Taarifa: The Organisation

On Friday 14th of September at approximately 1952 the Taarifa organisation was started using OneClickOrg. Our constitution is here: taarifa.oneclickorgs.com. Our aim is to support the development and use of the Taarifa platform. We’ve had deployments in Africa (Uganda and Zimbabwe) and in the UK, however we need to grow to support the usage of Taarifa worldwide. Our Knight Foundation application was one part of this strategy. Our software platform is growing, aided by the Taarifa community. Herein lies the power of the Taarifa project.

A Taarifa organisation serves not just for its coders, hackers and members which develop its tools but should serve those which use and deploy them. From this we now need to consider good documentation and support in addition to good code. In doing so working on new funding avenues, which can sustain Taarifa deployments will be key. These may be in the form of grants but could be in the form of  managed deployments, or other funding models.

Are you interested in getting involved in Taarifa? Join the mailing list and say hi, we’d love for you to get in touch!

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Southampton Hackathon: Djangorifa

The Southampton Art House proved an apt venue for hacking on our return to Southampton. Building on the work at the previous hackathon we had a new toy to play with: Djangorifa – The new python version of the Taarifa platform. It’s currently in its very earliest stages of development, but where we’re going is clear, rebuilding from the ground up. The interface focuses purely on the data and reporting on it. If you’re interested in helping us develop it further, join us and check out our github for instructions to get started!

While hackathons on the Taarifa platform are a very good thing indeed, giving a view into how we develop our tools is as important as the hacking itself. With this shedding light on the problem statements, then design process, finally with incorporating lessons learned from deployments is important, and now fully incorporated in how we do things. Part of this is through videos and audio as well as code. Development in this area will get progressively more important as we grow. Our Knight Foundation grant has been submitted but more on this in a later post.