It’s about 9:30pm on Friday night, and eight of us are hanging out at the University of Toronto. We spent the first couple hours getting our new volunteers up to speed on all the tools, and attacking some of the SMS Messages for PakReport.org. After a bit of grumbling about excessive scrolling, we are thrilled to find out that Atul (Silicon Valley) has built a Firefox plugin that keeps the messages on your screen while you search the rest of the web for the information you need.
After Kate Chapman arrived from DC, half of the group split off into a different room to learn the ins and outs of OpenStreetMap. The aim is to take her lesson, and build it into a new tutorial for future Crisis-Campers. Making the information specific to CrisisCommons’s needs is critical. As is discussed frequently, there’s a lot of tools and jargon flying around, so limiting the lessons to exactly what we need to use, and how we need to use it is paramount.
We also had our first chat with Tolmie in Sydney and got him up to speed with the happenings thus far. The main mission of our camp tonight is to make sure that they’re good to run their first official CrisisCamp in Australia. Tolmie said there were already about 15 people there and that their aim was to get some OSM work done, and also build some video tutorials for some of the other tasks they’re going to ask their volunteers to do.
The security guards at U of T keep walking by, wondering what we’re doing this late on the Friday evening of a long weekend. Updates to follow…
-Brian
