Once again, developers, geospational engineers and online media professionals have come together to work on crisis response applications.
Today at the World Bank in Washington, dozens of volunteers are now at work at Crisis Camp DC. They’ll be working on finishing projects that have been created since the first Crisis Camp in January at the Sunlight Foundation, following the disastrous earthquake in Haiti.
And, after reports of a powerful earthquake in Chile that has resulted in tsunami advisories all around the Pacific Ocean, a team will be helping to feed information into the Ushahidi media monitoring platform for Chile. They’ll be reading Terremotochile.com and, along with tens of thousands, watching live online video from Chile at uStream.  And, thanks to the disaster response team at Google, an earthquake “People Finder” for Chile is live: Chilepersonfinder.appspot.com.
Projects underway include:
- Documenting the application programming interface for WeHaveWeNeed.org
- Continuing to clean up maps for Haiti with advanced crisis mapping at OpenStreetMap.org and doing Creole transaltion. The GPS map of Haiti has been one of the most-used products from the Crisis Camps, adopted by the UN, UNICEF and many other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
- A Haiti Hospital Capacity Finder, Kapab Django, focused on provuding medical situation awareness. Python developers are needed here
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- CrisisWiki.org, now with interest in building out for Chile or tsunami affected countries as needed
- Crab Grass, an open source social networking tool that will be tied in to TechAid. This will be used to connect NGOs to Crisis Camp.
- A development team will be modifying code for Rover, a disaster assessment mobile app for the World Bank. Â Rover will be used for more ground-based structural assessments. It’s already being used by Ministry of Work in Haiti. Initially the scope will be about 100,000 buildings. The World Bank sees broad applications for Rover around the world, including gathering information about risks before disasters.The app was commissioned by FEMA and uses existing structural assessment standards. The World Bank interested in injecting the code into its projects.
There will be a briefing on Chile from World Bank expert on the country later in the day.
I would like to know how we can use this group’s technological savvy to help us identify resources within P-au-P that can help care for orphaned teens that UNICEF will not accept into their tent city or find a place for. I have the Director of an NGO going to PAP the end of this month. We can get funds and supplies together to help these teens who are living on the streets and have lost everything and everyone they know and love. We need to identify an existing resource, i.e. person(s) and/or structure that can devote themselves to these kids, primariily boys.