Ushahidi Relaunches Website, Secures New Funding

Ory Okolloh made an announcement this morning that Ushahidi has relaunched it’s website and has laid out a bold vision for future growth and integration of existing technologies. On her blog KenyanPundit she has this to say about Usahidi’s new funding, new ideas and plans:

So I’ve tinkered in a lot of activism / tree-hugging / save the world type endeavors in the last few (or more) years most of which have not achieved the notoriety of Mzalendo or Ushahidi…largely because I’ve been unable to clone myself, sometimes inertia, and then there’s that pesky problem of paying the bills. I’m also paradoxically risk averse (hello..I’m a lawyer) so I think the challenge of starting something from scratch rather than jumping on to an existing initiative was something I tried to dodge.
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This is a very long-winded way of saying please check out the relaunched Ushahidi website, learn about the work we will be doing, and read more about the grant funding that we have secured from Humanity United, which has allowed us to build a talented team that will focus on growing Ushahidi

Via the Ushahidi website, they’ve made the following call for developers:

We are in the early stages of developing the Ushahidi Engine as a free and open source platform. The core team is made up of developers from around the world, but especially Africa. The constraints and usage of technology in Africa provide the best testing ground for Ushahidi, and we’ve been extremely happy with the amount of input that has come from this region.

If you would like to take part, we have a complete development environment, where we are working on many features, plug-ins and extensions to the system, some of them listed below:

* Timeline and Map work
* FrontlineSMS integration and extension
* Geocoding Accuracy
* Bayesian Modeling: for use in automatic classification (finding the right category) of reports
* Sahana integration
* Heatmapping: Depending upon the elevation view of the map, heat-mapping (polygons) will be used instead of point data
* News and Incident Clustering: figure out how to cluster both citizen reports and mainstream news reports.
* Charts and Graphs: Beyond mapping and timelines, data should be able to be seen in charts and graphs
* Authentication: Background credibility scores based on past information/reports sent in by individuals. Ability to manually set this in the admin panel.

To join the Ushahidi development team visit them here.