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)