CrisisCamp Bangkok had their first CrisisCamp as part of our Global Marathon for Pakistan (Pkfloods).

After they met the CrisisCamp community on IRC, folks created some CrisisCamp Bangkok social media spaces (Facebook and LinkedIn) to help build their community.

Here’s some of the great work they did with our volunteer technical community partners:

* Don removed 25+ duplicate locations from Sahana.
* Gordon developed a tool to extract Lat Long for Locations.
* Suwanee entered 30 Latitude and Longitude coordinates.

Then:

* A representative for the Pakistani Embassy for Thailand stopped by for a visit.
* Andrew and Ar-phanee talked with Michael about integrating Sahana with the courses at Siam Institute of Technology.

Special Thanks go to Michael and Gordon on facilitating and coordinating people during the event and a very nice coffee supplied by Khun Sander.

Pongvit Siribovornkiat, the CrisisCamp Bangkok organizer, and Barbara Ratusznik (World Bank, Papua New Guinea), Sara Farmer (CrisisCamp London) and I started building out CrisisCamp Bangkok 4 days ago. Amazing to watch it grow and have a Camp that fast. Great stuff and welcome to the community! See the CrisisCamp Bangkok wiki summary page.

CrisisCamp Mid-Marathon report

Toronto, London, Bangkok, Silicon Valley and most of the virtual team are done their camps for the weekend. You can find us on Freenode at #crisiscamp. Sydney continues for a second day in a few hours. Here is the fantastic CrisisCamplog that Deborah Shaddon created. She will be writing up a global summary tomorrow.

Thanks so much for all our volunteer technical community support from OpenStreetMap, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Crowdmap/Pakreport team, Humanity Road team for sharing their knowledge. We are so happy to contribute to your projects. Thanks to all the CrisisCommons folks who had joined in camps or virtually. Also thanks to Mozilla for providing sponsorship for Sydney and Silicon Valley CrisisCamps. And, thanks to all our other supporters: locations, food, and, most of all, the folks who volunteered their time.

(Post by Heather Leson)

In just a little over two weeks of planning and organizing for a weekend of geocoding and crowdsourcing, CrisisCamp Sydney organizers kicked off a rainy Saturday morning with 15 volunteers ready to do what they can to help with the reconstruction efforts in the unprecedented Pakistan floods crisis.

Partner organizations that made this event happen include: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Mozilla Drumbeat, CrisisCommons, the University of New South Wales’ Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) the Students in Free Enterprise UNSW (SIFEUNSW) and the World Bank.

The initial plan for the weekend was simply to ask volunteers — developers, IT professionals, university students, community activists and do-gooders to help with drawing a detailed map of the flood water boundary, iron out mapping glitches and creating SOP for map making. Then, after a brief orientation and instruction on geocoding, we needed volunteers to geocode incidents from the ground. Within the first hour of the opening day, volunteers were getting their hands wet on how to geocode. Within a few hours and a few GIS experts and software developers among us, we added crowdsourcing aside from the geocoding that was being done.

As the volunteers work a video of a tutorial for mapping villages has been uploaded to Youtube (link below)
We are expecting to work throughout the day. In the meantime, we appreciate the support and help that the CrisisCommons’ teams in Toronto and Bangkok have provided so far. In a few hours, London will be up and we hope to be able to share our work with them and get on a collaborative mode in ways that we never could have imagined without the internet.

Mapping Pakistan with OpenStreetMap on Youtube

(Post by Tolmie Macrae, Sydney)

Martin Bliemel, from the Sydney CrisisCamp, was interviewed by Australian Broadcasting Company news about the work they’re doing for flood relief in Pakistan. In this short clip, you can hear him talk about the potential uses for Crowdflower and Pakreport.org

Listen here

Here is a the podcast of the skype interview that Rabia Editor in Chief of CIO Paskistan made a few hours ago about CrisisCommons pakistan flood relief…

Check out the video here…

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

We are tracking the situation in Christchurch, New Zealand after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck outside of the city at 4:35am local time. We will continue to monitor reports leading up to our CrisisCamp Marathon Weekend this weekend, which we had initially put together to assist the Pakistan flood relief efforts, but anyone that wishes to also volunteer to also assist in whatever support needs arise from the Christchurch quake, we will almost certainly be at least increasing our monitoring/news gathering efforts this weekend around this latest disaster. Please follow us on Twitter at @crisiscamp for more updates.

There are two places right now that you can add reports and/or suggestions:

CrisisCommons Wiki Page for Christchurch Earthquake

CrisisWiki Page for Christchurch Earthquake

Join us for a CrisisCamp Marathon Volunteering Weekend for the Pakistan Floods. We will be working to assist our friends and partner organizations: OpenStreetMap, Sahana and Crowdmap(Ushahidi). Each individual city may also be working on tasks listed on the CrisisCommons wiki for pkfloods.

We’ll be working in a number of countries and timezones with staggered over three days. CrisisCamps in Canada and CrisisCamp Virtual will start on the evening of Friday, September 3, 2010. This is the same start time for CrisisCamp Sydney where the time will be Saturday, September 4, 2010 : 08:00 AEST. As we collaborate work across North America, we will run overnight and link to the CrisisCamp London team. The Canadian and Uk teams finish on Saturday, September 4, 2010 while the Sydney team will continue throughout Sunday, September 5, 2010.

Join a CrisisCamp:

Event starts at Friday, September 3, 2010: 15:00 PT, 18:00 ET or 23:00 GMT. In Sydney, Australia it will be Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST.

Register for the Sydney, Australia CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST

Join CrisisCamp Bangkok for Saturday, September 4, 2010

Register for the Toronto, Canada CrisisCamp: Friday, September 3, 2010: 18:00 ET

Join Silicon Valley on Friday, September 3, 2010 5-10pm Pacific Time at 650 Castro, Mountain View

Register for the London, UK CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4,2010: 10am GMT

Join us virtually:

Register to be a Virtual Crisis Camper

Check back here for the ustream, pirate pad, conference bridges and other collaboration tools. We would love your input and will do our best to help you volunteer.

Help us spread the word.

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)

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.

Defense expert George Chamales is attending Crisis Camp Silicon Valley and needs your help with the pakreport.org flood mapping project.

Check out dev.pakreport.org/wiki to get started!