A slow but interesting week for march-hare development. There was some planning for presentations at the upcoming SF Anarchist Bookfair, and the Bayarea hackmeet, a meeting with Jenka Sodenberg of the IMEMC project, and some random testing of Ushahidi_Android and the Ushahidi fullscreen map plugin.

We will be waiting to hear back if we are presenting that the bookfair, but at the very least will be tabeling there and debuting a beta release of the operator distribution with some of the secure conference call support features. Hackmeet however is gunna be a blast. We will likely be presenting there and there will definitely be a live demo on using some of the more common DDOS tools. The DDOS pres will be recycled from the presentation that I am putting together for Evergreen's SDS chapter in a couple of weeks inspired by the release of How to plan and execute an act of ECD, except we will have some servers that we will be able to run it against.

I had a chance to sit down with Jenka Sodenberg](http://knight.stanford.edu/fellows/2011/soderberg/) of the IMEMC project earlier in the week who was interested in what we were getting into with Ushahidi and Swiftriver as relevant to our previous work with tapatio. She is working on another crowd sourcing solution with a focus on news reporting for a mostly English speaking audience that aggregates news from Palestine called IMEMC. There are some challenging aspects for the project, but maybe a Knight grant will help them out. One interesting aspect that I took away from the conversation was regarding the use of Meedan for crowdsourcing Arabic/English translations. Meedan is a news from the Middle East aggregation site that uses machine translation (licensed from IBM as I remember, likely DOD funded) and then submits the news to translators in the community to fix the machines mistakes. On top of that I think some of the Swiftriver Devs work there. Oh and its totally another ROR shop, but what else what you expect of any Web 2.0 shenanigans coming out of the Bay Area.

Over the next couple of weeks some of us will be taking a look at the mobile apps that talk to an Ushahidi backend. My initial evaluation today leaves me thinking that there is not a lot of added value with the out of the box ushahidi Android app from the perspective of someone on the street. Ushahidi Checkins, which I can't actually find a copy of, just the anouncement, looks like it will be useful for collecting points of interest at mobilizations, but still using twitter, or status.net (aka identica, but I mean really! Come on, no one but FOSS geeks are using it and they are not dumping the $250K/month that twitter is into being a SMS gateway for reporting) as the source for all reports filtered through Swiftriver. An ideal mobile client however might look something like what the folks at Sukey.org put together for the student protests in London. If yall see this please get back to me as we should be collaborating!

And lastly, the Ushahidi fullscreen map plugin is kind of neat as it lets you take just the map out into a full screen (screen shot attached below), which might be nice for convergence spaces on a separate large wall mounted monitor. I was originally thinking this would bea nice way to share a community map during at a convergence space, but using a large touch screen, so that users could move the map around and zoom in on areas just touching the screen. But wow! They are upwards of $50K and I can think of a few things that might be a bit more useful at a mobilization for that kind of money.