Text on Techs

Virtual participation for geek, technical or social events helps the sting of not being able to attend in person. While it can’t completely fill the void of shared, human interaction, at least you can potentially watch a stream, catch a liveblog or even find a new person to follow who inspires you.

photo by Tolmie Macrae

South by South West – Interactive starts tomorrow. Every year I make a wish list of sessions that I would either attend or research. Then, I seek out the content and presenters before, during and after the events. It also gives me a chance to support some friends and thought leaders from afar. The list below is an eclectic mix of interests. There are folks from CrisisCommons, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, UN Global Pulse, Frontline SMS, Movements.org, NPR (Andy Carvin), Mozilla, P2PU, Toronto friends, and more. I know that I have missed some good people and welcome the tips. Also included are topics that perked my interest or topics that I know friends or family members research.

As you can tell, I would need to be cloned multiple times over to virtually monitor all of these sessions. And, put the rest of my scheduled activities on hold. Most of the sessions have hashtags and might have streaming. Last year I was able to cobble participation together for 10 sessions. I am mainly following #sxswgood for my Technology-for-Social-Good @ SXSW fix.

The Virtual SXSW Schedule (subject to whim and edits)

Austin Time translator – all times in CST Standard time zone: UTC/GMT -6 hours
(Note: DST starts on the weekend. On Sunday, switch to UTC/GMT -5 hours)
What time is it for me?

Friday, March 11, 2011

14:00 Lessons Learned from the Arab Spring Revolutions – Susannah Vila (movements.org)

14:00 Fireside Chat: Tim O’Reilly Interviewed by Jason Calacanis

14:00 Rebooting Iceland: Crowdsourcing Innovation in Uncertain Times

15:30 The Future of WordPress

17:00 The Singularity is HERE (cousin’s research area)

Saturday, March 12, 2011

9:30 Putting the Public Back in Public Media Andy Carvin
9:30 Federating the Social Web

11:00 Agile Self-Development
More details.

11:00 We Are Browncoats: Leveraging Fan Communities for Charity Serenity!

11:00 Seed & Feed: How to Cultivate Self-Organizing Communities (New Work City – for @camaraderie)

11:00 Flattr w/Thingiverse, Readability, Demotix: Rewarding Creators and Crowdfunding
#FlattrSXSW

12:30 Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization

12:30 Mobile Health in Africa: What Can We Learn?
Josh Nesbitt Frontline SMS #AmHealth

12:30 How Social Media Fueled Unrest in Middle East New York Times

14:00 Keynote Simulcast: Seth Priebatsch Gaming!

15:30 Humans Versus Robots: Who Curates the Real-Time Web?

15:30 The Behavior Change Checklist. Down With Gamefication Aza Raskin

15:30 Real World Moderation: Lessons from 11 Years of Community
Metafilter

15:30 Social Media Data Visualization: Mapping the World’s Conversations

16:00 Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users

17:00 All These Worlds Are Yours: Visualizing Space Data

17:00 Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation With HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript

Sunday, March 13, 2011

9:30 Radical Openness: Growing TED by Giving it Away

9:30 One Codebase, Endless Possibilities: Real HTML5 Hacking

11:00 Hacking the News: Applying Computer Science to Journalism

11:00 The Future of Philanthropy: Social Giving Takes Off
#socialgiving More Details

12:30 Fail Big, Fail Often: How Fear Limits Creativity

12:30 Influencers Will Inherit the Earth. Quick, Market Them! Sloane Berrett

12:30 Urban Technology on the Dark Side

15:30 Nonprofits and Free Agents in A Networked World Beth Kantor

15:30 Paying with Data: How Free Services Aren’t Free (Privacy, NYT, Stanford)

Monday, March 14

9:30 Tweets from September 11 Schuyler Erle

9:30 Method Tweeting for Non Profits (and Other Players) Geoff Livingston

9:30 Machine Learning and Social Media

11:00 SOS – Can Citizen Alerts Be Trusted? Patrick Meier, Chris Blow, Robert Kilpatrick and Karen Flavell

11:00 Worst Website Ever II: Too Stupid to Fail

11:00 The SINGULARITY: Humanity’s Huge Techno Challenge
(My cousin’s research area)

11:00 Naked Dating: Finding Love in 140 Characters or Less Melissa Smich and Jeremy Wright

11:00 Cryptography, Technology, Privacy: Philip Zimmermann, Inventor of PGP

12:30 NPR’s API: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

15:30 Mozilla School of Webcraft @P2PU John Britton

15:30 Voting: The 233-Year-Old Design Problem

16:00 How to Offer Your Content in 100 Languages Featuring June Cohen of TED and Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla

17:00 DIY Diplomacy: Designing Collaborative Gov Noel Dickover

Tuesday, March 15

11:00 Creating a Social Hackathon for the Good – Justice League Style

12:30 Wikileaks: The Website That Changed the World?

12:30 How Governments are Changing Where Big Ideas Happen Ian Kelso, Interactive Ontario

15:00 Next Stage: Bike Hugger’s Built: A Series of Talks by People Who Create

15:30 Interoperable Locations: Matching Your Places with My Places Kate Chapman

15:30 The Wonderful Things in Internet of Things

15:30 Techies Can Save the World, Why Aren’t They?

17:00 Bruce Sterling, closing speaker

17:00 Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV Mozilla, Google and more

Brain infusion pending.

Heather

Cross-posted from CrisisCommons.org

Crisiscamp Toronto is preparing. We’ve learned from the global CrisisCommons responses that we need to build relationships and capacity locally, provincially and nationally. Our core team is David Black (Emergency Management lead), Melanie Gorka (International Development and Projects lead), Brian Chick (Social Media Trainer and New Media lead) and myself (City Lead and Community hacker). Together, we’ve been running monthly events for the past year. Our unique mix of skills, networks and dedication to building is helping us grow our community. We are a sandbox for Preparedness CrisisCamps and for building community within your city.

On Saturday, February 19, 2011, our second preparedness CrisisCamp was attended by 30 people. Some people were new faces while others attended previous CrisisCamp or Random Hacks of Kindness events. Our goals were to build a common sharing space and to build local CrisisCamp capacity emergency managers, software developers, journalists, new media, government and technical groups. We designed a program to recognize that people have different interests and gaps. The model also included cross-training, brainstorming, planning projects and community building.

Event Highlights:

• In the morning, we held three simultaneous sessions: Social Media 101 (Brian Chick), Emergency Management 101 (Patrice Cloutier, Jason Redlarski, and David Black) and GIS/Mapping 101 (Richard Weait and Kristina MacKinnon).
• We welcomed participants from the Ontario government and Toronto Police. This is the first time we have ever had Canadian officials attend a full CrisisCamp event. Canadian officials are slowly becoming interested in this space as we continue to outreach with the help from some early leaders. Evolving national and local communities is one of our core goals this year. We were delighted to have them join us.
• Richard Weait of OpenStreetMap provided us an Introduction OSM and some individual training.
• George Chamales, Konpa Group, offered to give a spontaneous one hour presentation via skype from Haiti. He provided a great overview and mentorship for our community. Some of his topics were: What is Ushahidi? What were some of the emergency/crisis response deployments of the past year? What are the best practices? Lessons learned? George also provided some feature requests for our developers to brain on and answered some technical questions. One of the requests was completed during the camp.
• Sara Farmer, Crisismappers.net and UN Global Pulse, provided cross-training for mapping and gave participants a global perspective on the movements.
• We held the first ever tweet-up and live tweet chat about social media in Canadian emergencies. This was lead by the fantastic, and bilingual, Patrice Cloutier. Patrice is a leader in this space in Canada and offered to help moderate the conversation. As well, David Black and Jason Redlarski provided context for emergency management in Canada. Patrice is a member of the SMEM weekly chats.
• We had a group brainstorm on Canadian emergency management needs and project ideas for preparedness and response. This will help us plan our activities for future events.
• Melanie Gorka facilitated a number of brainstorming topics about CrisisCommons in Canada and digital volunteerism. She also coordinated our content curation team.
• Glenn McKnight set-up a display for IEEE’s Humanitarian Initiatives and provided demonstrations for the Solar Suitcase. Glenn is a big proponent of Open Hardware and helped us geek out beyond software solutions and think about our friends in the Maker community.
• We used Scribblelive to liveblog our content for the event. This really worked well. We recommend it for other CrisisCamp events.
• The majority of our events have been held at University of Toronto. This partnership has been amazing. Not only can we use multiple rooms for break-out sessions, we have a strong university student contingent that is helping us grow.

Every city and every country has different needs, yet some similar themes. We would be happy to answer any questions. But, most of all: STEAL or HACK this MODEL. It really worked. We are very thankful for our presenters, guests from Volunteer Technical Communities, government officials and the amazing participants who asked great questions and are the reason that CrisisCamp Toronto continues to grow.

Stay Tuned!

CrisisCamp Toronto City Lead
Heather Leson

Do something. During the CrisisCommons response to Haiti, I learned about the Crisismappers network. When the Chilean earthquake occurred, our CrisisCamp Toronto team got a crash course in Ushahidi and crisismapping by creating training materials while we learned how to map. We also volunteered for the Pakistan floods using the same tools and community networks. I became hooked. Geo-locating situational awareness and potential needs to provide context to humanitarian response continues to evolve. I am a mapper-in-training (MIT) and a serial volunteer.

In October 2010, I attended the International Conference of CrisisMappers. The calibre of organizations, academics and volunteers inspired me to join the newly formed Stand-by Task Force (SBTF). The SBTF is a collective of highly skilled, diverse people from around the world who can be activated to respond. As George Chamales of Konpa Group likes to say: a map is only as useful as the process and people to make it happen. It is hard, iterative work to map. But, the rewards mean contributing to a new, visual response. In January, I volunteered with the SBTF monitoring the Sudan elections with sudanvotemonitor.com. I spent time working with the geo-locating team.

I could spend a few years learning and still not be an expert. Everyone starts somewhere. While I have volunteered with Ushahidi and maps for a year, there are many layers. The CrisisCamp Toronto team is modeling and testing maps as a volunteer offering. We created Snow in Toronto. I applied the SBTF methods and cross-trained my local peers on how and what to map using the best practice templates and processes.

Maps

Mapful. The last weeks included large scale responses for the Standby Task Force and CrisisCamp. Digital volunteers from many groups have answered the call to action.

New Zealand – eq.org.nz

Monday, February 21st was the end of a long weekend. Upon checking my twitter stream around 20:30, I learned about the earthquake in New Zealand. I logged on to skype and began collaborating with people from around the world for 8 hours straight. We activated the Stand-by Task Force to assist with the initial response and training. I was given the honour to chronicle the experience on the Ushahidi and CrisisCommons blogs: Launching eq.nz.org for the New Zealand Earthquake.

In 12 days, the CrisisCamp New Team and friends have filed 1,355 reports and 10 layers of information. Their work has been chronicled on the CrisisCommons wiki and blog.
All the NZ folks like Tim McNamara, Robert Coup, Nat Torkington, Gavin Treadgold and hundreds of volunteers are changing the face of emergency response in NZ and inspiring people around the world.

Libya
The Stand-by Task Force was activated this week for a special project for the United Nations – Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA). This historical action involved crisismappers in the humanitarian response. I joined the SBTF deployment team and began research social media resources and mapping. Four days later we have hundreds of reports verified and continue to volunteer. This effort included many diverse groups – CrisisCommons, Humanity Road, CrisisMappers, Google Crisis Response Team, NetHope and OpenStreetMap. Patrick Meier, Director of Crisismapping at Ushahidi, and Sara Farmer, Chief Platform Architect at UN Global Pulse blogged about the the Libya response. The map is not publicly available at this time due to the sensitive nature. Mappers do no harm, we just want to help. In time, it will be available. Volunteers are most welcome. You can contact the Standby Task Force.

Digital Mappers

Digital volunteers from the various Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs) are involved in crisismapping. There are hard-core geo mappers like the OpenStreetMap and the Google Earth folks. And, there are groups like CrisisCommons, Crisismappers, and Humanity Road who provide surge capacity and often focus on situational awareness and research from social media, media and official sources. Add to this, the Ushahidi development team and other technical volunteers.

Who are these digital mappers? Well, they are doers. A mapper doesn’t want to talk for hours about doing, they just do. It takes a new volunteer about 4 hours to wrap your head around the process and begin to really dig in. The SBTF have worked on a number of deployments and are very open to new members. We are the people who map for 3 hours at night instead of watching tv. We are the people who wake up early before work, log into skype and add a few reports to the map. We map at lunch. We are the people who may drop everything to map for 4 days. We are communicators and friends. And, we believe that a map can and does change the world. Every day I am more and more honoured to call myself a mapper. While it might not show immediately that we are making a difference, it will in time. Iterative change starts with a few hours and a few dedicated people who want to make a difference.

Heather

Crisiscamp Toronto shared our story at Podcamp Toronto 2011 on February 26, 2011. Our session: “Crowdsourcing Tech for Social Good and CrisisResponse” had approximately 25 attendees. The talk was recorded and will be posted at a later date. We had some great questions about how to engage volunteers and what are results of RHoK and CrisisCamp. Here is a quick event summary and our slideshare:

Some results of the past 6 months

Toronto digital volunteers participated in CrisisCamp Pakistan and CrisisCamp New Zealand. Some of the contributions were: mapping and situational awareness. CrisisCamps can be for response or preparedness. People work on tasks identified or brainstorm on ways they can contribute. We also participated in two Random Hacks of Kindness event: Sydney, Australia in June 2010 and Toronto, Canada in December 2010. These events are two-day hackathons focused on humanitarian and local solutions. For the RHoK Toronto event, we partnered with Open Data Toronto.

Some of the lessons learned are: the processes need to be set well in advance of an emergency and partnerships built between Crisis Responders and digital volunteers. And, if we identify problem definitions, we can brainstorm and create prototypes which might aim to solve real world issues. Volunteer technology communities collaborate during response. Each brings their special skills. Digital volunteers are modelling in an agile, iterative manner using their skills of research, digital media creation, social media outreach and mapping contribute to a basic framework. Their contribution and feedback is built on by each response effort and each hackathon. We are attempting to identify the best way to train and engage people to volunteer in the most rewarding and effective manner. It is hard work, but each time we improve.

Toronto has about 30 people who volunteer locally and globally. These people are developers, emergency managers, project managers, digital media strategists, technologists, students, experienced employees, open data/open gov users and journalists. We are at the training and project analysis stage. All of these lessons learned will enable us to build programs and relationships locally for preparedness. As well, we aim to collaborate with emergency responders to manage the surge of information online during an emergency and create software/innovation solutions.

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