Redaktor: Showing solidarity in times of COVID-19

Guest blog post by Sebastian Lasse, photojournalist and lead of Redaktor development. Sebastian is available via ActivityPub as @sl007@mastodon.social or via Twitter as sl007.

Redaktor is an Open Source content management system in the making. It is based on the Open Protocol “ActivityPub” and the world’s leading federated social web standard drives us. redaktor is an inherently social website, building software capable of serving website-building needs of institutions, journalist organisations, citizen journalism and photo/film documentaries.

Different widgets correspond directly to a social vocabulary which can be directly understood by other nodes participating on the federated social web. This allows news, reports and content to flow directly from a site's source to its interested subscribers, supporting community-oriented dissemination of information without needing to rely on centralised intermediaries such as Twitter or Facebook.

This enhances the control of journalist organisations and other institutions over their content, empowering them in their messaging. We want to build the ultimate tool where NGOs, local associations, clubs, pubs, bloggers and everyone who wants to communicate on any topic or group based experiences can craft their stories for the web.

Then Covid-19 turned the world upside down.

We heard Dr Michael J Ryan saying "Speed trumps perfection. > Be fast, have no regrets.". We stopped our own business for a while and set up a hosted Ushahidi instance in minutes. The plan was to immediately give people a tool and to cater for self hosting, explanation and integration in a second step.

I followed the development of ushahidi from the very (public) beginning. The 'colors' of Ushahidi and redaktor overlap probably because we believe in an Open Web as a canvas ready for ideas and unique expression.

To cite Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, FrenaLaCurva Map, (another user of the Ushahidi platform in this covid 19 season),"We were expecting similar initiatives from local governments and councils (the first to announce "apps" or "webs") but when we saw that these platforms were oriented to the self-diagnosis of covid19 symptoms or how to proceed with lock-down measures, we saw the need to go for a full-fledged Map." The same applied for us.

Additionally, we saw commercial companies working on this and the SPAM and Scam mafia sharpening the weapons. We saw the Adidas egoism. For a story on soccerball stitching, the German company refused Sebastian to enter the Pakistan factories. Now they want to refuse to pay the rent if they can't open their shops.

Our key drivers are federation, emancipation, research and truth. Our key is solidarity worldwide.

We are open to any suggestion on how to make redaktor.ushahidi.io the ultimate Covid-19 map. The activities mapped are currently concentrated in the EU. However we hope to spread the word across the oceans and contribute to your creativity in problem solving for this season. Since Ushahidi is also open source and we have now discovered the possibilities, we hope that our developers can give some feedback later, raise a few issues but also contribute. It would be wonderful to add "The Fediverse" (e.g. mastodon) as a datasource.

Ushahidi was very handy when it came to set up because after 5 minutes when we created our first survey, people were able to use the tool. We began by bulk importing known neighbourhoods and moderating entries. Now we could use some support on the explanation page, especially with translation.