Later in the morning, after the kickoff for Crisis Camp DC, volunteers gathered for a conference call to connect efforts across North America and beyond. The World Bank’s Joaquim Toro offered a briefing on Chile, which experienced a serious earthquake in the early hours of the morning.
“This is basically the opposite of what we saw in Haiti” said Toro. “Historically, Chile has had a centralized government. It’s now decentralizing more, as regional offices are working now. President Bachelet is heading the emergency management agency.”
“We know the epicenter of the Chile earthquake was off the coast, north of Santiago, near Concepcion. We don’t know know much of the damage yet. We do know that in Santiago many felt it, almost 300 km from epicenter. Concepcion and other cities nearby are developed but have few big building. We do expect poor neighborhoods to be affected.”
“Everything will go through the authorities. However, because of the history of earthquakes in Chile, there is a lot of community involvement. There’s a huge community to tap into there that’s quite advanced technologically.”
“Tweak the Tweet needs to get adapted right away, since people on ground in Haiti are using Twitter and text to communicate. We’re seeing a lot of websites down in Chile. There are many networks through optic fiber so there’s some connectivity.”
After Toro’s briefing, a Spanish linguist native to Haiti in the Austin Crisis Camp volunteered to translate Tweak the Tweet.” To adapt a phrase, “si, se puede.”
Andy Carvin dialed in from his home office, where he’s been hard at work coordinating NPR social news desk’s coverage of the Chilean quake. Carvin quickly put together a Twitter list of Chile tsunami-earthquake and has helped to collect earthquake news at NPR’s news blog.  He said Crisiswiki.org is up and running, and that he was actively soliciting volunteers to concentrate on adding news resource and aid information. Instructions on who to do so are up to date and posted at the site.
Another camp will be bridging the gap from a Google document posted to collect Chile earthquake information for Ushahidi to directly feed into the new instance of Chilequake.ushahidi.com. Volunteers are needed to comb the net and add information to the document. Submit reports here.
A new Crisis Camp wiki for the Chile earthquake went live shortly after the call ended that aggregates news, disaster resources and much more, including a link to Reliefoversight.org, which is tracking the effectiveness of the action of NGOs.
After the call, the Crisis Camp DC team went back to work coding, mapping, translating and doing what they could to create applications that would be helpful to disaster response in Haiti, Chile and beyond. A gallery of images of Crisis Camp DC volunteers is up at Posterous.
Bien hecho, Crisis Camp.
It’s been very cool to be a part of a group of people who are smart and caring!