Postponing our scheduled v3 beta 9 release, again.

Hey Folks! Last week, we committed to releasing another beta version of v3 today. However, after some internal deliberation, we have come to a decision NOT to make a release this week. We apologise for any inconveniences caused by this, and commit to getting back to our regular release schedules next week, on 30th October, 2014.

How did we end up here?

In early October we did a week of user experience sessions with one of our launch partners and it became clear that we still had a long way to go to bring V3 up to feature parity with V2. Our partner was very confused about a long list of things and we couldn't provide good answers, which was troubling. To address these issues, a product team meeting was called for. This team spent the last week in Atlanta (where our CTO, David Kobia resides) thinking, working, bonding and planning... and taking a hard, honest look at the status of V3. We saw a two distinct paths forward and wanted to select one that gives our users the best product possible in the least amount of time. One option was to continue working as we had, with a UI that had drifted fairly dramatically from the original product specification. The other option was to pivot and focus all our efforts on the new UI, making sure it stayed true to the product specification. If we continued working on the existing UI, we could have the release finished by year end, but the UI would be outdated and replaced a few months later. If we focused all efforts on the new UI, we would have to delay the final release by 3-4 months. Neither option was particularly satisfactory, but ultimately we decided that another delay would cause less confusion for users and allow us to deliver the best possible product, one that would satisfy our goals and offer the best user experience. The decision was reached to spend our time and efforts on finishing the new UI and launch about six months from now. We understand that many of you have been eagerly awaiting V3 of the Ushahidi Platform and we convey our deepest and sincerest apologies for the delay. We've brought on new people recently, are finessing our processes, and are truly committed to delivering the best product possible so that you can do what you do best. We love enabling visionaries, thought leaders, and activists such as yourself. We humbly ask for your patience as we work on the new, better client. We will put up a demo site for testing soon, along with more information about features, timeline, and migration options.

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Although this has been a very difficult decision to make, we firmly believe it is in the best interest of all our users in the long run. As a team, all of us are deeply committed to ensuring this timeline is kept. Thank you for your continued interest and support, and stay tuned for more updates.