open source

Drumbeat Festival: Bicycles, Hackbuses, Robots, & Science Fair

I’ve read the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival of Learning, Freedom and Web schedule more than once and it is still daunting. Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation, even created a Drumbeat Festival Users Guide for attendees to help.

How to choose sessions, activities or spaces to hang out? I have three days and a flight to Barcelona to finalize my plans. Overwhelmed by awesome the selection. Well, I know I want to participate in badges, open video and open web sessions. These are the ones that will help with my CrisisCommons work and my choose adventure paths. I’m also blogging for the event.

Tents, Robots, MACBA and the Science Fair

Here are some of my schedule picks, but they will change as I navigate and explore. And, the whole schedule is subject to awesome and might be changed by the crowd!

Wednesday, November 3, 2010:
Join me: Sharing the CrisisCommons story at the Science Fair.

Thursday, November 4, 2010:
10:30am Badge Lab:Badges, badges, everywhere
11:30amEducating your Users or the Skills Lab: Learn what you need to hack Open Video (Video Lab)
14:00pm Arduino, Processing and Fantasia
15:00pmBadges, learning and online identity: design jam
16:00pm Arduino, Xbee, Bicycles and the Open Web or Learning accessibility:values and skills
17:00pmCalm after the storm: Yoga for Hacktivists
or the School of Webcraft: use case on Badges

Friday, November 5, 2010:
10:30am Pathways to Open Content
11:30am Encourage Content Reuse: Educate your users!
14:00pm Badges, learning and online identity: wireframes + prototypes
15:00pm Dale Dougherty How Maker Faire works or Build your own Personal Learning Environment Part II
16:00pm The Next Big Thing
17:00pm Build, Make, Learn in the Hackbus and Hackerspace Playground

Saturday, November 6, 2010: OpenRaval classroom, for the community
10:00amBe a GoodWill Reporter
12:00pmCommons Time Traveler

I’m going a bit early to be a tourist. Some of the greatest architects have works in Barcelona: Gehry, Meier, Mies van der Rohe Gaudi, and much more. It is my first time in Spain and I can’t wait to explore and learn at the festival and in the city.

4Oct

Learning Open Governance

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.

4Oct

Help Hack Open Source Software for Social Good

Geeks without Bounds is running a hack-a-thon on October 9/10, 2010.

geeks-without-bounds
I met up with Geeks without Bounds‘ Johnny Diggz at the International Conference of Crisis Mapping. We talked about his event and I promptly introduced him to some of the attending Open Source communities: Sahana, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi/Crowdmap, Swift River, and Frontline SMS. These open source software tools can be used for Humanitarian and Crisis management. Some of the software can also be used for a wide range of social good /community activities.

Ushahidi and Sahana are confirmed participants in the 10.10.10 day activities. The GWB event includes amazing prizes. But to win, you need to:Register and participate.

Thanks Johnny and good luck with the event!

Help Volunteer Technical Communities:
Not available on 10.10.10? Each of these open source teams could use a geeky hand.

How you can help these communities:
Each of these open source communities have mailing lists, forums, and wikis. All their documentation and training materials are available online too. Can you help them?

Sahana:
*Sahana is a free open source disaster management system.
*It’s a web based collaboration tool that includes modules for crisis response including finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers and much more.
*How to help?: needs volunteer help with specifications, code, donations and standards

OpenStreetMap:
*OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.
*How to help?: anyone can map, code, bring your expertise, translate, create user manuals, contribute and collect data using walking-papers.org. Go ahead and add missing information to the map.

Ushahidi/Crowdmap
Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. The tools use three main criteria: information collection, visualization, & interactive mapping.

They need:
1. Experienced Web Developers – there’s a list of awesome things to do
2. Trained teams of people ready to be activated to help
3. Ushahidi is building a community site to help and engage

Swift River
*SwiftRiver is an open source platform that helps users manage real-time data.
*How to help: Need developers who create but also document.

Frontline SMS
*FrontlineSMS allows to you to text message with large groups of people anywhere there is a mobile signal.
*How to Help: beta testing of the tools, field testing by NGOs, and most of all spread the word about Frontline.

Brief update about ICCM10
The International Conference on Crisis Mapping was a great event. Meeting fellow volunteer technical communities, NGOs, students and folks from the World Bank and UN was inspiring. I attended as a volunteer, but participated in training and was able to hear most of the Ignite presentations. It was a bit of a reunion of other dedicated volunteers whom I’ve met via my work with CrisisCommons.org.

There was even a small meet-up about Exercise24.org participants to talk over lunch about collaborating across volunteer technical communities. I was happy to give my view on this event and how our communities might participate in the future.

For more about ICCM10, see some posts from Kim Stephens and Gisli Olafsson (a number of great posts).

28Sep

Mozilla’s Learning Freedom and the Web Festival, Barcelona

The Internet is revolutionizing how we learn. It’s exciting. And it’s only the beginning. Mozilla’s Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of this revolution.

Taking place Barcelona from November 3-5, we’re planning three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web. We want you to be a part of it. Register.

Whether your a teacher or a technologist, this is your chance to help shape the future of learning and the web. We hope to see you in Barcelona.

If you are able to jet to Barcelona, we could use a hand with promotion. Have a moment? Please help us spread the word on your blog, Facebook or Twitter.

Be inspired by Joi Ito:

Joi Ito on (informal) learning, freedom and the web from Henrik Moltke on Vimeo.

17Sep

Mapping Honduras Hospitals

Paul Jones believes that a map can change the world – starting with Honduras. A third year McMaster University medical student, Paul has taken two tours with the medical brigades in Honduras. In the past month, he has developed a unique Crowdmap providing visual story of Honduras hospitals and the rise of Dengue outbreak. I’m posting his story because he needs your help. Paul is a symbol of future mapper. Someday students around the world will follow his path by taking their discipline to crowdsource open source tools like Crowdmap.

Honduras Health Map

What is your Crowdmap project?
I originally started this project due to the lack of available information about the health system in Honduras and lack of collaboration between health-based Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). My only motivation is to accurately catalog the existing health infrastructure and resources in Honduras to better facilitate communication and collaboration. As one collaborator put it: “Here’s to a healthier, better educated Honduras”. Often, NGOs utilize teams or “brigades” of foreign medical personnel that have little knowledge of the Honduran health care system or existing projects so there is often duplication and redundancy. I wanted to try to break down these silos and provide easily accessible information for other projects, clinics, hospitals and medical teams.

The entire project is open source and information gathered through crowdsourcing and modeled after CrisisMappers. Crisismappers brings together practitioners, scholars and developers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping. They have developed deployments during the Haiti earthquake, Chilean earthquake and the recent floods in Pakistan by leveraging volunteers to map large quantities of data onto a single dynamic platform. Content is freely accessible to improve the overall effectiveness of the response.

What have you learned? Any obstacles?

My first priority has been to establish the exact location of hospitals (Public, Private and NGO). After this is complete, I’ll focus on mapping clinics and NGO projects. This is a labour intensive project, so it is heavily dependent on my free time or volunteer capacity.

I am in contact with a number of individuals working/living in Honduras and the USA/Canada who have an interest in this project. It is really in its infancy. I am open to suggestions as to how it can be improved and most effectively utilized to improve health for Hondurans as well as how it can be used to compliment and not duplicate existing efforts.

I’ve been following the ongoing Dengue outbreak in Honduras and thought that this might be worth incorporating into the existing map. My original slogan for the project is why wait for the next crisis. It appears that Honduras is now in the midst of a crisis. Thus, I’m attempting to gather information about both Honduran health structures as well as the recent Dengue outbreak. I would love to update this map to be more relevant and detailed about the current situation in Honduras.

How can we help?

I am the only one actively collecting the information, emailing NGOs, reading news reports and mapping for this project. I am also attempting to plug into the various crisis mapping communities, all while staying on top of my medical studies. I would love some more experienced and knowledgeable crisismappers involved in this project. I have recently made contact with the Medicine sans Frontieres (MSF) mission in Honduras and they have been providing me with copies of the epidemiological reports of the Dengue outbreak. I haven’t time to map this yet. I am hoping in the coming days to establish some contacts within the FrontlineSMS/SMSMedic community with individuals running SMS based health projects in Honduras to see if collaboration might be feasible. I’m on twitter hoping that this may attract the attention of some potential volunteers.

You can access and edit the working spreadsheet of Honduran Hospitals, Clinics, NGOs and Medical Brigades by using the Google spreadsheet.

More information about this project can be found by following these links.

Honduras Health Crowdmap
Paul on Twitter

More about Paul

My name is Paul Jones, I am 22 years old and in my 3rd year of Medicine at McMaster University (in Canada). I’ve been to Honduras twice with medical brigades and am active with a couple of NGOs which work in the health field in Honduras. I’m in my final year of Medicine at McMaster University. I plan to pursue a residency program in Family Medicine with potentially some additional training in Emergency Medicine as well as Travel/Tropical Medicine. Briefly, I flirted with the idea of pursuing specialization in Infectious Diseases, but have decided that Family Medicine would be a better fit for me. I am still really interested in Virology and Global Health. During medical school I have been writing articles for our student newsletter Placebo about neglected, infectious diseases and other Global Health topics. I’m also writing an article about the unprecedented outbreak of Dengue Fever and Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever in Honduras.

Update: (Tuesday, September 21, 2010)
Paul is now collaborating with a few volunteers from the CrisisMappers mailing list.

Update: (Monday, September 27 2010)
Ushahidi features Mapping Honduras.

16Sep

Join the Global CrisisCamp Day of Learning

Global CrisisCamp Day of Discovery and Learning is about Preparedness. Our strengths are in crowdsourcing technology and information often using applied social media. We want to prepare our training materials, communications strategy and infrastructure to be more positioned to help. We also know many folks like to discuss policy. And, we want to provide an opportunity for folks to learn more about other Volunteer Technical Communities.

We will have three streams of activity:

1. CrisisCamp in a Box: create content and participate in activities and tasks to help groups and individuals contribute
2. Open Dialogue about Emergency Preparedness and World Bank Problem Definitions
3. Learn about other Volunteer Technical Communities and their tools.

We are also very fortunate to partner with the World Bank. The World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery Labs will provide Global CrisisCamp Day with a set of problem definitions for volunteers to explore ideas and provide innovative approaches to challenges related to flooding in Pakistan. Anyone can participate. Written and video submissions are welcome. Problem definitions will be released prior to the events on the CrisisCommons wiki.

We have CrisisCamps planned for Calgary, Toronto, Washington DC, London UK, Virtual Team and more.

CrisisCamp Day

22Aug

Help Crowdsource SMS Reports for the Pakistan Floods

Cross-posted from the Crisiscommons.org blog.

SMS (Text messages) Reports + Your Brain + a search engine + google translate + basic map (long and lat coordinates)

Mobile phones are used in Pakistan. There is a text message (SMS) short code created to help people in Pakistan send reports. The SMS reports link to a tool called Crowdflower. Volunteers review and submit tasks which get mapped on Ushahidi. There is a virtual team of folks reviewing the reports for any urgent matters and appropriately redirecting to the NGOs on the ground. The Pakreport Ushahidi map tells a map story of what is needed and what is happening in the affected flood regions of Pakistan.

So far 100 reports have been filed. The short code may be communicated more throughout Pakistan. They are expecting an increase of reports in the coming days. We need your help.

Ushahidi is an open source tool that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating crowdsourced information from the public for use in crisis response. Crowdflower is a tool that helps people do quick, crowdsource tasks.

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