Weekly: Citizen Action in Philippines, OSCON / Portland Meetup

From Citizen Action in the Philippines to Data experiments to Translation help and Open Source Events, we've got an action mapped weekly.

Deployment of the Week

Citizen Action in the Philippines are the Deployment of the Week. CANA is all about building citizen action: More Deployments of the Week. Also see this work about Mapping Gender Violence in Cambodia.

OSCON and Portland

Angela and I will be Portland next week for the Community Leadership Summit, a casual Portland Hangout and OSCON. I'm in a session all about Becoming a Digital Humanitarian. If you are at OSCON, please be sure to tweet @ushahidi and connect. Rumour has it we will be sharing stickers.

It's all Chiac to me

Chiac (pronouced "Shek") is a Canadian Acadian dialect of French. While we are not sure that Ushahidi needs to be translated into this localization, we're looking for some guidance on translation and localization priorities. Our friends at Translators without Borders can help with some. I made a quick list on the wiki. For example, can you help with Hindi, Chinese or Spanish translations?

Voice of Kibera needs your help

Are you based in .ke or able to help online? Voice of Kibera is running an old and custom version of Ushahidi. We want to upgrade to the latest release. I'm not sure if the best strategy: apply migrations to the current database, install the new code, and piece by piece apply the changes (mostly to the theme, but requires a bit of code patches); or to export from the database, import into a fresh install, and then rebuild the theme. Bonus points - help with SMSSync too. Contact Map Kibera

Data Science Progress Update

The Data Science for Social Good Fellows need a hand with datasets and testers. Get involved in the DSSG Experiment and see their progress:

Data Science for Social Good and Ushahidi from Ushahidi

We love meeting Community folks

Got to meet an upcoming member of the Ushahidi Developer community in Nairobi this morning, Samir Shah.

Into the Code

Ushahidi Core

We’ve curated a list of github issues on Ushahidi v2.x, according to priority, that we would like to work on as we move towards version 2.8 of the platform. We've put this list up on the wiki for all to review, and welcome any help to make this list shorter by sending in pull requests. If there's any issue that you may feel has been left out of this list, feel free to edit and add it in here. There’s an ongoing discussion on the mailing list on how to handle categorization on Ushahidi v3. Some of the key discussion points include:

Do categories need a multilevel hierarchy?

Do categories need multiple select?

How do we handle migration from version 2.x to version 3.0?

Have a look at the progression of this discussion and how the 3.0 team plans on handling this and feel free to chime in.

Mobile

Henry is working on the new version of SMSSync, expected to be released soon. Some of the features to expect include: -

Ability to whitelist and blacklist phone numbers

A few UI improvements

Crowdmap

We’ve received numerous reports of an intermittent bug that throws a 500 error on crowdmap. We apologize for any inconveniences caused by this, and are looking into fixing it as soon as we can. If any of you could provide any information on how to reproduce this error, send them in to support@crowdmap.com. Greatly appreciated!

Uchaguzi hangout

In closing, we may need to call this "Best Practices" week. It is invaluable to think about your plan before starting an Ushahidi map project. We discussed the findings of the Uchaguzi Monitoring and Evaluation report in this video. It is our hope that you can learn from us. Also see the slides with the high level findings. Want more news? Check out our July 2013 Community newsletter.