5. Musings...
• Maps of developing nations are coming. Be it through
community engagement or other means, with
OSM/H.O.T., Google MapMaker etc...
• This Data can be used to engage citizens and improve
public service delivery and environmental problems
(among many other uses).
• Citizens need to engage with governments - Taarifa
provides an interface to facilitate this communication
and provides another tangible use-case for maps.
6. Problem
“The problem we are trying to solve is that the
technology we design is diff cult for our users to use and
i
access.”
Steven Feldman
7. What Is Taarifa?
"The Taarifa Platform is an open source web
application for information collection, visualization
and interactive mapping. It allows people to collect
and share their own stories using various
mediums such as SMS, Web Forms, Email or
Twitter, placing these reports into a workf ow.
l
Where these reports can be followed up and acted
upon, while engaging citizens and communities."
11. Technology
Currently
• PHP, MySQL, JavaScript - Built on top of Kohana
• Forked from Ushahidi
• LGPL 2.1
Proposed
• Python and JavaScript => Taarifa API
• GeoDjango
12. Features
• Cross platform mobile and web using
HTML5/CSS3/JQuery
• Customisable forms
• Report workf ow
l
• 'Better' UI/UX tweaks
• Easily export data
• Automatic Geolocation
• Form functionality (custom forms, copyable forms etc)
13. Design Decisions
• Transition to HTML5 Web App
• Workf ow and Triage Integration
l
• User Feedback
18. Where?
• Uganda - Ministry of Local Government/ Africa Urban,
World Bank (AFTUW)
• Zimbabwe - Pilot World Bank, Africa Urban (AFTUW)
• Senegal – Planning, Global ICT, World Bank (GICT/SDN)
• Far/Middle East and Eastern Europe (Coming Soon?)
http://www.taarifa.org - We Need A Website!
http://gm.taarifa.org - Current release
http://dev.taarifa.org - Dev with Ugandan dataset
http://ugtaarifa.org - Uganda Harrare Watch
https://github.com/taarifa/ - GitHub Source
19. Problems
• Governments/Organisations need to be willing to
engage with citizens/users.
• Inheriting licences and design decisions from Ushahidi.
• Hackathon and existing code ergonomics.
• Open Layers on a phone, poor UX.
• Cheap phones are cheap. But getting better!
20. Roadmap Future
• Current version as a fully featured prototype.
• Better tech = happy developers = a better product =
more problems solved = happier citizens.
• True off ine functionality within the browser.
l
• Location from SMS (GeoSMS?)
• Leaf et.js
l
• Cloud based SMS integration
• Community engagement (developers and users)
