Text on Techs

A map + GPS + volunteers + development = Map Kibera. My imagination of technology and mapping has been framed by a few strong examples of leadership, especially after meeting Jamie Lundine and seeing her speak at the International Network of CrisisMappers Conference.

Soon, I will have the honour to meet Jamie and her coworkers in the Kibera area. One of their projects, Voice of Kibera, uses Ushahidi. I consider this one of the more important aspects of my journey. Development using technology has its hurdles. Really, it is people who make these amazing projects happen.

Can you help Map Kibera:

Turn Maps into Action: Donate to the Map Kibera Project via Global Giving

Total Funding Received to Date: $1,715
Remaining Goal to be Funded: $2,285
Total Funding Goal: $4,000

Ushahidi: from volunteering to working

When I traveled to Ireland in 2009, I decided that I wanted to live a more meaningful life. For various reasons, I had been holding back on living my dreams and by my values. These are freeing “on paper” concepts. My family worked hard to give me the rich opportunity to do the type of work that inspires. This decision and the journey since has been incredible and, at times, very complex. Volunteering has lead me to find my calling of technology for social good and I work with Ushahidi. Now, I am constantly reminding myself to make sure that I leave time for breathing, while I focus on building community. Coworkers and the greater volunteer community of developers, translators, project managers and idea hackers leave me awestruck on a daily basis. It is motivation to do.more.act, and to take breathing lessons.

Kenya

I arrive in Nairobi on Friday, August 19th and return to Canada on September 3, 2011. While in Nairobi, I will co-work at the iHUB, run a few events, including testing Toolboxes to help deployers, and, most of all, learn as much as possible about Nairobi, Kenya, and Africa. I consider it a privilege to work for a innovative Kenyan company. And, going to Kenya will most likely alter my life as every touch point on this path has done. I am ready. Nervous because it is the big unknown, but excited and ready.

Watching the news and supporting various donation campaigns for the people of Somalia and the Horn of Africa is also on my mind. I have so much respect for humanitarian groups and encourage people to support their efforts to help. Every person can change the world and help their neighbour, even those half way around the world.

Heather

Competitors build life-saving apps for disasters and emergencies in global weekend challenge

Teams at Random Hacks of Kindness Toronto “hackathon” create new mobile and online tools

WHAT: Hackathon to solve humanitarian problems & pitch competition
WHEN: Pitch competition & judging: Sun., June 5 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Hackathon: Ends Sun., June 5 at 3 p.m.
WHERE: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), 5th floor, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto
WHO: Experts in climate, disaster, crisis; software, design, Internet, media, more (see below).

TORONTO, June 5, 2011 /CNW/ – Disaster professionals working with volunteer software makers in Toronto yesterday began building a set of mobile and online emergency aid tools whose prototypes they aim to complete today. This evening, competing teams will vie for prizes in a pitch competition judged by a panel of experts.

The teams at Random Hacks of Kindness Toronto (RHoK Toronto) are among some 1,000 people in 18 cities across 6 continents participating in a global weekend-long hacking marathon, or “hackathon,” that unites technologists and humanitarian experts in an effort to solve pressing problems.

“It’s unbelievable that the teams are able to create these mobile apps and online tools in less than 48 hours,” said Heather Leson, lead organizer of RHoK Toronto. “By dinner time last night, one team here had already programmed a working prototype!”

Projects

Competitors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in downtown Toronto are working on six projects:

The Random Hacks of Kindness volunteer community — founded in 2009 by Google, Microsoft, NASA, Yahoo and the World Bank — has produced mobile and online software tools that were deployed after disasters in Chile, Haiti and Japan.

Pitch competition Sunday afternoon

“This afternoon’s pitch competition will let the teams in Toronto show off their work — and give the most innovative ones bragging rights,” said RHoK Toronto manager Melanie Gorka. “The best pitches will also win prizes that include a private lunch with leaders at Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser; high speed computer networking equipment from Linksys by Cisco, security software from Symantec, and more.”

The Toronto teams will also be able to receive coaching to develop and enhance their pitch and presentation skills, and consult with special guests who are experts in crisis and emergency aid, before they showcase their projects in front of the pitch competition judges:

Special guests:

“The best part of Random Hacks of Kindness is that no matter which teams win Toronto’s pitch competition, all the participants learn, mentor and share in their world. Plus, some projects will continue and maybe become fully built,” Heather Leson said.

ABOUT RANDOM HACKS OF KINDNESS TORONTO:

RHoK Toronto is an ad hoc committee of civic-minded citizens with professional expertise across a broad range of industry sectors. The first Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Toronto was held in December 2010.

Community partners new and old have donated space, food, funds, prizes, services and tools to help make the event a success. Donations may be made through the RHoK.org Toronto site or by contacting the organizers. Current sponsors include: Camaraderie, Centre for Social Innovation, CIRA, Cisco, GlobalNews.ca, Jonah Group, Lady Atelier, Marketcrashers, MaRS Discovery District, Aaron McGowan, Microsoft Canada, Net Change Week, Nitido Inc., Rightsleeve, Symantec, Syncapse, Tropo, Tucows Inc., University of Toronto and Yahoo Canada.

RHoK Toronto is online at: www.rhok.org/event/toronto

RHoK Toronto on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RHoKTO

RHoK Toronto hashtag: #RHoKTO

ABOUT RANDOM HACKS OF KINDNESS:

Random Hacks of Kindness was founded in 2009 by Google, Microsoft, NASA, Yahoo and the World Bank. The worldwide innovation community has seen thousands of volunteers work on 120 open source software projects, including tools used in the Haiti and Chile earthquakes in 2010, the recent Japan quake and tsunami, and landslide-prone parts of the Caribbean. “Open source” means the computer code is available for anyone to use and build upon.

Global Random Hacks of Kindness community: www.rhok.org

On Twitter: www.twitter.com/randomhacks

Twitter hashtag: #RHoK

For further information:

OR TO SCHEDULE INTERVIEWS:

Melanie Gorka or Heather Leson
melanie.gorka AT gmail DOT com heatherleson AT gmail DOT com
Twitter: @melgorka Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/leftbutton

Only 3 more sleeps until Random Hacks of Kindness Toronto.

I prepared this to help our 90 (!) local participants get acquainted with RHoK and how to make the most out of the event.

Our RHoK Toronto team is working hard to get all the details prepared. We are talking to folks in Nairobi, Seattle, Bangalore and Melbourne to see if we can have Ustream dates to meet each other

Global collaboration for a hackathon is a mash-up. More tonight after our pre-RhoK meet-up.

We are almost at 3rd RHoK from the Sun!

Heather

With just over a week to go, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) Toronto is gearing up. We have some updates for participants, potential sponsors and supporters.

What is RHoK?

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a joint initiative between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank, with the objective of creating solutions that have an impact in disaster management and crisis response. Together they hold semi-annual simultaneous global hackathons (marathon coding events) over one weekend. The event brings together subject matter experts from all over the world in software development, open data, project management, graphic design, videography, emergency management, technology, research, knowledge translation, logistics, just to name a few. Also, see the RHoK global press release.

Before RHoK

RHoK Toronto has 50 participants registered. Won’t you Join us?

Pre-RHoK event for participants:

We invite you to attend our RHoK Warm-up

Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Time: 19:00 – 21:00 ET
Location: Camaraderie
Address: 102 Adelaide St E.

Meet your fellow hackers, ask questions about the event and brainstorm on the problem definitions.

Recruiting Sponsors:

Our amazing sponsors are providing food and prizes. We are happy to announce CIRA, Jonah Group, Syncapse, University of Toronto and Camaraderie are joining us as sponsors for the second year. Thanks! And, to Marketcrashers/Hackernest for joining us with a prize donation.

If you are a potential sponsor willing to contribute prizes or donate funds for food, please drop us a line at rhokto at Gmail dot com or contact heather at textontechs dot com for more details. We commit to account and use all funds for the event. As per RHoK Global guidelines, we will donate any unused funds to the Canadian Red Cross.

In return for your kindness, we can add your organizational name and logo to the RHoK website, include your name in our media outreach, add postings to our job board and provide you with post event blog content.

Share a Problem Definition:

The RHoK Global team and our local curation team are working on problem definitions. You can submit ideas on the RHoK site or for either of these two call-to-actions:

Calling all Health2.0 Enthusiasts for RHoK, June 4th & 5th

Calling all Climate Change and Open Data Enthusiasts

RHoK Main Event Schedule: June 4 – 5, 2011

RHoK Toronto Location:
University of Toronto
OISE
252 Bloor Street West, 5th floor
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V5

Schedule:

Saturday, June 4, 2011
8:00 – 9:00am Arrive and enjoy breakfast
9:00 -9:30 Introductions and Questions
9:30 – 11:30 Pick your problem definitions and teams. Start brainstorming
11:30 – 1:00 Lunch
1:00 – 5:00 Coding, doing, brainstorming
5:00 – 6:00 Stand-up – Quick Discussion about your team’s work
6:00 – 7:00 pm Dinner
7:00 – ongoing (Optional to stay late. Otherwise, we’ll see you the next day)
Midnight – home

Sunday, June 5, 2011
8:00 – 9:00 am Arrive and enjoy breakfast
9-11:30 More coding
11:30 – 12:30 Lunch
12:30 – 3:00 Go teams!
3:00 – 5:30 Demos and Prizes
6:00pm End of event

What to bring:
laptop, electrical power bar, headphones, phone and charger, video camera, camera, webcam, demo equipment, coffee mug, a smile and an open mind.

How to prepare:
Review the problem definitions on the RHoK website. The definitions are still being created, so keep checking back. Please take a moment and familiarize yourself with all the tools available to you online before the main event. Some of the tools we might use to collaborate are: IRC, Skype, Github, Wiki, Google Docs, Ustream, Twitter, Facebook and Piratepad. All hacks created are open source.

RHoK Toronto needs some help:

Volunteer run community events always need many hands to make it successful. Here are some ways you can help:

• There will be errands for food and supplies. Can you help on Friday evening or Saturday for logistics (registration, food delivery, etc.)?
• We seek a sponsor or volunteer who can provide standard equipment for demos (including mobile devices), a video camera and microphones. This includes some onsite support and set-up. We want the hackers to be heard and to shine. You could really make a difference by lending your expertise.

The RHoK Toronto team:

RHoK Toronto is a collective of talented folks working hard to make this happen:

David Black, Melanie Gorka, Brian Chick, Christine Crowley, Amy Coulterman, Jessica Hazen, James Walker, Aaron McGowan and myself.

Also, we are thankful for all our supporters who are sending outreach for participants and sponsors. A special thanks to Greg Wilson for everything he does.

See you soon,

Heather

What is RHoK

Random Hacks of Kindness is a community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to humanitarian aid, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. This is about technology helping people. On June 4th and 5th, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, HP and the World Bank, through their initiative Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), will bring together thousands of people in over 18 locations around the globe to create open solutions that can save lives and alleviate suffering.

We would love if you joined us: Register for RHoK 3.0 Toronto

RHoK 3.0 will focus on the issue of climate change. We’re hoping that this year, RHoK 3.0 Toronto is just as successful as our inaugural RHoK 2.0 in December. Over 50 hackers, citizens, designers, writers, researchers and open data enthusiasts came out in Toronto and joined 1000 others, collaborating with RHoK events in 21 cities and Open Data Hackathon Day events in 73 cities, all around the world.
We could not have done this without the generous support of our sponsors. Last year, sponsors donated space, food, tools, services and funds which helped make the event a success.

Help Feed RHoK Hackers and give them prizes.
RHoK Toronto 3.0 is a Satellite event for the RHoK global event. We are responsible to drum up local sponsorship support for food and prizes. This time, we are looking for sponsorship for a pre-event reception, to provide meals or funding for meals to participants and prizes for the top 3 innovative solutions or ‘hacks’.

In exchange for your involvement in the RHoK initiative, we will do the following:

• Showcase your logo internationally on the RHoK global website.
• Mention you in the media and press releases for the Toronto event.
• Provide you with space at the event for your pamphlets or promotional materials.
• Offer recruitment opportunities through our job board and your presence at the event.
• Provide you with blog content about the event

Sponsorship Options

Fill the Hacker Candy Jar $100.00 Feed the Hackers Lunch $250.00 Buy the Hackers Dinner $500.00 Opening Night Party Sponsor $750.00

Please let me or our contacts know if you have any questions or suggestions. Any donated funds will be used for food and prizes. Any funds that we do not use will be given to the Red Cross. RHoK global requires that we provide full disclosure on accounting for events. We will happily do so. The Donation button is on Brian Chick’s Left Button Solutions business account. Brian is a core volunteer for this event.

Hope you can join us.

Thanks,

Heather Leson
RHoK Toronto Coordinator

The CrisisCamp Toronto team is holding a casual meet-up in honour of Canada’s National Volunteer Week: April 10 – 16, 2011:

CrisisCamp Casual meet up:
Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011
Time: 19:00 – 21:00pm ET
Location: Mick E. Fynn’s (In the back room.) 45 Carlton Street, Toronto, ON

Agenda:

Note: We will be voting on any decisions made by the community.

For updates on our CrisisCamp activities, see our CrisisCommonsToronto google group or our CrisisCampto Twitter account.

Hope to see you there.

Heather L.

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

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.

h