In this week's Community report we feature Crisismapping, upcoming code testing, help the NYC Office of Emergency Management and some DC events:
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Congratulations to the Hackney Crowdmap team (HCAB) team for being featured in the Putting Problems on the Map (report). The report covers a number of Ushahidi and other mapping projects.
Crisismapping and Deployment of the Week
Crisismapping is full on my mind: from the people to the challenges to the technology. It is a week until the International Conference of CrisisMappers to be held in Washington, DC. The event is mostly sold out, however, there is still room to participate in the free Random Hacks of Kindness @ ICCM. We often focus on the technology, being a software company, but the people and what they are trying to accomplish is far more important. I am honoured to cite the hard working Lauren Wolfe and the Women's Media Center project team for Women Under Siege Syria as our Deployment of the Week. The Women's Media Center's Project "Women Under Siege" has been building their efforts for months. Lauren Wolfe wrote previously on our blog about their work. She was recently interviewed with the CBC radio program: The Current "The High Price of the Syrian Conflict on Women" about their map project and crisismapping. (24 minutes). There is some great detail about their verification process and challenges in documenting the experiences.
See more Deployments of the Week
Election Reporting in the US
Huffington Post has a new project which needs a First Hand. If you are a US citizen, can you share your story and help amplify this project? The more that citizens are engaged in their country and city, the better chance we all have of being heard. Rob and Nat will post more about this project in the coming days.Sample tweet to share: " Map your story leading up to the US election with #Firsthand http://huff.to/O0mcGu cc @HuffPoPol ""@ariannahuff: Map your story: introducing #Firsthand huff.to/O0mcGu" get out there folks and tell your story!
— Nathaniel Manning (@natpmanning) October 3, 2012
Into the Code
Coming soon: new code to test
It is almost time to kick the code tires and test our next Ushahidi Platform Code Release. Community testing for the next Ushahidi release will be between October 8 - 14th, 2012. A test deployment site and test tracking document will be loaded with new code on that date. We'll post announcements via our communication channels (Contact Us). The Code Release has an event page: Community Testing 2.6.Help NYC citizens connect to the NYC Office of Emergency Management
In NYC? The Severe Weather Crowdmapping Challenge is looking for helpers (developers and the like) for this Application for Good. CodeforChange hackers are supporting the NYC Office of Emergency Management with some of their more advanced Crowdmap needs such as reporting, filtering and info management. They would like to be able to easily overlay Crowdmap/Ushahidi data on their systems as well as have a good mechanism for something similar to "ticketing". The project is underway and culminates next Friday, October 12th at the final event. Essentially an elongated hackathon. Contact @DisasterNet for more details.Layers expert?
Robbie posted this on the Dev list, but it is worth another mention: "WMS support has been a requested feature for a while, and a few people have hacked various ways to get it in. I improved the mapping helper a while back to make it easier for plugins to add WMS base layers. However I'm keen to get support for overlays into core and maybe make adding baselayers even easier. Who else has worked on WMS layers? Has anyone got examples of working WMS overlays? Has anyone checked the WMS baselayer support works? Robert Buckley did suggest something wasn't quite right, and my GIS knowledge isn't good enough to be sure I didn't mess something up. Any help/experience anyone can share here would be great." Code examples: https://github.com/kigen/Ushahidi-plugin-wms https://github.com/rjmackay/Ushahidi-plugin-metacartaResearch:
Congratulations to the Hackney Crowdmap team (HCAB) team for being featured in the Putting Problems on the Map (report). The report covers a number of Ushahidi and other mapping projects.