Happy Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) weekend! RHOK's mission is to create a self-sustaining global community of innovators building practical open technology for a better world, and to ensure their work creates impact in society.
RHOK Bangalore (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Vancouver (Canada) will each be featuring Ushahidi Hacks. The types of projects range from Violence against women, Safety and corruption tracking. We're delighted to have a number of Ushahidians very active in the RHOK community. And, to welcome others to kick the Ushahidi tires and give our software a spin.
RHOK Nairobi (Kenya) is partnering with Transparency International. Daudi Were, Ushahidi Program Manager for Africa will guide the team for project assessment highlighting Ushahidi's toolboxes to help deployers plan. Seth Kigan, Dunstan Machoka, and Accadius Ben will be guest hacking as our local community leaders. (Thanks guys!)
Transparency Hacks - Summary of the Problem Statements (PDF) Also see the Transparency International Kenya website.
RHOK Bangalore (India), supported by Ushahidi community leader Shemeer P. of Maps4Aid.com and Praveen Selvasekaran, will work on an Ushahidi install for Amnesty International. They've been tinkering away in our Ushahidi developer Chat getting ready for the big day to start in a few hours from now.
RHOK Vancouver (Canada) will be collaborating with Harassmap Team to test the following project:
Use the main Ushahidi map, but then have layers of indicated safe zones. They may potentially add badges for community helpers. Some of the code they might play with includes layers. The Full Harassmap Challenge is listed on the RHOK site.
Have a great event!
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Internews released their online guide SpeakSafe: Media Workers’ Toolkit for Safer Online and Mobile. The guide provides journalists, citizen reporters, bloggers and media workers with a series of simple yet effective practices to maintain control over their information and communications. Also, see our list best practices and security tips on the wiki.
There's been some great articles this week:
The people of Syria and those community mappers are on our minds this week. Patrick Meier posted a piece about USAID using Syriatracker. The comments include an interesting discussion.
Emmanuel Kala presented in Madrid about Ushahidi.(article in Spanish)
Ushahidi is being used for Crowdmapping Water Contamination in Peruvian Indigenous Communities (Article by Susannah Villa of Engine Room on Global Voices)
Jennifer Chan of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative wrote a piece about How to make Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief Work Better (focusing on the Hurricane Sandy response and various mapping projects)
In Uganda, WOUGNET is Mapping Social Accountability issues using Ushahidi platform
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From the community
Congratulations to our Deployment of the Week: ICT in Conflict & Disaster Response and Peacebuilding: Who is who in ICT for conflict & disaster response and peacebuilding applications. This project is over a year old and even has incorporated an annual survey to ask their users for feedback! They've tracked groups ranging from Access Now to YaLa Young Leaders.