A non-profit, non-governmental, open-source platform as a source of crisis information on topics from corruption and election manipulation to police brutality and domestic violence. How does that sound?
When our partner, Ushahidi, first contacted ProCoders asking for help, we were as impressed by the idea as you may be now. So, we’ve updated a 5-6-year-old website, migrated it to a newer framework, and redesigned a mobile app almost from scratch so that any user can report an event.
Ushahidi wanted to improve the user experience of their web application for open-source product, which aligned with the organization’s mission – changing the way information flows in the world. They also wanted to give opportunities for beginner developers, which ended up in messy code and a dire need for professional review.
We ended up not only helping with the frontend of the website and building an app but also mentoring and supporting their international team a lot, sharing our unique experience and fresh perspective with Ushahidi’s programmers.
Our developers have vast experience in AngularJS to Angular migration and sophisticated management skills. Finding good AngularJS experts is quite a task as it’s an outdated framework, so migration often seems daunting to businesses. But ProCoders has such specialists!
However, Ushahidi needed someone who would not only be tech-savvy but also would be able to work as a part of a multinational team with specialists scattered from Kenya to Hungary and Spain.
The partner knew ProCoders’ capabilities as they’ve come to us after a reference from another client who’s been successfully implementing tech solutions with our experts.
That’s when Ushahidi’s representatives realized it was a match!
There has been good reception to the app from most internal stakeholders. Management has been highly responsive and hands-on at both the account and project level. Procoders values relationships that last, and they always strive to deliver the expected results.
Ushahidi had a tech team that handled the platform’s backend, so they opted for the Team as a Service model for frontend development.
ProCoders has provided 6 people for the project:
3 Frontend Developers experienced in Angular.js, Angular, and Ionic
1 Quality Assurance expert
1 Project manager
1 UI/UX engineer
Learn About AngularJS Migration! Explore How ProCoders’ Expertise in This Area, Combined with Our Team as a Service Model, Made a Significant Impact on Platforms like Ushahidi.
Information crowdsourcing and reports from anyone and anywhere using email, Twitter, Web, SMS & more.
A map where you can see all posts. Integrated with Open Street Map and Mapbox for street and satellite view support.
CSV export for the ability to move data to third-party analysis tools.
You can view all events or incidents reported by a single organization in all locations.
Location, date, problem category, new/old first, survey, source (email, SMS, etc.), date, etc.
Activity over time and by volume. The data is neatly visualized, convenient to perceive and track.
Multiple user roles and permissions for organizations that register; email and SMS notifications.
The main challenge was team diversity causing communication gaps at first. Thanks to our talented PM, ProCoders was able to solve the riddle with:
Another complex task was the outdated interface and the patchwork-like code. The thing is, many developers with different backgrounds and design visions worked on the project, each bringing their own coding styles.
As a result, the project gradually turned into a combination of code snippets that needed to be homogenized, and that’s exactly what we set out to do,
So, we approached the task with:
Procoders values relationships that last, and they always strive to deliver the expected results.
After ProCoders migrated the site from AngularJS to Angular 14, there has been substantial progress, with an estimated 60-70% difference in the platform’s appearance and functionality, according to our PM Evan.
The Ushahidi mobile app is developed exclusively by ProCoders. It will be a light version of the platform, focusing on essential features to facilitate easy reporting of incidents and account management.
All that in about 1 year! We’re still collaborating and preparing for the app’s launch, so many exciting tasks are underway.
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