Think About Your Audience

My Outreachy Organisation USHAHIDI is: Ushahidi, which translates to “testimony” in Swahili, was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Since then, thousands have used our crowdsourcing tools to raise their voice. We’re a technology leader in Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, with a global team. This is a link to the Organization’s website https://www.ushahidi.com/about .

The people found in my community are developers of every sort; Web,Mobile, Web designers.e.t.c

It is solving the problem of a social enterprise that provides software and services to numerous sectors and civil society to help improve the bottom-up flow of information.

My project this Outreachy session of May to August 2019 is “Voice integration into the USHAHIDI platform”.It was introduced to serve as an additional means of collecting data from users of the Ushahidi platform. It to serve as a useful tool to users of the platform who may not be very literate to use the other sources such as SMS,Email e.t.c But can just voice out their need and it is processed without any prior knowledge or experience with such technology.

The project came about when Ushahidi users from Puerto Rico were having trouble using their deployment they told Ushahidi that it will be good to have a means where they could just talk and the message has been sent without any additional work.

Ushahidi being an Organization that takes its users opinion seriously gave it thought and agreed to give a chance to none literate people bringing them a means of voicing out their needs without a manual or guidance from a bot.

The thought of working on this project was very exciting to me. While applying for the project I was already imagining the end result how the application would look like on the platform with the other data sources serving the communities in need and satisfying the users.

Working on the project is very exciting to me. The breakdown of the project has shown me technologies that will be used in the project, for example, the application we will use the Google speech-to-text conversion API.It will be integrated into the microservice as well as the Twilio API in order for the users to see the output of their speech and then edit it if need may be. In addition to that, the project is a PHP project built with the Laravel/Lumen, therefore, I have to learn and be versed with the technologies and so far sharpening my skills have been very interesting and exciting I am learning new aspects of the framework and I am gaining more skill and knowledge.

In Lumen, I have had to learn how to perform Routing and controllers in a Lumen application. I have tested the Routes and the controllers I have created using a tool called POSTMAN  Postman is the only complete API development environment. Using POSTMAN was not very easy but with the help of my mentor I have been able to get a hold of it and I am successfully testing my Routes and their controllers.

In conclusion the project is a very interesting and exciting one.It will be a great addition and useful to the Ushahidi platform. Working on it serves as a big addition to my skill and enhance my career