Thanks again,
Patrick

I concur that the tool was exciting and remains promising. It is indeed, at this time, better suited to retrospective, or more delayed accounts than real-time or near-real-time information. That doesn’t mean we can’t adapt further it to meet our needs.

Ushahidi has great potential to be quite useful for #ows. It can help keep people safe, and provide useful reports on traffic and police action. To be clear, I’m not advocating action against police, just promoting a greater level of awareness of their actions so that collective decisions are better informed, and our public servants are held accountable for their actions. Simply letting the police force compliance and push people around doesn’t help anyone.

Some of our next challenges, as I see them:

1. Timestamps on reports may not indicate the actual time an event occurred. We need sufficient numbers to crowdsource more accurate results and possibly mechanisms for requesting verification on the ground of events as they unfold. Tweets are assumed to be timestamped accurately, but network or human delay can impact their accuracy.

2. Crowdsourcing is great, but Approved & Verified reports that pull together information gathered from various accounts, along with media, and supporting details can provide another valuable browsing experience as well. Further, a view of only Verified reports, or more granular versions of these could provide more useful data, e.g.: all medical emergencies, or only verified reports of kettling.

2.1 Filtering reports happens via ajax. Callbacks would be useful, so we can quick link to filtered result sets, or provide more contextual views.

2.2 Moderating incoming reports can be a chore, requires a clear policy on verification, and a trained and trusted network of peers.

3. SMS integration can provide instant messages to subscribers under discrete conditions. There are costs involved with SMS, and SMS gateway integration with US providers is somewhat lacking in Ushahidi.

4. Localization of the system on the same code base doesn’t seem baked in. It would be useful to be able to provide default map centering based on users’ geography. For example, washington.map.occupy.net would load a map centered on D.C. and reports would be filtered by default for that region.

I thought one way of resolving this issue would be to introduce an existing timebank which is set up to build community and bring racial equality. I understand Internet and Open Source are very excited about creating new innovative systems. But if existing drupal based timebanks are up and running and could greatly enhance working group accessibility and OWS functioning I would appreciate moving forward. We can always change things in the future when our own internet systems can serve the broader community.

Please let me know if my worries are unwarranted and why. OK?

Thanks,

Jill
413 658 8509

PRODUCT MANAGER PRIORITIZES ISSUES FOR CURRENT SPRINT
(first box at the top of the chart)

Please think of the “Product Manager” as attempting to organize information and make it more accessible to both developers and users of the system. In our current situation you cannot and should not be “ordering” unpaid volunteer developers to do certain things.

The current “Sprint” is a term from Agile project management. At the beginning of a Sprint, the team should reach consensus about priorities and reduce requirements churn by not letting other requests change the focus during the Sprint. The “Pivotal Tracker” tool being used helps to separate “Current” from “Backlog.” See: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/399421 In addition to this, a team should have a meeting to discuss what belongs inside “Current” otherwise anybody with access can be adding to the “Current” list resulting in scope creep or requirements churn. The role of the Product (or Project) manager should be to help keep the team focused on a small set of problems that are possible to address in a short period of time (Sprint). This is a philosophy of getting more done by doing less (at any one time). By producing a “static” document with a date for the current Sprint, a Product Manager could help to make it more obvious as to whether scope creep or requirements churn is taking place.

Finally, this is not intended as a complaint against anybody who is currently working or trying to help. Many are already doing their best to implement the processes described here. My goal is to help communicate these ideas for discussion among the people doing the work so they we can all coordinate more smoothly with each other. I sincerely apologize to anyone who has felt their work criticized by any previous posts I have made. I do believe that if we are to succeed as a movement, that we must be able to discuss process. If feelings are hurt by this, then we must make attempts to reach out on a personal level to insure solidarity. To that end, I think we should consider some regular “social get together” events, where we can meet as people.