Techs are superheros. I'm a bridge.
In December, I had the honour to present at the United Nations Spider meetings in Vienna. Here are those presentations with details notes:
Coining Global is a state of community for where Crisismapping and Digital Humanitarianism should grow:
Hurricane Sandy saw the rise of many Crisismapping projects, including the great Hot or Not test of satellite imagery. There was also a large number of Crowdmaps launched:
As much as I love talking about deployers, digital volunteers and mapping, I still get a bit nervous seeing videos of my talks. I was honoured to speak at TedxSilkRoad on April 11, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.
You can tell I was talking fast when “Non-government Organizations” suddenly got renamed “Non-Government Associations.” The presentation has 2961 views.
(Also see: Map it, Change it (blog post).)
It is a goal to bring Crowdsourcing home in 2011. Our CrisisCommons Toronto team attended a meeting with the Ontario Government, Ministry of Natural Resources on January 18, 2011. It was an honour to have our first official Canadian provincial government meeting.
I presented this overview to attendees. Crisismapper volunteers from Russia and Australia provided some input with their lessons learned for fire crowdsourcing implementations. This is the power of global volunteer technology communities. We had a great discussion about barriers in remote regions, mapping techniques and government policy. Over 75% of forest fires reported in Ontario are by the public. We intend to use the latest tools available to share with mapping visual information.
Officials were very receptive to continuing our discussions. I will post the next steps as they evolve.
Heather
On Monday, I had the distinct honour to participate in a seminar at York University: The Haiti Earthquake of Jan 2010: Lessons Learned.“. Brian Chick and I were on a panel with Kenneth Kidd of the Toronto Star: Role of the Local, National and International Media; Communication Challenges; Reality, Myths, and Perception Issues.
(Photo by Morgen Peers)
The responder was Jean Claude Louis of Janos Canada/Caribbean. He talked about the plight of Haitian Journalists and their communities. Janos has a number of future projects focused on Haitian stories. Jean mentioned a site focused on children’s stories: “Voice of the Children“(in Kreyol). I mentioned that Carel Pedre, a Haitian radio announcer collaborated on a CrisisCamp project:The New Haiti Project.
The audience was happy to hear that CrisisCommons will be released a CrisisCamp After Action Report about our activities: a project that I contributed consultant work to CrisisCommons. One other question asked us whether we had contacts in Haiti during our effort. I responded that our value is in supporting the existing Crisis Response Organizations. The report will be released in the coming weeks.
Communication and Volunteers
Presented by Heather Leson and Brian Chick
January 10, 2011
Each of the presenters provided their lessons learned and perspectives. Humanitarian aid in Haiti was a difficult and, at times, daunting, endeavor. All of the presentations will be posted on the York University site in the coming days.
This is a time of reflection for anyone whose life was touched by the emergency response efforts in Haiti. Last night I watched TVO’s program: “Inside Disaster“. The volunteers and Haitians provided an overwhelming picture of life just days after the earthquake. I remain in awe of the efforts of humanitarian workers and hope that some day new media and communications volunteers can truly make a difference and assist.
I’m on an adventure to learn more about open governance for communities. For the past 10 months, I’ve volunteered with many amazing people to build CrisisCommons. We are a new volunteer technical community aimed at helping crowdsource information and technology in times of crisis. Learning and researching practices for open communities has brought me near and far talking with technical communities such as Mozilla or my peers who attended the International Conference on Crisis Mapping. I’ve spoken with experts at Creative Commons and with consultant David Eaves. As a co-lead for the CrisisCommons.org Community Working Group, I consider it a priority to learn about community governance.
Fortunately, I found and enrolled in the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) Open Governance course. We collaborate online and learn from each other. In the coming weeks, I will be posting items for the course.
What do Baboons, transgenders, and bent fox ears have in common with Open Governance of Communities?
Our first week’s assignment was to write about Radiolab’s podcast: New Normal? The show seeks to identify change triggers in communities. Using two separate scientific studies, they pose the question that a baboon troupe and a breed of foxes can change with alterations to patterns resulting in culling aggressive creatures. Another example talks about the town of Silvertown, Oregon accepting a gradual change of a transgender resident. “Under the right circumstances, a small town can change.” What can trigger change in a community?
What are some of the norms in communities you are a participant in that affect governance of that community?
CrisisCommons is just beginning to formalize our strategic governance. It is both flexible and fragile. As an open community we respond to governance questions via our CrisisCommons google group. There is also a wiki open for edits.
The norm is that there is no norm yet. Anyone can contribute and the decisions are in flux.
The same stands for CrisisCamps. We have some model examples to share. We are working on CrisisCamp in a Box – a project to help mentor and share camp standards. Again, the norm is that all content is open for discussion and change.
How are these norms communicated to new joiners?
We need to work how to communicate norms to new joiners. Our community culture is evolving with each response action. We try to mentor new CrisisCamp cities. When it comes to individual volunteers, we need to improve on communicating norms and facilitating volunteer experiences.
How important is it to explicitly state the norms? How much can be picked up from “observing”?
We know that standards would help our community, but too much structure might not be accepted. There is a balance yet to be struck between more governance and less governance proponents. CrisisCommons needs to set a minimum frame of what and when we will respond and vice versa. This discussion is ongoing, but we know that clarity will help us grow.
Observing norms? Well, our community is evolving fast. I actually find this question hard. We need to make it more stable and clear so that there is potential for a volunteer to be able to “observe norms”. I consider that a 6 month goal for our community.
Note: Radiolab is partially funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. CrisisCommons is currently preparing our trustee proposal for the same organization. Small world.
Crowdsourcing during a Crisis is evolving. Here are some of the amazing activities that you can volunteer your knowledge and technical skills to help manage information, maps, and development. We may not save people and the geopolitical situation is very uncertain, however, using our skills may make a difference. If not today, then someday.
Reading articles about the plight in Pakistan from the Telegraph (UK) really provide some context. The UN and World Bank are also providing great communications about their activities.
Think of these activities as modeling: ASCII art evolved to HD Games. Each layer of knowledge, development and information that we collaborate and crowdsource can build a new future of aid. Maybe, just, maybe we might be able to help someone now. This motivates us all to try.
CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who help people in times and places of crisis. If you can use the Internet, a word processor, a cell phone or any other kind of technology, you can help. Right now virtually online or during one of our many CrisisCamps around the world!
CrisisCamp Cambridge and CrisisCamp London had their first CrisisCamp last weekend. They continue to spearhead efforts. There are talks about France and Australia. Folks from Canada and the US have been supporting our UK friends. CrisisCamp Calgary and CrisisCamp Montreal have also been fully engaged for the past two weeks.
CrisisCamp – Pakistan 2010 Floods
Mappers are waiting for Hi-res satellite maps of the affected regions. Folks are using existing maps, SMS notifications and amazing innovation.
Ushahidi wrote a great blog post on how to crowdmap and the situation in Pakistan.
If you want to learn more, join the CrisisMappers googleggroups or OpenStreetMap Forums. (OpenStreetMap’s Humanitarian OSM Team investigating a response). The mailing lists are very noisy, but the discussions about open source, humanitarian aid, “do no harm”, collaboration and more are very engaging.
Two great efforts to manage information with wiki:
(There is some talk about merging CrisisWiki and Pakistan.wikia.)
The Twitter hashtag is #pkfloods. Search #pkfloods and you will find a wealth of information and calls to action. Many of the organizations mentioned in this post are using twitter for volunteer outreach, education, and mapping reports.
NEW: CrisisCamp Paris set up a live tweet/liveblog for #PKfloods:
Live Tweet/Liveblog from Canalblog
Ch16.org combines tweets, blogs etc
Tweak the Tweet from University of Colorado focuses on refining the signal to noise ratio with veracity during crisis response. They are an amazing group.
Learn how to use Twitter to help manage crisisdata.
Sahana is a open source disaster management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.
They have set up an instance
A new SitRep module has been built to manage:
* Flood Reports
* Assessments from World Food Program
* School Reports
Sahana is looking for data entry and Python help.
Google’s Crisis Response Team has released Person Finder and Resource Finder to provide help.
And more Social Media and Information Volunteering
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a YouTube channel dedicated Pakistan? It would be amazing if there was a channel dedicated to the humanitarian groups and their story to help. What about the diaspora in Canada, US, UK, and around the world?
Add any video links to the Crisis Commons wiki and please tweet them out with the #pkfloods tag.
Understanding Pakistan, her history and her people is really paramount. Knowledge is power.. I am looking for the best links on Pakistan to share with all the communities. Help us learn.
Add these to the Crisis Commons wiki and please tweet them out with the #pkfloods tag.
Please blog, tweet, map and wiki to collaborate. Every voice and action can count. Every volunteer can help with a computer. Maybe you will inspire someone else to volunteer.
My inbox is full and I am so proud to be engaged with such bright people. Unfortunately, I’m focused on a personal project and don’t have the bandwidth to create a CrisisCamp Pakistan right now. I would spend every waking hour doing all of the above. I can however blog and spread the word.
Change the world: You can too!
Technical communications is a fine juggle. On a daily basis, I collaborate between customers, technical teams, and management to deliver complex projects, build customer partnerships, activate change, create concise content, document processes, and train staff. It is very fast paced and rewarding once you learn to negotiate all the moving parts.
For three years, I’ve written for the OpenSRS SaaS dashboard. My current position as technical communicator did not exist before I started. We created it from scratch and tailored it to meet the needs of our highly technical Internet customers. With a narrow field of expertise, I have few peers who focus solely on communicating uptime with real-time incident reports. I follow SaaS dashboard communications and industry blogs that discuss outages and uptime. Learning to be an Internet industry leader in technical communications requires constant comparison. I discovered Lenny Ratinsky’s blog Transparent Uptime and was happy to have my work featured as a successful model.
Recently, Lenny presented about software-as-service (SaaS) dashboards at Velocity 2010. Here are some of his thoughts on being a successful technical communications organization:
I think we need to consider the next iteration of technical communications. As most of us know, technical staff on video is a new concept for most development and operations teams. Communications, development and documentation are all changing with agile software development. Customers demand that companies communicate the messages in a human, timely and accessible method. Screencasts and videos are often used for product launches. It follows that screencasts and video streaming will move to technical incident communications and be one offering of the next SaaS dashboard model. Internet customers are savvy and they want real-time technical details. Companies will add this to their communications suite allowing customers to receive their uptime reports via Twitter, blogs (RSS), video streaming and live chats. Incorporating video into technical incident, change and escalation processes will be very interesting. It will be the responsibility of technical communicators to manage, to train and to assist this exciting transition. Changing to meet the information and communication methods will be a new spin on transparency.
Thanks Lenny!
h
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