Happy Week from Nairobi! We have updates about Uchaguzi and the upcoming Community Developer call. Pause. A room full of creative, dedicated, smart people gather. Their mission: to build a strong offline and online campaign of citizen voices for the upcoming Kenyan elections. Planning is key to any Ushahidi project. We're excited to share this journey with our local and global community. At last night's event, we did a group map perception infographic exercise to get folks connected to the whole country and consider how we need to rethink location and outreach as we prepare for the elections. (Crowdsourced by community and Infographic created by Ihub's Patrick Munyi)

Uchaguzi Mission

Uchaguzi is a partnership; a joint initiative between Ushahidi and SODNET who are building partnerships with civil society, the electoral commission, election observers group, peace networks, youth networks, global digital community through the Standby Task Force, law enforcement agencies, international organizations, diplomatic missions. These partnerships are the strength of the platform.

Three key components:

Crowd: the main focus of Uchaguzi and the source of most of the reports. We want people to send us any information on the election/electoral process that they feel is significant Verification: the process through which Uchaguzi evaluates information and determines how credible it is Response: Getting verified information to organizations and individuals who can intervene positively and monitoring that response to measure its effectiveness. (Erik and the Social Media Outreach team) Our Working Groups and planning are documented on the Uchaguzi wiki page. In the coming weeks, we'll be planning more meetings to prepare strategy and next steps. Stay Tuned! More pictures from the Uchaguzi Community Meetup Thanks Nekesa for taking these! Some articles about the Uchaguzi meetup: Potentash Ihub Overview about the Uchaguzi meet-up Ushahidi's Uchaguzi Launch from Tech,Art,Poetry (blog)

Deployment of the Week

Congratulations the BezDim team from Bulgaria for their Deployment of the Week: Bezdim. This map aims to promote positive use of public space by encouraging non-smoking.

Into the Code

Signal to noise curation with verification components is the SwiftRiver mission. We're testing linking the SwiftRiver and Crowdmap plugin using some easy starter documents. These will be refined and added to the wiki. Have you tried to use the two tools together yet? Need a SwiftRiver invite? Drop us a note in the comments. The Next Ushahidi Developer Meeting is January 22nd. We will be doing a LIVE from Nairobi event connecting the local and global developer communities. Register via Meetup. (We'll be connecting skype and Google Hangout to the event.

From the Community

Women Under Siege Women Under Siege Syria is a project by the Women's Media Center using Crowdmap to track Sexualized Violence. Lauren Wolfe and her team has been working tirelessly to give voice to those in crisis. Recently, this work has been featured in: CNN: Lauren Wolfe tells CNN of the Horrors Documented in Syria The Huffington Post's LiveChat: How We talk about Rape The Atlantic: Are Women Being Targeted in Syria Mapping Corruption? See this work in Spanish (with video) Transparency International collaborated with Ushahidi during Random Hacks of Kindness. They wrote about the anti-corruption hackathon. Harassmap continues to lead in mapping Safety for women (print coverage from CNN) Onward!