Community starts with volunteers. CrisisCommons and all the CrisisCamps have been on a massive journey exploring collaboration, crowdsourcing and volunteer technical communities for disaster and crisis response.
I’m reading CrisisCamp city profiles and researching our progression for the Sloan Foundation Trustee proposal. We’ve received feedback from the CrisisCongress, the CrisisCommons Founders weekend and from individual volunteers. Thinking about the volunteer experience, I am asking questions: How can we improve the CrisisCamp volunteer experience? How can we create content and structure while learning? How can we improve on collaboration, crowdsourcing in our community? I’m writing narratives on the CrisisCamp City profiles and will be in contact with each of the CrisisCamp City Leads for more input. There is a mountain of research on our lessons learned. If you have any further information, feel free to send it my way.
This path has also lead me to participatory learning and task turking for volunteer technical communities. I am excited to hear about the Mozilla’s Mozilla’s Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival. It will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of this revolution. There will workshops and sessions all about participatory learning and badges. People like Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and proponent of Open Learning, will be running sessions on storming learning. The Open Video Alliance team will also be attending. What if we had HTML5 videos as training materials to help volunteers learn and create at the same time? Endless.
Taking place Barcelona from November 3-5, it includes three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web. They invite everyone to be a part of it. Whether you are a teacher or a technologist, this is a chance to help shape the future of learning *and* the web.
Registration is open. It would be great if our European CrisisCamp friends and other volunteer technical communities attend. Based on the festival mandate, I expect that the most of the content will be available online after the event.
Back to writing.
(post by Heather Leson)
Grief is natural to mortal world, and is always about us; pleasure is a guest, and visited us but by our invitation; be prudent, and the visits of joy shall remain long with you.