Syria Crisis

Ebola in West Africa

Sex Trafficking in the United States

Hong Kong Protest

Global weather changes

It was exciting to see the work that was going into building visuals off of REAL crisis data(Jonathon was on standby remotely in Texas, helping us grab data into the CrisisNET pipeline for the students to use). We’re going to keep working with the students over the next couple of weeks to finish up and get their projects open sourced and sharable.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to play around with CrisisNET yet, you can:-

Have a look at some interesting visualisation examples built off of CrisisNET(Ebola and Syria Tracker)

Play around with our API Explorer to get a general feel about how it works

Sign up for an account and API Key, and dig in. Docs available here as well

Also, if you happen to be in Phoenix for the conference, we’d love to hangout, reach out ;)! Have a great week ;)!