Afternoon Checkpoint at CrisisCamp DC: Bootstrapping and Tackling

As has been the case at each of these events, the rooms of volunteers are rich with quiet, intense conversation punctuated by the tapping of keys and familiar pulse of Tweetdeck notifications.

Ushahidi in Chile and populating the People Finder
After hours of work, each of the project managers at Crisis Camp DC reported on the status of their projects.

One room is packed with people migrating information entered into a Google document posted to collect Chile earthquake information for Ushahidi into Chilequake.ushahidi.com.

The team has added RSS feeds and is looking for ways to automate the process. The earthquake “People Finder” for Chile (Chilepersonfinder.appspot.com) which went live this morning due to some quick work by Google’s disaster team  is now tracking over 3400 records. This team is also scraping missing persons site and setting up a list for hand off to other camps.

Crabgrass social network

“At the end of the day, we expct a Crabgrass site to be bootstrapped” said Andrew Turner. They’re work on building out a DC Crisis Common page and then adding Rover and Kapab page as tests. They’ll populate the front page and set up a template for migration for other criss camps.

Dashboard for government

Another team is preparing hard drives and USB sticks to send down to Haiti. They’re looking for possible applications of industry and, by the end of the day, will have an index of data. The data sent will be used at HaitiCrisisMap.org.

OpenStreetMap

The team is making progress made on translation, and cleanup tasks for Haiti. For Chile, they are awaiting permission for use of high-resolution satellite imagery for tracing.

Rover

The Rover team acquired the source code and has been debugging. One task to is to see if GPS is working and then get Google Maps working on device. They’d like to have a running version by the end of the day.

API documentation for WeHaveWeNeed.org

The team has been working through confirmed installation instruction and troubleshooting. They’ll be done with the installs by the end of the day.

[Editor's Note: If readers are looking for ways to assist remotely, here's a list of simple tasks anyone can do to help with earthquake and tsunami volunteer efforts.]