Long time, no see: some updates
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.
