Events

1Jun

Prepare to RhoK

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.

Prepare to RHoK
View more presentations from Heather Leson

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

25May

Ready for RHoK Toronto?

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

17May

Help Feed RHoK Toronto Hackers

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













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

9Apr

Meet-up for National Volunteer Week: Passion.Action.Impact

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:

  • Update on mbfloods.ca and skfloods.ca
  • Introduction to Masas.ca
  • Patrice will provide a report back from SMEM camp
  • David will give a report back from CrisisCommons core team meeting
  • Project decision and next event planning

    • 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.

    10Mar

    May the Stream Be With Us: My Virtual SXSW Sessions

    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

    8Mar

    Models for Preparedness – CrisisCamp Toronto

    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

    2Mar

    Podcamp Toronto 2011

    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:

    Crowdsourcing Tech for Social good and Crisis Response
    View more presentations from Heather Leson

    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

    18Feb

    Social Media in Canadian Emergencies – CrisisCamp Toronto

    The CrisisCamp Toronto team has been working hard to prepare for CrisisCamp Social Media in Canadian Emergencies. This morning I was delighted to receive some great response from the IAEM – Canada mailing list. Our goal is to connect the spirit of Canadian startup innovation, internet savvy and emergency managers.

    When: Saturday, February 19, 2011 10am – 5pm Where: University of Toronto, OISE 4th fl

    Here is a list of Communication channels to participate during CrisisCamp Toronto.

    LiveChat- Social Media in Canadian Emergencies on Saturday, February 19, 2010,
    14:00ET, 11:00PT for one hour

    We’re hosting a tweetchat (live chat on twitter.com). If you search twitter.com for #CSMEM you can follow all the comments. If you have a twitter account, please use the hashtag #CSMEM and add your province code. (Eg. SK, NFLD). This session will be held in both English and French. We will have translators to help. It is our hope to host these regularly. Our American friends use the #SMEM hashtag.

    Twitter hashtags

    Follow us on Twitter : @crisiscampTO
    #CSMEM
    #CSMEMchat

    Also see: @crisiscamp, @crisiscommons and #SMEM

    Liveblog

    I saw a demo of Scribblelive at Hacks/Hackers this week. I think it is a great fit for CrisisCamp Toronto’s event. It is all set up and ready to start posting content tomorrow morning. I also downloaded the free Iphone app. If it works for this event, I’ll be recommending it for more events in the future both in Canada and globally.

    Ustream

    We will try to stream and record the morning sessions. This will help other folks learn. Again, it will be active around 10:00 ET on Saturday.


    Live Videos by Ustream

    Schedule for the day

    10 – 10:30ET – Introduction
    10:30 – 1:00ET Morning session

    Education Stream
    We will run these three sessions, three times. You can pick which one you want to attend.
    1. Emergency Management 101/Emergency Management in Canada
    2. GIS/Mapping 101
    3. Social Media 101/CrisisMapping 101

    Dev and Tool Testing Stream
    *Crowdmap/Ushahidi 101- test case and cross-training
    *Ushahidi small code features – TBD

    Other activities:
    *Prep for #CSMEM Twitchat
    *Canadian Virtual Volunteer Team planning: help us brainstorm credentials and organization for this idea.

    1:00ET Lunch

    Afternoon: 1:30 – 4:30pm
    2:00-3:00ET – Live chat on Crisis Commons and Social Media in Emergency Management (skype – Heather Leson – Twitter #csmem)

    1:30 – 2:00 Brainstorming ideas with Melanie on CrisisCommons Canada activities
    3:00 – 5:00 ET

    1. Project Demos
    CrisisCamp Toronto wants to pick a project to work on. Demo your project idea in 5 minutes, then we will vote
    2. Project Planning
    We will build out the project requirements and next steps
    3.Ongoing work playing with tools will continue in the other rooms.

    5pm Event complete.

    Join our CrisisCamp TO Mailing list

    10Feb

    OpenUN and the Future of Real-Time at SMW

    The age of real-time has changed media, humanitarian aid and my life’s path. I am a community manager and communications emergency/incident manager by trade who also volunteers with digital crisis response. Social Media Week has provided great opportunities to attend events in person or participate virtually. Today I am attending OpenUN and digging into how media and crisis response organizations work with open data, real-time data and digital media changes. The way we obtain news and participate in our local and global communities is evolving. It is exciting to have my career and volunteer work merge. And, also to have the chance to learn and engage online.

    The United Nations GlobalPulse is participating in Social Media Week with “Open UN: Engagement in the age of Real-Time”. #openUN is livestreaming right now.

    PSFK on Future of Real-Time trends

    PSFK presented their trend analysis about the future of real-time, including the example app called mappiness:

    PSFK presents Future Of Real-Time
    View more presentations from PSFK.

    PSFK posted, free for download, their UN report on The Future of Real-Time.

    Robert Kilpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse

    Robert Kilpatrick presented about UN Global Pulse and how they are working to embrace real-time information for development. He cited the opportunity for the use of citizen reporting and how the UN is researching how to collaborate with digital volunteers and communities of interest. Some of my favourite quotes from his keynote:

    10Feb

    Canadian and American Red Cross Talk Strategy at SMW

    “Inspire people to do actionable items using social media.” Our CrisisCommons Canada team likes to call it Applied Social Media. We create,do stuff…and talk about it.

    Karen Snider of the Canadian Red Cross and Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross presented their Social Media Case Studies at Social Media Week and the Toronto Social Media Club on February 9, 2011.

    Karen and the Canadian Red Cross team are great supporters of CrisisCommons Canada. We have a common goal of sharing information and digital volunteerism. Karen introduced the new CRC Social Media team that is gearing up to support CRC activities across the country. (Their twitter handles are in the screen capture below.) We are very excited to continue our conversations with CRC and find new ways to collaborate as digital volunteers and partners. In the past year, the Canadian Red Cross has been testing social media strategy for small projects. More details can be found on the RedCrossTalks Blog.

    Last night was my first time meeting Wendy Harman in person. She is a leader in SMEM for social good and has inspired me for the past year. The power of the SMEM network is that we built connections online and share many people in common. Wendy created the American Red Cross’s Social Media Strategy Handbook. This is available free online to use and remix. We truly look forward to more SMEM conversations in Canada and with our Amercian friends.

    Next time I will set up a liveblog for events. In the meantime, here are some of the snippets about Canadian and American Red Cross social media case studies:



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