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!
Our Contribution
Patrick Tague ninja’d up the UNOCHA financial tracking system, taking a new task and writing a program automating generation of the summary table and charts. Way to go! He will be finishing up the UI and verifying the task list to see if this project is completed.
HAM to PakReport.org
We finalized the methodology for getting on the ground reports through HAM radio to Ushahidi. HAMs voice message relay over VHF until you get to someone with packet radio or the Internet, and email the report to submit@pakreport.org. Let them know it came from HAM, include call sign if you have it. We had a lot of difficulty finding GPS coordinates for village names. It helps to add any additional identifying information! The emails will get sent to the crowd for categorization and then input into Ushahidi. Rakesh Kumar sent out the word to CISCO peeps around the world to get the word out. Paul Petach galvanized Silicon Valley HAMs.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) We had lots of editors working on OSM, tracing and finding GPS location of villages – even entire tables, and at least one person volunteered he would keep it up in his free time!
Crowdflower aka Pakreport.org A couple people worked on message categorization. We also had a keen volunteer ask if she could do this in her free time – ah beautiful converts!
NEXT STEP: There is a huge backlog of messages for pakreport.org to Ushahidi. We need to speed the categorization any way we can. Simplest is more volunteers to categorize messages on crowdflower aka pakreport! Any techies wanna try machine/automated stuff, feel free! Learn how to help.
Communication across the language barrier
This was identified as a common problems for all the disasters. We brainstormed by entertaining everything from harnessing “SMS a translator” or “Call a translator” existing systems in China for tourists, to Jibbigo iPhone app to kwikpoint (an existing visual picture/point). Can we make an iPhone app to drag and drop pictures to show someone a message?
Other Activities:
Chad Catacchio did some work on RSS feeds to twitter. He is stomping out bugs. Go Chad!
We connected with the South Asia Relief (Mailing list). They are a Pakistani group that has been around since 2005, and are interested in collaborating on identifying corporate match programs (often not even known to employees) and collating situation updates from the web.
CrisisCamp Silicon Valley even had a virtual participant from Karachi: Dr Meher Zaidi, Karachi. On Twitter: @Meherzaidi.
Those are the highlights of work we accomplished. I apologize if I missed anyone!
Until next CCSV (this coming Friday, anyone?),
(Post and photo by Jeannie Stamberger, CrisisCamp Silicon Valley)
Posts about the Silicon Valley event:
Atul Varma on Toolness and Mitchell Baker on Lizard Wrangler.
Hello,
I noticed your mention of Kwikpoint and your desire to work around the language barriers. As this is our specialty, and we are even considering producing an app I was wondering who I should speak with; we can very likely help with your specifics.
-Bill
The next time I read a website, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as substantially as this a single. I imply, I know it was my selection to read, but I truly believed youd have a thing interesting to say. All I hear can be a bunch of whining about one thing which you could fix in the event you werent too busy looking for attention.