NetChange Week Hears About CrisisCamps

Brian — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:36:50 +0000

I was fortunate to inherit some tickets to a Net Change Week panel called “The Future of Web and the World” at the MaRS building. During the presentation, featuring Dr. Gerri Sinclair, Dr. Lucy Bernholz, and John Thackara, there was much discussion of Crisis Camps (mainly due to Dr. Bernholz). If you’re familiar with Left Button Solutions, you know that we’ve been involved as participants in CrisisCamp Toronto, and also as a sponsor, supplying coffee, snacks, and blog hosting.

Following the panel discussion, I was able to offer a plug for the Toronto group, and invited people to talk to me about the program, and how it works. I handed out a few business cards, all of which point here, so I wanted to list some of the resources people might want to check out for further information regarding Crisis Camps, and Crisis Commons.

CrisisCamp Toronto – our blog can be found here.
CrisisCommons (the organizing body) lives at CrisisCommons.org
CrisisCommons Wiki is where all the project, camp, and organizing information lives.
There are also Google Groups for CrisisCommons and CrisisCampTO but all major happenings will be blogged or tweeted.
Speaking of Twitter, you should follow: @CrisisCommons, @CrisisCampTO, @HeatherLeson, and @leftbutton

As stated in at the panel discussion, the next big thing for CrisisCommons is an upcoming international congress, happening in Washington DC in July. There, the group will develop some governance, some policy, and some direction to help refine the global effort that has mobilized more than 2,000 volunteers in more than 25 different cities.

Again, thank you all for indulding the shameless plug… feel free to contact me if you have any questions

Thank you from Crisis Commons!

Heather — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:59:43 +0000

Dear Crisis Camp volunteers and supporters:

Thank you!

We want to thank you for all your volunteer efforts at CrisisCamp.

Crisis Commons grew from 150 people at the first CrisisCamp in June 2009 to 340 people during the first weekend after the Haiti earthquake to now over 2000 volunteers in 7 countries by the end of February 2010. We’ve built tools, helped find missing people, helped get aid to the right places and connected people in danger to the people who could help them. We’ve done all this in less than 4 months, and it’s all thanks to you wonderful volunteers.

And this is what you’ve achieved so far:

Volunteered through our social networks
Responded to disasters in Haiti, Chile and China
CrisisCamps in Europe, North America, South America and Australasia
Tweak the Tweet, We have We need, Open Street Map, Inveneo Wireless Network and dozens of other projects that made a difference to people in need
Partnerships with Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, the World Bank, the UN and dozens of other relief organisations

But it’s not over yet. CrisisCommons still has a lot of work to do: sadly there will always be crises, and we need to help where we can when we can, and prepare for the next Haiti before it happens.

You can help by:

Helping our Oil Spill Response Mobile App
Attending one of the camps – they’re still happening.
Joining the VirtualCrisisCamp – you can help from home!
Helping us to build Crisis Commons through our wiki, blog and google groups (including our Working Groups)
Filling in this survey

We, in return, promise to support you and to keep in touch. We’ll be sending out regular newsletters, mid-July 2010 we are holding a Crisis Commons Congress – we’d love to see you there!

Thanks again and we promise to keep in touch,

Crisis Commons Team

Crisis Commons Pub Night/National Volunteer Week

Heather — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:28:17 +0000

Volunteering we were so focused that we didn’t get a chance to truly have conversations and get to know one another. Each of us is drawn to volunteering for different reasons. This is a chance to informally talk about all the events of the past months and about what is happening next for Crisis Commons. We’d love to chat and get your input on how to build going forward. Guests and new volunteers are very welcome.

Crisis Commons Pub Night
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
7pm – 10pm
Mick E Fynn’s
45 Carlton Street

If you can’t join us, we post regularly on our google group.

It is National Volunteer Week

We grew to 2000 volunteers in 7 countries in less than 4 months. Without your individual and collective efforts we would not continue to evolve. The UK group created this amazing map to show how much we’ve grown. The next Crisis Camp is in Paris this weekend.

We were so fortunate to have you volunteer for us. While I can’t buy you rounds, I certainly would love your company and thoughts.

Hope you can join us,

Heather

Social Media Crash Course for CrisisCamp Volunteers

Brian — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:46:17 +0000

While CrisisCommons is trying to get organized on a global basis, I decided to build something that would help CrisisCamp volunteers on a local level. Because not everybody is savvy on social media, blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., I built some pretty basic tutorials on how to use some of these tools, specifically as it relates to CrisisCamp functions. Anybody who is already a blogger, Tweeter, or wiki contributor won’t likely find these terribly helpful… they’re aimed specifically at those who haven’t really taken the social media leap yet… But if you are planning on volunteering at a CrisisCamp in the near future, watching these two videos might be a good place to start!

Part 1 – Blogs and Wikis

Part 2 – Twitter and RSS

Hope these help, guys!

What next? Building Crisis Commons, Helping Partners

Heather — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:11:05 +0000

Can you believe it is spring? It really is a time of renewal and change. What next for Crisis Commons and all other Volunteer Technical Communities? Well, there have been meetings, presentations at big technical conferences, brainstorming and development.

Crisis Commons Founders Weekend

Imagine a room full of passionate engaged technologists, programmers, web designers, infrastructure planners, project managers, government employees, open source advocates, city coordinators, volunteers and more. On the first day, we talked about our experiences, pluses and minuses, and built out a list of our top issues that we encountered. The second day we discussed how to build ourselves. Heather Blanchard has been tasked with building out a Strategic Framework and plan for Crisis Commons. This includes an after action report.

As a group, we determined that we need to work on 5 main working groups:

Projects/ SDLC
Governance
Infrastructure
Community
Communications
Legal (may be part of governance)

We could use your help on these topics. Since you volunteered or found this blog, maybe you might be able to contribute your knowledge and Internet savvy skills. Drop me a line (heatherleson AT gmail DOT com) and I can fill you in or check out the wiki for more details.

One of the key tasks we would like to build is our community and collaboration platform: Crabgrass. This is in beta testing. We are hoping to have one main tool to have multiple cities.

Help some partners: Ushahidi, Swift River and Open Street Map

Our goal is to build out a training program to have experts in Toronto and other cities to help on established projects at the outset of an emergency. These are open source projects were long established prior to the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. At some of the Crisis Camps, volunteers engaged to learn and build within these communities. I collected some details to help you learn more about Ushahidi and Open Street Map.

Ushahidi-Swift River

Swift River is a tool that collects data which can be filtered for veracity and importance. This is a fairly simplified description. Dig in more on their site.

There is a Global Hackathon for Swift River tonight. They need developers and testers. The main group is in San Francisco, but anyone can join the skype chat to learn and see if you can help out. There are also Swift River forums which you can learn how to get involved.

For those of you who worked on the RSS Feed Aggregator Project, I think you will find Swift River from Ushahidi a brilliant step forward. The skype chat: Skype. Folks in person in San Francisco will be working on it starting at 17:00 PT/20:00 ET and then teams from Africa will jump in.

There’s a great video explaining Swift River. The potential for positive change using this tool is endless.

Open Street Map
We can do some great things with Open Street Map. I am in contact with some folks from OSM – Toronto. We hope to set up an introduction session and some hands on work. OSM is an amazing community. Hopefully, we can learn and train ourselves how to OSM. In Washington I was fortunate to meet a few OSM volunteers. They talked about their projects and the potential permutations.

Video always expresses it best. Here is Patrick Meier’s presentation from Where 2.0 Ignite – Crowdsourcing the Impossible: Ushahidi-Haiti

Patrick’s blog, iRevolution, is full of inspiring content. If you want to learn more about OSM and Ushahidi, he is one of the main builders. In October, there is an International Conference of Crisis Mappers. Another plane ticket, but well worth the opportunity to grow these ideas.

Upcoming events

April 3, 2010: I’m in Ottawa for a family weekend. Some of the Crisis Commons Montreal folks are driving in to chat. We invite to anyone in the Ottawa and Montreal area to meet up for coffee and learn more about Crisis Commons. If you know anyone or are in town, drop by the Bridgehead.

We are planning an April pub night to catch up and get some feedback. More details soon.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010 I am meeting with some York University students to talk about Crisis Commons and disaster management. You’re welcome to join us. Drop me a line as we haven’t determined the location yet.

Save this date: June 7th, 2010 is the Crisis Commons Congress in Washington. I highly recommend attending. We are collective aiming to change the future of technology volunteer aid. It is incredibly inspiring to meet like minds who believe and act on the power of open source, crowdsourced, collaborative technology.

Happy long weekend,

Heather

Ada Lovelace Day – CrisisCommons Celebrates

Heather — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:01:39 +0000

Crisis Commons is a diverse group of wonderful technologists, developers, programmers, crisis communicators, open source advocates, project managers, GIS experts, Internet savvy and more. We are a growing volunteer technical community.

Crisis Commons was founded by Heather Blanchard, Noel Dickover and Andrew Turner. Heather is one of many wonderful women in technology who are volunteering their knowledge and time to building the Crisis Commons Community.

Our Ada Lovelace shout-out goes to Heather Blanchard for dedicating her next few months as our first full-time employee. She will be building an After Action Report , a Strategic Framework and coordinating the various committees tasked with building our organization. We would be lost without her vision, leadership and love of technology.

I’ll post a wrap up of the Crisis Commons Founders Weekend in the next week. We streamed video of the weekend: here. The twitter hashtag was #ccfw.

Volunteers, Telling our Story and Building Crisis Commons

Heather — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:54:04 +0000

Building Crisis Commons
At our March 13th camp, we worked on a Volunteer Starter Kit. Volunteers are the heart of Crisis Commons. They offer their knowledge, business intelligence and skills. To quote a commenter at SXSWi: “It’s not just about technology. This is human intelligence ”

This weekend is the Crisis Commons Founders event. Crisis Camp organizers from all over the U.S. are attending. There is one attendee from the UK and I’ll be representing Canada. We collected feedback from our respective cities and countries to help share and build Crisis Commons. World Bank and US government employees are also participating.

Our goals are to build our Vision, Mission and Governance and our Strategic Framework.

Ushahidi update
Our volunteers created slideshares in English and French on how to file Ushahidi reports. Since the earthquake in Chile and our initial work:

*Over 1000 entries were reported and mapped on the Ushahidi instance for Chile
*Our slideshare presentations in English and French have over 400 views.

Crisis Commons presentation at the World Bank

Heather Blanchard, co-founder of Crisis Commons, presented to the World Bank on March 1, 2010. The content is now live. A few of the projects that Toronto contributed: Machine translation (CrisisCamp Haiti) and Ushahidi (CrisisCamp Chile). And, she gave a shout-out to all the volunteers. It is a long presentation (2 hours) and includes folks from Ushahidi, Random Hacks of Kindness, Open Street Map and more.

Developers for Development: Using Open Source Technologies in Disaster Response and Beyond.

Looking forward to sharing more results as we build our community of helpers.

Heather

Next CrisisCampTO – Sat Mar 13

Rachel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:56:43 +0000

At our last camp, volunteers experienced what it was like to hit the ground running on the first day of a disaster. They pooled together to see where it was best to help the people of Chile and every volunteer hour counted towards something valuable.

The next CrisisCampTO will be on Sat Mar 13 from 10:00am to 4:00pm at Camaraderie, 102 Adelaide St E.

Please register at http://crisiscampto5.eventbrite.com if you can help for the day.

CrisisCamp – Helping Chile with Ushahidi

Heather — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:02:17 +0000

Today we worked with Ushahidi: a crowdsourced information mapping tool. We are creating a slideshare and video content to help other volunteers learn how to contribute.

There is a need for Spanish translation. Email heatherleson AT gmail DOT com if you can help and I will link you up.

If you have a computer and some time, you can help.

Ushahidi needs information on anything to do with builidings collapse, medical emergencies, vital communications, food distribution and water distribution. If you find any viable information please add this to Ushihidi.

Simple Tasks Anyone Can do

Ushahidi is a way of mapping incidents occurring related to the crisis, which helps to determine where help is needed, etc. Crisis Campers can find reports of incidents online through twitter, facebook, etc, and submit them to Ushahidi. You can submit reports here: http://chilequake.ushahidi.com/reports/submit

Blog post from Ushahidi: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/02/27/volunteers-respond-with-ushahidi-chile/

Video on Vimeo on How-To use Ushahidi: http://vimeo.com/ushahidi

How to Help with Ushahidi

View more presentations from Heather Leson.

Information necessary to submit an Ushahidi Online Report:

Report Title
Description
Date and Time
Categories
- (Pick one: emergency, threat, vital lines, response, other, persons news)–> these may be different for Chile
Optional Information
- (First Name, Last Name, Email)
Location
Refine location name (make a name for the location)
News source link
Video link
Upload photos

CrisisCamp volunteers are working throughout the night on Open Source mapping, tweak the tweet, and Ushahidi. To learn more, check out our main wiki page

CBC interviews CrisisCamp Toronto

Daniel Schwarz of CBC joined us for our whole session today help us film and create content. We are really honoured for their constant support to share our story. CBC News Day has invited me to join them tomorrow at 11:30am. We will be talking about CrisisCamp, projects we’ve worked on and how you can help.

Update: The CBC NewsDay interview was postponed.

CrisisCamp Toronto Today

Heather — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:39:09 +0000

CrisisCamp Toronto will focus on preliminary research for the earthquake in Chile. We originally planned to CrisisCommons long term planning research.

Location:

Camaraderie
102 Adelaide St E
2nd fl
Toronto, Ontario M5C 1K9
Canada

How to reach us today:

*come to the venue

*follow us on twitter

*email heatherlesonAT gmail.com

Status report and plans for today:

At the moment, satellite imagery is not available yet. Teams are preparing work and plans for volunteers.

Hashtags: #Earthquake #Chile #Terremoto #terremotochile #tsunami

Live Feeds

U-Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tv-de-chile
Trendsmap: http://trendsmap.com/
http://crisischile.canalblog.com/
http://terremotochile.com/

There is a CrisisCamp conference call at 11am. Today we will be doing research with Ushahidi, twitter, news feeds, and begin organizing.

More details

The CrisisCamp wiki page

From home you can help with twitter and media monitoring.

If you are working virtually, you can join us online (IRC channel). My tag is TOheather.