Project update for the Christchurch Recovery Map

This update contains lots of information. That’s because it was a great day for the project. It was our first face to face meetup, which was really cool. http://eq.org.nz continues to strengthen. Thanks again to all of the volunteers for making this such a great service. If you wish to volunteer for this effort, please visit our volunteer orientation page.

People like what we’re doing

We are receiving some great feedback from the site. An interesting theme is that people are telling us how therapeutic it is to be able to provide at least some support to the community by contributing to the map. We have also had someone use the map before they went driving for supplies to know where the road blocks are. A family friend of mine has told me that the service was invaluable yesterday to find petrol. The Student Volunteer Army has told us that we are the only map that consistently up-to-date information, which is making their responses even faster.

I put the great service that we are providing down to our volunteers. Thank you everyone for providing such a wonderful service.

Nat Torkington Interview

This morning, Nat Torkington was interviewed by Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand National. Despite being asked some really hard questions, such as “How do you know that you guys have everything?”, Nat did really well. The interview was a great success, prompting a small spike in users. Listen here.

TV 3 News staff as eq.org.nz operators

Today marked a great day for the project’s relationship with the media. We have had Dylan Moran from TV 3 ask to be able to very reports himself. I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with him. He’s very interested in assisting the project move forward.

Development changes

Lots of development occurred today at the hackfest. While we haven’t got to the state of being able to push anything to the production system, you’re welcome to take a sneak peek at our development server. If you would like to take a look at our up-coming changes, visit http://beta.eq.org.nz. We hope to have a completely revamped landing page available by the end of the weekend.

Printed maps available

It is now possible to provide maps to people without power. http://maps.eq.org.nz/print provides our maps as PDF and JPEG files. This opens up completely new avenues to disperse information to the residents of Christchurch and beyond.

Two new mailing lists

Tonight, I created two mailing lists. This will be far easier for announcements to be distributed and will hopefully be easier to follow than the Skype chat rooms for people only participating every few days.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eqnz
The purpose of the first is a general list relating to the project. All members of the project are expected to join this list. It will be the primary way that general announcements will be provided. The general public are welcome to participate. I hope that the residents of Christchurch will be able to interact directly with the people running the system. That way, positive feedback loops can be created.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eqnz-dev is for developers. People developing the site are expected to join both mailing lists. Please keep words like PHP, git, commit and so forth to this channel.

If you would like to learn how to find info on the map, we made the video below (others regarding the site on Vimeo)