We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re just strategizing.
Here’s what’s new:
Our Cairo team is working hard to get this project off the ground.
All of us are volunteering their time, off-the-clock and unaffiliated with our day jobs. We’ve been meeting, planning, emailing, and strategizing. How do we want to be affiliated? Where can we find funding? We’ve been writing and revising budgets and proposals. We’ve been testing the existing technology and figiuring out what we need to develop and customize fresh.
We’ve decided to use the Ushahidi engine as our foundation.
The folks over at Ushahidi are planning a beta release sometime in April. They were kind enough to let us start testing their engine to see how well it would work for our application. Our impressions? Pretty good.
The Ushahidi engine is pretty slick out-of-the-box. One of the big pieces we’ve been struggling with in conceptualizing this project is the lack of geocoding capabilities for neighborhoods, landmarks, and addresses in Egypt. So I was really surprised and excited when I started setting up the Ushahidi engine and it was able to automatically load Egypt’s 100 largest cities as locations for incidents. Wow!
However, around 30% of Egypt’s population lives in Cairo. So if we use the current Ushahidi model (where incidents are mapped according to the city), any harassment report from Cairo will simply be included in one point, turning Cairo into a single large blob of a circle. This really defeats the purpose of mapping where the harassment is happening, as we need resolution down to at least the neighborhood level & preferably lower to make use of the information coming from Cairo.
Hopefully, our friends at NiJeL can help us figure out a good way to deal with this problem.
We are in the running for two more competitions.
We’ve gotten such good feedback from the NetSquared community that we’ve entered the project into two more competitions: the UC Berkeley Human Right Center Mobile Challenge and the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. The project fits the goals of both competitions perfectly. Now, we just need to get out the vote.
Check it out!
HarassMap is one of the 15 finalists that made the cut based on the community vote last week.
Thanks to everyone who voted! We’re looking forward to seeing what the judges think of the proposal. Until then, feel free to give comments, suggestions, or see how you can get involved here or on the HarassMap Project Page.
Also, our friends at NiJeL and Ushahidi have projects in the final 15…
- FloodSMS – Early Detection and Warning of Catastrophic Flooding via SMS
- Ushahidi v2 – Mobile.Crisis.Reporting
Thanks again!
-Justin
For this project, we need one of the following types of cell phones:
LG KU250
Nokia 2626
Nokia 2855
Nokia 3220
Nokia 5070
Nokia 5140i
Nokia 6021
Nokia 6030
Nokia 6070
Nokia 6080
Nokia 6100
Nokia 6101
Nokia 6102, 6102i
Nokia 6103
Nokia 6230, 6230i
Nokia 7360
Nokia 8801
Nokia 9300i
Nokia 9500
SonyEricsson F500
SonyEricsson K600
SonyEricsson K750
SonyEricsson K800i
SonyEricsson K850i
SonyEricsson T610
SonyEricsson W200
Motorola C385
Motorola U6 PEBL
Motorola V220/V235
Motorola V3X
Falcom SAMBA 75 GSM modem
If you have one of these phones that you would be willing to donate, please contact Justin Kiggins (jkiggins@nijel.org).
