Saying good-bye to Crowdmap.com

The first version of the Ushahidi platform was in response to the Kenyan post-election crisis in 2008. In the subsequent years to follow, we saw more use cases of the platform (beyond crisis response) come up, including environmental mapping, human rights mapping, transparency and accountability, research etc. This meant that we were continuously improving on technical features on the platform to meet the needs of our growing and diverse user base.

In 2012, we began conversations with our users to build a design framework that would serve as a basis for building a more robust and efficient tool, with improved user experience for users across various use cases. This was the start of us building a new version of the platform, famously known as Ushahidi v3. Ushahidi v3+ has been in use since it’s launch in September 2015, to date, and we’ve continued to see extensive use of the platform to do good in the world.

It is now time for us to say goodbye to v2.x, and focus all our attention on v3.x+. We FINALLY have a tool that facilitates migration of our v2.x and classic users to the latest and more stable version of the Ushahidi platform. We’ve been working on this migration tool for over a year, as we owe it to our users to provide a pathway for your continued impactful work.

By January 15th 2021, we will be shutting down Crowdmap.com permanently. As such, we’re strongly advising all our users to migrate their deployments well in advance.

Why now?

Following the launch of this new version of the platform in 2015, the Ushahidi team stopped active maintenance of Ushahidi v2.x and its hosted product, Crowdmap classic due to limited resources.

Ushahidi is a non profit tech organisation, who’s major source of revenue is grant funding and donations. One of our major cost centers is hosting. Given the current global landscape, we are no longer able to support hosting for Crowdmap classic. As such. We will be migrating off of the current hosting provider by January 15th 2021. After this date, you will not be able to access your deployment or data.

What’s different?

Benefits

Our primary goals when building v3 were to make the platform:

more effective at responding to events and managing data

a more stable piece of software, and

easier to use.

To accomplish this we’ve:

Added steps into posts. Users can assign a workflow to incoming reports, which makes it easier to understand exactly what stage a report is in, if it needs response and when.

Simplified our user interface. We’ve reduced 30 flows into four simple menus. We’ve made the user interface more intuitive for the user by having only one admin menu, merging the backend and front-end and with user-permissions to manage access.

Expanded visualizations beyond maps to a timeline and a bar chart, with more visualizations coming soon.

Enhanced data management with Saved Searches and Collections. Once you have all the data in the platform, you can create dynamic filters by conducting a search and saving the parameters, and then coming back to see new reports that fit those parameters. This allows you to run multiple dynamic filters on a flow of data that will continue updating.

Limitations

While there’s plenty of new features and improve user experience on v3, it’s important to note that some features you’ve enjoyed in v2 are not available on v3 as of yet. Some of these include (but are not limited to):-

Displaying RSS feeds, which was discontinued in one of the earlier releases of v3.

Commenting to posts. There is still a possibility that it will be re-introduced in the future. In that case, there may be support to automatically import the comments from v2, as part of the feature enablement process.

Some missing data types like Media Links with rich preview won't be available yet, but the data should be migrated/available for when we do have it.

V2 plugins will not work with V3+, it's a big endeavour to bring back support for them, as there is no similar system to support them.

For a more detailed view of the differences between Ushahidi v2 and v3, please see this comprehensive migration information guide.

How do I migrate?

We have developed a procedure to migrate data from Ushahidi Platform v2 deployments to deployments running the latest versions: v3 and greater. The first prototype is ready and we are hoping to gather the information that will help us understand the strengths and limitations of the prototype for real-users, as well as gauge the general demand and level of interest on the project.

We’re starting by offering to migrate the first 10 or so v2 deployments that request to be migrated.

Here’s the process for Crowdmap.com:-

Step 1: Fill in our migration request form, and someone from the the team will be in touch

Step 2: We’ll confirm your hosting details. All we need is authorization to migrate you.

Step 3: We get in touch to confirm when the process is starting or if we have any questions.

Step 4: Once everything is clear, we go ahead and do a test migration

Step 5: We send you a demo. If you have any questions, you can contact our support team who will be happy to help.

Step 6: If all is good, we plan and schedule a full migration.

Self-hosted deployers moving to ushahidi.io. If you’re running a self hosted instance, and want to move to a hosted instance on https://ushahidi.io, please follow the same steps as described for Crowdmap.com users. Once you are in touch, we’ll reach out to ask a few questions, and we'll ask for a database dump to get your v2 data into ushahidi.io. Keep in mind that self-hosted deployments will take lower priority than Crowdmap.com and as such may require longer wait times.

Self-hosted deployers moving to v3+ (self-hosted): If you wish to migrate and self host your instance, you’ll use the migration tool yourself and reach out to us for technical support via our community channels.

We are committed to making this a smooth transition for all our v2.x/Crowdmap classic users, and will continue to work closely with you to migrate your deployments.

As always, feel free to reach out to us in case you have any questions regarding this.