The Ushahidi platform’s growing use has been astounding to say the least. The platform has been download almost 4,000 times. On top of that, our mobile applications (including the Android Oil Spill reporter by Henry Addo) have been downloaded more than 3,700 times.
As an organization that is barely two years old, it is encouraging to see adoption of the platform in various countries and for diverse uses. Be it election monitoring in Burundi, Snowmaggedon in D.C., or preventing forest forest fires in Italy, it is very encouraging to the development team to see people around the world using the platform to solve local problems. That is the beauty of open source software — it allows for greater customization and localization.
Wide Range of Deployments
One of the early adopters of the Ushahidi technology was Oscar Salazar and the team behind Cuidesmos el Voto; they translated the platform into Spanish. This was huge for Ushahidi and for Latin America. Since then we have seen many deployments by organizations like Elecciones Transparentes in Colombia, Eleitor 2010 in Brazil and the Chile Map that utilizes the Spanish language files that Salazar and his team helped translate. (Eleitor 2010 translated the platform into Portuguese).
On mobile phones, Pablo Destefanis and his team translated and customized the Ushahidi Windows Mobile app created by Dale Zak to map crime in El Salvador. This is amazing: An app created by a Canadian software developer is associated with a platform that originated in Kenya and is being used in El Salvador.
Multiple Translations for Download
While all of this was happening, there was also a partial translation of the platform into Swahili. We realized that the projects in Kenya really needed a Swahili version of the platform to encourage participation and outreach whenever an organization used the platform. We reached out to the developers in Kenya who could help, and Ahmed Maawy stepped up to the plate.
The language files will be checked into Github and made available in the next version of Ushahidi. Thank you very much Ahmed for translating this — it will be a great help to organizations deploying the platform in East Africa.
Ahmed is the gentleman in the middle. Picture was taken at a recent Developer Meetup in Nairobi’s ihub.
If you would like to download the Swahili language files directly, go ahead and click on this link: i18n_swa.zip. We also have the Polish, Russian and Chinese translations available for those who are interested.
Thank you to Kuba of Shipyard and Jakub Górnicki for the Polish translation, to Altynbek Ismailov of SaveKG in Kyrgyzstan and Gregory Asmolov at the Berkman Center at Harvard for the Russian version of the platform.
If you would like to help translate Ushahidi into your language, please email us at translation[at]Ushahidi dot-com. Meanwhile, watch out for the next version of Ushahidi, which will have some cool new features and the expanded plugin architecture.