presentations

10Mar

Connecting a Data-Driven world to Entrepreneurs

Sitting in the audience at a myriad of events across topics of humanitarian action, social innovation or entrepreneurship, I often get twitchy. Truly I enjoy the engaging talks, learning new things/perspectives and networking. But in the back of my mind, I am always asking: “Nice policy, what does implementation look like?” The worlds of civic technology, digital literacy, humanitarian response, international development and entrepreneurship steadily connect. Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk with a room of entrepreneurs about how they could apply data-driven innovation to their startups. Increasingly, I am struck how applicable the skills and techniques I learned from Digital Humanitarian activities are for entrepreneurs and vice versa. This is becoming fairly standard in North American communities, but it is still new ground in MENA. If you look to UNICEF big ‘moonshot’ on investing $9 million dollars in open source entrepreneurship with the Unicef Innovation Fund. The types of digital and data literacy gaps differ some in the entrepreneur community from the civil society/civic tech circles. This comes down to purpose and goals. Yet, the curriculum stands the test of transfer as we consider how to build a civic and digitally engaged community.

If you are in Qatar and want to keep in touch with others interested in learning data-driven innovations, we set up a SLACK channel, simply just share your email with me.

My slides from the Data-Driven Startup talk include extensive notes and references. Thank you to School of Data, Data-Driven Innovation Mena, Open Data Institute, Aspiration Tech and the Digital Humanitarian Network for being so inspiring.

14May

Using your Voice to Amplify your Career

Mentoring is one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. Over the years, I have learned from mentors many skills on how to build my network, develop my skills, speak publicly and find my voice. Today I had the opportunity to share my experiences with the Qatar Computing Research Institute‘s Summer Interns. I am very thankful to my teachers and mentors for guiding me. Certainly as a mentee and mentor, I consider it a goal to be a lifelong learner. Do you have tips and ideas about amplifying your career? I’d love to learn from you.

Here are the slides with notes, articles, tools and techniques that might help you:

23Apr

Convening Innovation Allies

How can we use advanced computing, human computing and social innovation to have impact in Qatar? Healthy lives, taking care of the environmental, youth engagement, resilient cities, social entrepreneurship and humanitarian response are some of the core Social Computing research activities at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)?

On Wednesday, April 15, 2015, QCRI hosted a small forum to discuss social innovation in Qatar. The session consisted of speakers from QCRI and partners as well as some informal discussion groups. Thank you for our guests and participants for this informative conversation.

The Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp was held in Doha, Qatar from March 31 – April 9, 2015. These are some early observations that I had on the use of technology and the opportunities for future research and collaboration:

We plan on expanding this dialogue in the future. Until then, your insights will inform both our strategic planning, research agenda and future activity collaborations.

Social Innovation Workshop Discussion groups 2015

QCRI’s Social Innovation Programme in Qatar is focused on four streams of research and activities:
  • Smart and Resilient Cities
  • Remote Sensing for Social Good
  • Digital Humanitarians
  • Social Media for Disaster

In the Resilient city discussion group we saw some opportunities with ICTQatar leading open data initiatives, QMIC working with traffic sensor data and the potential of sports data to provide insights into society. Collectively we agreed that we need to know more about resilience city and society ecosystems in Qatar. Some of the barriers included lack of policy and regulation in Qatar, community services need access to the data and
cellular data is hard to share.

The Remote Sensing group spent time thinking about blue sky uses for these tools and techniques. Some of the concepts tie directly into the Resilient City Group with opportunities to use phone traffic sensors, computer vision and drones and uavs for parking. Some of the potential imagery sources include landsat imagery, Planet Labs and Skybox (Google).

The Social Media for Disaster and Digital Humanitarian teams joined forces to delve into opportunities, barriers and new research items. Opportunities included a very diverse community (languages, cultures), engaged youth, access to technology/mobile devices and the sense of belonging in a geographically small but strategic area. The barriers include lack of civil society, language barriers, education levels and the fluidity of communities. Also, there is a need to reframe the concept of volunteering into opportunities for educational and society advancement. Research opportunities included understanding the needs/motivations of people, peer-to-peer transfer of knowledge, community development in Qatar and understanding social responsibility programs in Qatar.

Thanks again to the speakers, guests and my colleagues for a great morning.

4May

Map it, Change it! [video]

As much as I love talking about deployers, digital volunteers and mapping, I still get a bit nervous seeing videos of my talks. I was honoured to speak at TedxSilkRoad on April 11, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

You can tell I was talking fast when “Non-government Organizations” suddenly got renamed “Non-Government Associations.” The presentation has 2961 views.

(Also see: Map it, Change it (blog post).)

19Jan

Bring Crowdsourcing Home – Crowdsourcing Fire and Floods

It is a goal to bring Crowdsourcing home in 2011. Our CrisisCommons Toronto team attended a meeting with the Ontario Government, Ministry of Natural Resources on January 18, 2011. It was an honour to have our first official Canadian provincial government meeting.

I presented this overview to attendees. Crisismapper volunteers from Russia and Australia provided some input with their lessons learned for fire crowdsourcing implementations. This is the power of global volunteer technology communities. We had a great discussion about barriers in remote regions, mapping techniques and government policy. Over 75% of forest fires reported in Ontario are by the public. We intend to use the latest tools available to share with mapping visual information.

Crowdsourcing Fire and Floods

Officials were very receptive to continuing our discussions. I will post the next steps as they evolve.

Heather

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

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

14Nov

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

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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