CrisisCamp Marathon Weekend

Join us for a CrisisCamp Marathon Volunteering Weekend for the Pakistan Floods. We will be working to assist our friends and partner organizations: OpenStreetMap, Sahana and Crowdmap(Ushahidi). Each individual city may also be working on tasks listed on the CrisisCommons wiki for pkfloods.

We’ll be working in a number of countries and timezones with staggered over three days. CrisisCamps in Canada and CrisisCamp Virtual will start on the evening of Friday, September 3, 2010. This is the same start time for CrisisCamp Sydney where the time will be Saturday, September 4, 2010 : 08:00 AEST. As we collaborate work across North America, we will run overnight and link to the CrisisCamp London team. The Canadian and Uk teams finish on Saturday, September 4, 2010 while the Sydney team will continue throughout Sunday, September 5, 2010.

Join a CrisisCamp:

Event starts at Friday, September 3, 2010: 15:00 PT, 18:00 ET or 23:00 GMT. In Sydney, Australia it will be Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST.

Register for the Sydney, Australia CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST

Join CrisisCamp Bangkok for Saturday, September 4, 2010

Register for the Toronto, Canada CrisisCamp: Friday, September 3, 2010: 18:00 ET

Join Silicon Valley on Friday, September 3, 2010 5-10pm Pacific Time at 650 Castro, Mountain View (eventbrite available soon).

Register for the London, UK CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4,2010: 10am GMT

Join us virtually:

Register to be a Virtual Crisis Camper

Check back here for the ustream, pirate pad, conference bridges and other collaboration tools. We would love your input and will do our best to help you volunteer.

Help us spread the word.

CrisisCamp London Weekend Update

CrisisCamp London has been going strong for 4 weeks with mapping and managing info for the Pakistan Floods. The small, but determined team has inspired all of us with their efforts to tackle some tough questions.

Photos from Spike from this weekend’s camp

It was a holiday weekend in the UK, but we still got 9 people into our new venue (and free food again, thanks to Angela!). We always write up our camps as we go. Click for this week’s update – August 28 2010.

We had a huge list of tasks to to, but the bottom line as always is to
a) make a positive difference in Pakistan and
b) keep the pkfloods effort running smoothly

For once, we didn’t have any techies in the camp (the faciliators don’t count – we’ve learnt at last that we can’t code and organise at the same time). Our CrisisCamp London focus was on data entry for OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi and Sahana, monitoring & evaluation of tools for pkfloods, and improving the help provided to virtual volunteers. By the end of the day, we had lots of Ushahidi data entries, more detail into OpenStreetMap, an OV1 diagram showing the interconnections between all the systems fielded for pkfloods, two A4 sheets of M&E questions and a new VirtualCamper-friendly design for the CrisisCampUk pages.

We also learned about the situation on the ground in Pakistan:

• many settlements don’t have names because they’re part of larger estates
• there was already pressure on land in Pakistan before the floods leading many people to build settlements on the flood plains
• many people who had lent their vehicles to help people further north were now being evacuated at very short notice before their vehicles could be returned, and
• mobile phones are widely used in even the poorest of areas in the country.

And we got some really good tips on publicising camps in the UK, and agreed to set up a UK ‘announce’ mailing list to reduce the amount of traffic sent to people who aren’t able to join in on pkfloods.

We will be back next weekend to brain more on these topics.
(Post by Sara Farmer, CrisisCamp London)

CrisisCamp – Silicon Valley for Pakistan Floods

Thanks Silicon Valley

We had a fantastic CrisisCamp Silicon Valley. There were 46 people registered and 20 folks attended. First off, thanks to all the great volunteers for sharing your knowledge. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation provided a last minute blog shout-out. Pizza was provided by Dave Jorgensen. George Chamales provided an update on Pakreport.org (crowdsourcing SMS to maps). The venue at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley – Disaster Management Initiative was fantastic with easy WiFi and projectors for anim-promptu presentation. Thanks!
more »

pakreport.org needs your help!

Defense expert George Chamales is attending Crisis Camp Silicon Valley and needs your help with the pakreport.org flood mapping project.

Check out dev.pakreport.org/wiki to get started!

CrisisCamp Events – August 24 – 28th, 2010

It’s a busy week ahead for CrisisCamps this week:

Ed note: this may be revised as CrisisCamp activity is growing.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Taiwan 09:00 – 18:00 DST
The camp will be starting at 09:00 DST and will run all day until 18:00 DST.
Folks are working on Pakistan Floods tasks in Sahana Eden. It is really a Sahana camp with a touch of CrisisCamp.They are great partners.

Cambridge (UK) BST
See updates on their @crisiscampcambs twitter account.
Register for CrisisCampCambs
(The event is either 1- 5pm GMT (eventbrite) or 18:30 GMT(on their wiki page). We will update once we get confirmation.)

Friday, August 27, 2010 5pm-10pm PST
Silicon Valley, CA (USA)
Register
See our post from earlier today.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

London (UK) 10am-5pm BST
London has been a leader for CrisisCamp PK Floods. See their CrisisCamp wiki page for an summary of activities.
Venue: Red Lion Square Register

Global Community call
Our regular Community call will be 2 parts: CrisisCamp updates (30 minutes) and Community Working Group (30 minutes).
13:00 ET, Your local time zone info

Draft agenda. Please feel free to edit. This is a Community Call and things are moving fast.
(post by Heather Leson)