Events

4Feb

Snowmap and upcoming Social Media/Crisis Management Events

Mapping and strategies for Social Media in emergencies/crisis in Canada are new concepts. I am working with the CrisisCommons Canada team to bring crowdsourcing home. We have a few events and beta tests on the go. This is the beginning. I believe in the power of Internet communities and an open web making a difference in our country and the world.

Snow in Toronto – Crowdmap.com Beta

CrisisCamp Toronto set up a map to help Toronto folks report about this week’s snowstorm. We decided on Monday night. Melanie Gorka, Brian Chick, David Black and I built out the map, process and created a press release. Using the format of the Crisismappers.net Standby Task Force, we took the best practices and fit them to our team. We reached out the the CrisisCamp Toronto communities and our own networks. In 5 days, we had 42 posts, 620 unique visitors and about 30 re-tweets. Our goals were to test our process and create a Canadian proof-of-concept. We will prepare an After-Action-Report with the full results. The response we received from Ontario, Toronto and Canadian government officials and the media was fantastic. We are working on preparedness strategies with our partners. Stay tuned for more initiatives. Here is our Snowmap:

CrisisCamp Toronto is hosting a Social Media / Emergency Management event on Feb. 19th

We invite Emergency Managers and New Media Technologists to join us and share their skills. This SM/EM (Social Media/Emergency Management) event is to help our community be more prepared and to build partnerships between Canadian emergency management, NGO, project managers, software developers, technical experts and social media folks. This includes GIS/OSM training. There is a second stream of activity to make and test tools.

As well, we are taking project submissions. Each person will present their idea. Then, the group will vote on the project and begin to brainstorm on the next steps. We want to build solutions for Canadian crisis and emergencies.

On a personal note, I am super excited that Sara Farmer of UN Global Pulse and the CrisisMappers team will be joining us. She formerly ran CrisisCamp in London. The CrisisCommons community is a global family. We aim to exchange ideas. It is a great chance to learn from someone who has been working on some amazing projects.

Random Hacks of Kindness – Survey and Canadian plans

All participants of Canada’s first Random Hacks of Kindness event received a survey this week. The RHoK team is gearing up for 2011. Watch this space for announcements. RHoK Global encourages partnerships with universities for upcoming events. We found great success partnering with University of Toronto. And, we can’t wait to share with other cities.

15Jan

RHoK follow-up: Population Centers in Disaster

At Random Hacks of Kindness 2.0 (December 2010), volunteers from CrisisCamp TO, RHoK Seattle, Humanity Road, Sahana and OpenStreetMap joined to work on a project called: Populations Centers in Disaster. Each of our groups continue to commit time and knowledge to complete this project.

Three days after the devastating quake struck Haiti, the towns of Jacmel and Leogane were still isolated — no communication or transportation — though we knew people were there: 128,000 in Leogane and 40,000 in Jacmel. A data query tool that identifies high concentrations of population may help volunteer technology communities with their communication efforts. A lack of communication inside a population zone points to a problem and the query tools being developed may help speed up and improve volunteer contributions to situational awareness.

@Redcrossmom @CNN I know you have lots of crew on the ground in PAP but very little news is coming from outside of PAP – Jacmel & Leogane need help. (Twitter, January 15, 2010).

Situational Awareness

At the onset of a disaster, time lost means lives lost. As virtual volunteers, Humanity Road’s first response step is to identify affected hospitals. In an event that impacts a large geographic area, we need to quickly triage the situation and determine which population centers are affected. Part of this decision process involves identifying areas of population concentrations. For this, we have been turning first to Wikipedia to identify and understand the local area. Using this approach to search for information is manual, time intensive and requires multiple keystrokes of the same type of information. Manual research of standard information means time lost and that equates to lives lost. We look for cities within range of the epicenter of the earthquake or event, populations of those cities, hospitals within the impacted area, GPS coordinates, and local government structures for towns, counties and districts. Sometimes the absence of news does not indicate the absence of need.

RHoK

(RHoK Toronto, December 4, 2010. Photo by Cynthiagould.com)

The Project

We need a tool that would allow us to extract from Wikipedia into a Google Doc – the population centers for a defined area – such as City, District, Country. This would improve our volunteer response time. Humanity Road has previously worked with Sahana, Google, Gisli Olafsson and others to determine project needs.

The RHoK problem descriptions submitted included an outline for a query tool that would return the population centers within a boundary. The bonus tool would return results of hospitals in an impacted area, including contact information and GPS.

The RhoK Toronto team focused on the Hospital solution, while the Seattle team focused on the Population centers solution. The teams collected the data into Google fusion tables. By the end of the weekend, they had collected and stored a significant amount data that will help in future events.

The Next Steps

Data will reside within Sahana Eden, and be exported (Google Fusion Doc) for directed use by Humanity Road. Google Fusion Doc may have data limit parameters. The tool will help non-super users volunteering for Resource Management. Final product will reside on the Sahana database accompanied by the capability to extract specific hospital datasets.

The project needs presentation tools to help spontaneous volunteers work with the data. This includes criteria for data updates, to include the notes on impacts of infrastructure, operational impacts (damage, flood etc) of the hospitals query, developing the functional query for the populations center, and determining server space, and file formats for storing the data in open source format for all to access and use.

How you can Help:

1. Server space
2. DB specialist/developer to create query:finds objects (populations, host) within latitude and longitude radius. A query that finds “x” within radius of lat and long within the database
3. Support for a radius query to Sahana Eden

Our current project status:

1. Colin: talked with his Toronto – OSM folks about doing a OSM location hospital query
2. Heather/Cat/Pat: write a blog post and being outreach program
3. Terrance/Pat: will work on Sahana Eden component
4. Cat: will identify primary data fields
5. Colin/Pat/Terrance: share script
6. Pat: will start investigating the Final product- Sahana db, but with capability to have a hospital db can be pulled for a specifics.
7. Willow: Seattle team is on stand-by for the next steps.

We welcome any help you can provide. Contact: Heather (heather at textontechs dot com) or Cat (PeacefulIntent at humanityroad dot org)

Post by Cat Graham (Humanity Road) and Heather Leson (CrisisCampTO/RHoK TO)

12Jan

Haiti Seminar: Communications and Volunteers

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.

Presenting at York University
(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

Communication and Volunteers

View more presentations from Heather Leson.

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.

8Jan

Haiti – One Year Anniversary

Once you volunteer your knowledge, time and energy for humanitarian aid and response, your life will change. As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake, there will be reflections, reports, seminars, meet-ups and, most of all, conversations. I am committed to volunteering and working in the field of technology for social good and technology for crisis response.

Here are some of the events that I will be participating:

York University Seminar: “The HAITI Earthquake of Jan 2010: LESSONS LEARNED” (Monday, January 10, 2011)

York University’s Disaster and Emergency Management Program, School of Administrative Studies in Collaboration with Emergency Management Ontario (EMO) are hosting this event. Brian Chick and I will present on the panel discussion: “Role of the Local, National and International Media; Communication Challenges; Reality, Myths, and Perception Issues“.

Some of the topics I will cover include:

the new volunteer
volunteer technical communities
CrisisCamp and CrisisCommons movement
lessons learned on a global level

Brian will cover the social media tool-set and lessons learned on a local level.

CrisisCamp Toronto event – Thursday, January 13 2010.

Join us for CrisisCamp Toronto’s One-Year Anniversary Meet-up. Register for the event.

crisiscampto-haiti

On January 13, 2010, I joined the first CrisisCommons global conference call and began organizing CrisisCamp Toronto: Canada’s first CrisisCommons community. CrisisCamp Toronto started with Twitter and Facebook outreach. By January 19th, we had a core team of Toronto volunteers and the first event scheduled for January 23, 2010. We held 5 events in response to the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.

As a young organization, we know there is room to grow. Our team will plan our training and projects for the upcoming year. Building on our learning, we will continue to foster our community in Toronto and Canada. We are the new breed of volunteers learning as fast as we can to meet emergency responders and humanitarian groups with our technology and social media knowledge.

CrisisCommons Community Call
On the one year anniversary of the first 5 CrisisCamps, our community will hold a global conference call on Sunday, January 16, 2011. More details soon.

Heather

1Jan

Bushfire Connect: An Australian Ushahidi project

Bushfire Connect is a project to help Australians crowdsource reports about bushfires. The Australian bushfire season is during December and January. The Bushfire Connect team is monitoring the current bushfires on their Twitter account: @bushfireconnect.

They need help testing their Ushahidi site. In June 2010 for Random Hacks of Kindness 1.0 in June 2010 (Sydney, Australia), I had the opportunity to meet these dedicated volunteers. The project continues to evolve and will be launching soon.

bushfire-connect1

Keren Flavell, Initiator and Online Media Producer and Anthony Joseph, Developer on Bushfire Connect:

What is it?
Bushfire Connect is an online bushfire crisis service presenting real time information submitted by local community members and emergency agencies. Our goal is to establish a reliable, dynamic and timely resources for people in fire threatened or damaged areas to enhance and extend the utility of official data sources.

The service has been developed using the ground-breaking Ushahidi platform, a geo-spatial communication system implemented after disasters in Haiti, Chile and, most recently, Pakistan.

Who is behind it?
Establishing this tool here in Australia in preparation for the bushfire season has been the mission of a small team of volunteers from a range of backgrounds. Spatial information strategist, Maurits van der Llugt, teamed with online media producer, Keren Flavell, to initially kick start the project. Once it was worked on intensively at Random Hacks of Kindness, technical experts Daniela Fernandez and Anthony Joseph continued to work on the project. ICT strategist and Drumbeat Australia organiser, Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein, has joined the team as an advisor.

Where are we at now?
The project took shape after the Random Hacks of Kindness event in Sydney, where the first installation was deployed. Since then, the project has continued to be refined to include features such as submitting reports by SMS and registering to receive alerts in specific geographic regions.

We are in discussions with emergency agencies and media organisations about potential partnerships. A not-for-profit is being established to receive funds for further development and to keep the project independent from any single agency or organisation.

What do we need?
Bushfire Connect needs to funding and partners in order to create a robust and effective tool for community driven crisis alerts during the bushfire season.

We are looking to raise funds for the pilot testing and fire season preparation phases of development.

Next Steps?
The service is now ready for pilot testing by the community. We want to refining the user experience by reviewing icons and wording of the current site. There needs to be load testing of the servers and appropriate server enhancements to deal with high demand. We also need to build a volunteer moderation taskforce through recruitment and training.

Further Information
The Ushahidi blog featured their work in October.

Canadian forest fires

Wildfires, bushfires, and forest fires are a global problem. Using crowdsourcing, there is an opportunity to use technology to make a difference. What if all the lessons learned from each of these projects were used to build one simulator and one pattern for any country or region to use?

I grew up in northern Canada where forest fires are a large problem. Learning about Bushfire Connect while attending RHoK 1.0 in Sydney and monitoring the Ushahidi work that the Russian wildfire team did inspires me. Someday we will bring this technology and crowdsourcing to the Canadian north. All we need is a mobile phone (SMS) plan, an Ushahidi server install and a team of people to work with Canadian authorities to make it happen.

9Dec

RHoK Toronto and Global Wrap-up

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) 2.0 and the Open Data Hackathon Day (ODHD) was held December 4 – 5, 2010 in Toronto, Canada. It was our first Canadian RHoK. Toronto had 52 participants collaborated on eight projects. The RHoK team joined over 1000 participants in 20 cities while the ODHD team had participants in 73 cities.

rhokto
(RHoK Toronto team. Photo by Cynthia Gould)

About the Toronto event

Team video presentations for the RHoKto/ODHD problem definitions .

We were honoured to have Will Pate (World Bank), Joey deVilla (Microsoft Canada), Adam Thody (Architech Solutions), Stephanie Ashton-Smith (Plan Canada) and Ben Lucier (Tucows Inc.) join us as hackathon judges.

The Winners:

1st: Stolen Bicycle Serial Number Validator (ODHD)
2nd: Tweak the Tweet – User Testing (RHoK)
3rd: Payout to Mobile (RHoK)

MVP for being a leader/mentoring folks: Jon Pipitone

Novelty Prizes:

Good Housekeeping- TtT
Ivor Kenk Prize- Bicycle
Bed Bug Award- Where not to rent
Austerity Award- City Budget
CrowdSourced Award- WeAreHelping
Where’s Waldo- Person FInder
Heat Map Award- Population Centers
Geico Gecko Award- Payout to Mobile

Globalnews.ca joined us and wrote about the event.
Mark Kuznicki: Hacking for Good
Melanie Gorka: RHoKing out in Toronto

More Pictures by Ben Lucier and Cynthia Gould.

The full Toronto project from the RHoK wiki.

RHoK around the World

Here are some of the great highlights from RHoK:

*UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon spoke a RHoK NYC and talked about the importance of open source communities collaborating with development groups.
*NPR coverage (with podcast)
*Hack examples from around the world: Aarhus, Denmark (Connectivity Mapper), Berlin (Germany) (Disaster Maps) Lusaka (Zambia) and Jakarta (Indonesia) (Disaster Streaming)
*From the CrisisCommons community blog: Technology volunteers from Crisiscamp Support RHoK events

Our friends with CrisisCamp Paris created a complete RHoK2 social media stream.

Thanks again to all our RHoKto sponsors

Architech Solutions, Camaraderie, CIRA, Global News, Hackto, Happy Worker, Idee Inc., Jonah Group, Left Button Solutions, MacQuarie Group, Microsoft Canada, Planet Geek, Remarkk, Syncapse, TechSoup Canada, Tucows Inc. , Unspace, and University of Toronto.

Thanks again to the RHoKto core team

Special note of thanks to all the amazing Core team members: Mark Kuznicki, Meghann Millard, Sandi Jones, David Desko, David Black, Brian Chick, Melanie Gorka, Leila Boujnane and Christine Crowley. It was an awesome pleasure to make this happen with each of your amazing talents.

Heather

4Dec

Random Hacks of Kindness – Toronto (Day 1)

What an amazing first day of Canada’s first Random Hacks of Kindness. We had a great partnership with the Toronto’s Open Data Hackathon team.

rhok-toronto
(Photo by Cynthia Gould)

Amazing post from the RHoK team with Secretary General of the UN, Ban-Ki Moon, receiving his RHoK t-shirt.

Blog post by Melanie Gorka: RHoKing out in Toronto. She provides highlights on the 7 projects that the ODHD and RHoK teams are collaborating on and captures the solid community vibe.

Raw timelapse of @rhokto day 1 up by Ade Barkah

Check out all the Open Data and RHoK videos on our Youtube channel:

Photos by Ben Lucier
Photos by Cynthia Gould

Steady stream of social media content from CrisisCamp Paris

More details tomorrow.

Heather

15Nov

Drumbeat Overview – The First Date

Mozilla Drumbeat was a hybrid, chaotic event full of engaging people and ideas. I’m still processing, but in one word “Overwhelming“. The only model I can compare Drumbeat to is “The First Date“: new, so full of potential, contradictions, sometimes awkward, and sometimes magical. Trying to balance actions, participatory learning and some brilliant oration/creation is not an easy task. Add to this a deep sense of trying to model new collaboration syncing two sometimes disparate groups: open education and open web/hackers.

Every idea, every event starts somewhere. With CrisisCommons, I am encountering this same clash and collaboration of cultures: emergency planners and new technologists. The same theme exists: we know we have a great idea, we know we want to collaborate, but the space is undefined and a new frontier. We have the power of the Open Web cracking traditional models and providing incentives to keep trying. No one has the right answer on how this will look and how we could build in our respective areas. This is the beauty of being early adopters and change agents. Whether you are brainstorming around open education or open crisis management, there is opportunity to move beyond silos.

The People:
Meeting SJ Klein, Dale Dougherty, Phillip Schmidt, Mitchell Baker and Cathy Davidson was inspiring. Each of these people provided me with head-spinning thoughts about wiki, makers, P2PU, Mozilla’s future and the future of open education. But, I feel like each person I conversed with was a connection to like minds. Thank you to each of the participants for making this event so engaging. There are just too many people to name, but I would like to give mention to three people and their amazing projects/journeys:

Code for America Fellow

Kabissa: space for Change in Africa

Netsquared award for Kabissa Connections.

Learning Goals

Highlights for me:

Scrunchup by Anna Debenham

Badge lab
I spent most of the first day in the Badge lab. I believe that the brainstorming there can potentially help credentials for Volunteer Technical Communities. At times, I struggled with the focus on individual efforts. However, the models built will allow for group collaboration on badges. Communities will be able to create badges and work within the flexible model. It was truly exciting to have concurrent teams of brainstorming and software development. I’ve offered to be a community contact for any beta testing.

Canadian Red Cross: New/Social Media & Emergencies

The Canadian Red Cross: 2010 Provincial Emergency Management Conference was November 7 – 10, 2010. David Black, Melanie Gorka, Brian Chick and I were honoured to present the CrisisCamp/CrisisCommons story.

Our goal was to also demonstrate how local Red Cross organizations and emergency managers could use our lessons learned and leverage social media in their respective areas. I personally enjoyed the question about how would CrisisCamp respond to an potential earthquake in Sudbury. We would contact the Canadian Red Cross and ask how we could be of service. This is the type of collaboration and partnership that volunteer technical communities and crisis response organizations can have. We just need to continue to build relationships in preparedness.

We were also asked how to get started on Twitter. I recommended that people follow the lead of the Canadian Red Cross. Earlier this year, there was a very minor earthquake in Ontario. Immediately after this, John Saunders (Provincial Director Canadian Red Cross), started using Twitter for communications on preparedness safety tips as well as updates on power or other services. He is a trusted expert on Emergency Management and his tweet content would be verified. I his posts to keep my previous workplace informed.

cdnredcross-tweet

Karen Snider, Canadian Red Cross, wrote about our talk here: How Can Emergency Responders use 2000 nerds

Our presentation:

New/Social Media & Emergencies

View more presentations from Heather Leson.

Special thanks to John Saunders, Jen Mayville and Karen Snider for inviting us and supporting our efforts. We truly look forward to more collaboration between the Canadian Red Cross and the CrisisCamp Toronto team.

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