Weekly: Monitoring Budgets, Researchers Wanted

Happy week! There are updates for both SMSSync and ios - get your mobile fix! We also are happy to share Crowdmap API updates and another sneak peak at the UI for Ushahidi 3.0. And, we want to recognize some map projects from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Sudan.

Focusing on Maps in Africa

Determining the Deployment of the Week is a often a challenge. While every effort is remarkable, we had a tough community and team vote this week with all of our main choices from the continent of Africa. I'm sharing these so that you can see the examples of civic openness, election monitoring and crisis response. These remain three of the biggest use cases for our software. From the Khartoum Floods in Sudan to Monitoring Budgets in Nigeria to a number of Zimbabwe election maps (Zimbabwe Elections, ZimElections 2013 and VoteWatch263 to name a few). We selected Monitoring Budgets as they are using Ushahidi to track budgets for education in Nigeria. While there have been a few map projects in Nigeria, this is a unique use that could include more open data layers and potential for research analysis.

Research

There are two big research opportunities to mention this week. We would love to collaborate with you to write about Ushahidi's community work. Please check out wiki pages for Research and contact us. Our next research chat will be announced soon. In the meantime, ping heatherleson via skype to be added to our research community chat. 1. ISCRAM:International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Planning for ISCRAM already under way. The theme is Empowering Citizens and Communities through Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. As you can imagine, there have been a few great examples in the past 5 years. One idea would be to write a comparative piece of all the Crisis Response map projects. What do you think? More details on the ISCRAM site. 2. UNISDR : 2015 Global Assessment Report The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) is issuing a Call for Abstracts as part of the development of the 2015 Global Assessment Report (GAR15). More details on Prevention Web.

Into the Code

Crowdmap

We're in the process of documenting the new Crowdmap API, with the hope that developers will be able to build out amazing applications. The Crowdmap API will give you 100% of the functionality that the Crowdmap front end website has access to. The documentation is still a work in progress, but you can always jump in and have a look at what's been done so far.

SMSSync

Henry released alpha versions of SMSSync a few days ago. Some of the changes bundled in this include:

Fix Get response from server

Add G analytics feature

Add ability to send secret key when the task feature is invoked

Add nav drawer

Show the number of items in the list view

Improved speed when loading items into the list view.

We need your help testing this out as we move towards releasing version 2.4. Share your feedback with us via skype, IRC or our github issues page.

ios 3.6 update

Our ios app has a few updates. (Download the ios app): Fixed bug in the date of reports Fixed bug detecting user location

Ushahidi Core

We recently held an internal demo day for Ushahidi v3, and progress on the software: Integration of UI mockups is going on well, and we should be able to share something tangible for you all to play around with in the coming weeks. You can always track progress on the v3 Github page and the wiki.