projects

Hybrid Skills needed to foster change

Over 10 years ago at Tucows Inc., the communications department included my colleague James Koole, who was a journalist by training. His skills of digital storytelling and technical tinkering fostered the customer experience. Business intelligence, “in house journalists” and data science are now more pervasive in many workplaces. At the data-driven journalism course in Cairo, as part of the Data-Driven Innovation Workshop Week in MENA, I am here to talk about data in research and potential of data-driven innovation. As I prepare my thoughts on how Data-Driven Innovation can affect business growth, I consider why hybrid employees, like Mr. Koole, help. What other hybrid skills are needed and how can we support people’s learning journeys to drive social entrepreneurship?

Data-Driven Innovation in Qatar

In Qatar, there is a growing technical community. The Data-Driven Innovation MENA team asked me to provide an overview of examples of data-driven research and this might apply to business growth. The following are some examples from QCRI’s research and from a few of the local startup community (There are extensive notes):

Data-Driven Innovation in Qatar from heatherleson

How can data-driven innovation drive business

In a world that is increasingly focused on entrepreneurship, there is also a parallel stream focused on STEM education. This is a potential mistake to be too focused on silos. If you can tell a better story or design useful data-driven content/information products, this is also core to growth.

Qatar and Doha have a limited number of technical education events. If you are in school, you can join
CMU’s Smartlab and learn data analytics. Qatar Computing Research Institute has a Summer internship program open to local youth considering a career in computer science. If you are an entrepreneur and are able to join a number of the great incubators, accelerators or youth programmes, you might get some data-driven innovation training. Everyone can learn online by, for example, taking Cousera courses, but fostering this ecosystem needs in person engagement and learning opportunities.

In Doha, I hosted a few workshops on Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Social Media Curation and Digital Mapping. The free classes were oversold and included a wide mix of professionals, young startups, students and, even, research colleagues. QCRI will continue to build the knowledge economy sharing skills and technical training. But, I highly recommend a startup focused on training data-driven innovation skills for business. There is indeed a growing market beyond the student body. Change will happen when more senior people are exposed to the techniques and how it can enable their business team to flourish. Organizations also need to continue to provide more technical workshops to augment all the strategy and leadership training. This includes encouraging technical companies to host workshops on how to use the tools and apply to a diverse stream from humanitarian to startups to social entrepreneurship.

What is one quick win for data-driven innovation in Qatar: More technical training and more data journalism skills. What if there was a a Data Driven Startup Handbook and shared curriculum?

Consider this type of future of domain expertise, data-smart employees including Type 2 Data Scientists:

“…require a different kind of data scientist, one that does not have the core technical ability to write code but enough of a general understanding of what can and cannot be achieved using machine learning approaches to effectively evaluate its outputs. This ‘type II’ data scientist does not need an in depth understanding of the code but might lead a team containing data scientists and needs to be able to translate between the business or policy problem and the technical environment. Without some understanding of what these learning systems can and can’t do there is the potential for a lot of poor quality problem solving and the outcomes on society could be very negative. There are examples of courses trying to fill this gap, like the MSc course at Sheffield, targeted at non-data scientists that aims to teach students fundamental data science principles and its application within organisations to support data-driven approaches to problem solving. “

(Source: Nesta Report: Machines that Learn in the Wild, 2015.)

30Mar

In Doha: Internet of Things and Smart Cities

Construction, traffic and weather – these are the main topics that people talk about in Doha. All around there is this a massive pulse of change accompanied by many threads of activity. Resilience and knowledge economy are fed by this energy of bright minds congregating on this big shift plain.
Cities around the world are preparing their smart city or Internet of Things (#IoT) policies and practices. Doha is on this same journey. Cities that create together breathe.

ictQatar hosts #IoT and Smart Cities event

Humans connected to machines, machines connected to humans. It often seems like such a far off concept. But the convergence of the Internet of Things (Web of Things) and Smart Cities is creating a space where the data bits and the human bits become parts of the big data analytical questions. Layering citizen data (citizen sensing) with open data or sensor data is really the next level of social innovation. We want to interact and make sense of our environment and make decisions about how the space can or should be used.

ictQatar hosted an event last night: Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities.

ictQatar connects people to the technologies that enrich their lives, drive economic development & inspire confidence in the future.

Dr. Elyes Ben Hamida from Qatar Mobility Innovation Center (QMIC) spoke with the community on the topic of Internet of Things (IoT). How can we which is build a future where every day physical objects will be connected to the Internet and be able to identify themselves to other devices. At QMIC, they have created a product, Labeeb – an intelligent sensing and M2M services platform. During the Q&A period, there were some great questions about how can this research and the tools or datasets be activated to spur new entrepreneurship. Music to my eyes. While IOT may not be the first concept that comes to your mind when you think about Doha, what this talk demonstrated for me is that same undercurrent I encounter all around town. People want to dig into the data and activate it. They want to start businesses and gain a sense of play. While Labeeb is a closed system, there are many opportunities with IoT (Web of Things) can become part of Doha’s entrepreneurship story.

Doha was listed #41 on the Sustainable Cities Index. This is a call to action for the citizens and creatives of Doha. While government bodies like ictQatar work on the policies and negotiate the murky waters of trying to implement projects with few local context examples, there is this burgeoning undercurrent of people who want to capitalize and innovate using the doors that open with the dialogue of Smart Cities. Mr. Ahmed Hefnawi from the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology presented the basics of smart cities including how “information technology is the principal infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents.” There are a number of business and governmental initiatives around Smart Cities in Doha. The biggest take away I took form this was how small businesses and entrepreneurs could also be part of the solution. A few of the attendees inquired about how they could get more involved or how they could access the Open Data of Qatar to build apps or programmes. Step by step.

*******
All of this brings me to the key point: Every day Doha surprises me with the collective drive to the future. There are big ideas activating Doha. While my new home may only be #41 on the Sustainable Cities Index, but I expect that the progression is changing. The Social Innovation programme at QCRI is keen to use research social computing for Resilient Cities. We are keen to see how we can focus on Doha. Already, colleagues are digging into Traffic data.

Thanks to Julia Astashkina of ictQatar for an engaging night.

(Photo: Doha Skyline from Katara on a Dhow (November 2014))

11Jan

Open Badges in a Crisis

Recruit, Track, Assign, and Give thanks. These are volunteer management steps in the digital age. Many organizations are looking at ways to train, incorporate and support digital skilled people in their workflows. The Crisismappers Community and the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) highlight the convergence of new technology/smart design like open badges, digital community networks and making. How do we get the next 10, 000 participants in a community? How do we manage the surge of new digital humanitarians and make it a valuable experience?

At Mozilla Drumbeat in 2010 (precursor to Mozfest), I joined the first ever Open Badges hackteam. We spent the weekend talking and building around the idea of credentials. Fast forward 4 years, I joined a Mozfest team in the Emergency Hack Lab. We brainstormed on a technical workflow for badging using the scenario of Hurricane Sandy.

Cracking crowdsource or brainsourcing has been a mighty task that many are working on. We as organizers know that anyone who wishes to get involved is a gift for community. We know that there are small asks and big tasks for engagement. Tackling digital knowledge skills with surge support can be a full-time job during an emergency. We all have networks and there are a number of strong community groups or NGOs that are building better methods to train and support digital humanitarians. Last year I lead a digital community mapping effort called Uchaguzi for the Kenya Elections. The Ushahidi designer, Jepchumba, created badges for all the participants to use. This was to build solidarity and give thanks. Crowdcrafting (micromappers) was used during the Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda). I wrote a bit about ‘hacking’ during the Typhoon response mainly due to the sheer volume of emails and conversations.

Building Use Cases

We could use Open Badges for UN OCHA/Noun Project icons (emergency standard) Digital Humanitarians and emergency wayfinding. Earlier this week I pitched it on our Emergency Hack Lab call, including our partners at Geeks without Bounds.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and Open Badges

Digital humanitarians need to build trust and get thanks. Open Badges across the various communities enables standards but also gives recognition and thanks. The DHN really helps digital volunteers join specific skillset groups. The ideal is that the volunteer engagement occurs via these individual organizations. DHN exists to connect people to real actionable tasks to solve real world problems.

Example:
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap had over 1600 mappers do over 3 million edits for the Typhoon Response. We are part of DHN. With the help of Imagery to the Crowd and many other partners, the community received imagery which was added to the Task Manager. The task manager organizes the imagery into tiles and helps digital mappers coordinate. They sign in with their OSM account.

How easy would it be to add an HOT OSM Badge into this process? There are two core goals with this concept: credentials and thanks. HOT participants could use these for their social media or linked in profiles. Or, Open Badges could be used on the Task Manager or OSM Wiki. As a HOT board member, I continue to think about how to help thank the virtual, global community. Open Badges allows us potentially solve a gap.

Learn more Haiyan response from my fellow HOT OSM Board member, Harry Wood. (podcast)

Murmur + Wayfinding:(SMS solutions)

Ever since Hurricane Sandy I have been thinking about the power of Wayfinding during an emergency and how to connect and map community responders. Jess Klein, Creative lead of Open Badges has been a big inspiration on this journey. As well, Daniel Latorre of Wise City worked with Occupy Sandy communities to design and sign.

It struck me that Murmur plus Wayfinding plus Open Badges might be a way to connect those amazing ‘first responders’. While they may not be associated with formal organizations or NGOs, there are some community responders who make a huge difference in the field. Jess has written about this importance in response to Hurricane Sandy.

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people’s personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them.

Around Toronto there are Murmur signs. You call the number on the sign and you get a poem or story about the space or area. It is sheer magic in community and public spaces. Well, if Wayfinding is amazing to help people design and coordinate and Open Badges assigns and gives thanks, why not add an SMS number to sign up to volunteer, get SMS tasks and plus, a Badge. This idea about SMS task management is not new, but is missing is the pieces of thanks with Open badges.

Example: A Wayfinding sign is designed using the UN OCHA/Noun Project Label, but also includes and SMS number. This SMS number ties to the volunteer management choice of the community plus Open Badges. The NGO could use any number of SMS apps to help manage the volunteers and link them to an Open Badge process. Some examples include Frontline SMS, Medic (sim apps), Swara (Interactive Voice Response tool) or many others. The goal here would be to recognize mobile plus open badges as the way forward, especially in the majority of the world.

This idea needs more work, but you get the picture. The power of Open Badges during a Crisis is full of thanks.

****

There is much more thinking and hacking to happen, but it is an exciting journey.

Join the next Open Badges call

3Jan

Canada: Open Data for Development Challenge

The day is finally here! After years of building open community connections with governments, each one of us can look to this a turning point. The Canadian government, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, is officially hosting an event inviting the open communities to join them in a 2-day hackathon, er, Open Data for Development Challenge. There have been many hands and minds to make this possible. The government has been very keen on listening and observing Open style events globally. This is likely the first of many Challenges for Open Data in Canada. They are taking idea submissions until January 8, 2014.

Crisismapping background with DFATD (DFAIT)

Since the Haiti earthquake, I’ve participated in a number of informal discussions with the government. They were keen to learn more about how open communities map during emergencies. In September and December of 2011, we had two meetings to learn more about each other’s work to build a common language. In February 2012, DFATD (formerly DFAIT) hosted an Open Policy day. Along with Melissa Elliot of the Standby Task Force, we pitched a Crisismapping simulation using OpenStreetMap and open data sets. This lead to the first ever Canadian government sanctioned CrisisMapping simulation in March 2013 with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (Pierre Beland), Ushahidi (myself), and the Standby Task Force (Melissa Elliot and virtual SBTF teams). The sessions invited various levels of governments from different departments to observe our work.

This is a small window into bringing open communities closer to government data and cooperation for humanitarian purposes. I am more than certain that others have great stories about the road to opening up Canada.

***
The Open Data for Development Challenge idea that I am working on stems from the School of Data Expedition into Nigerian Extractive mining. I’m keen to learn more about Canadian company transparency for their work. This is the document I’m using to track datasets.

Hope to see you at the Open Data for Development Challenge!

Open Data for Development Challenge – January 27,28, 2014 (Montreal, QC)

You can register for the event (by January 10, 2014) http://www.open-dev-ouvert.ca/ (updated link)
(challenge submissions are due on January 8, 2014 via the same website)

Questions about the event should be directed to: opendata.donneesouvertes AT international.gc.ca

From the Announcement:

Do you want to share your creative ideas and cutting-edge expertise, and make a difference in the world?
Do you want to help Canadians and the world understand how development aid is spent and what its impact is?
Do you want to be challenged and have fun at the same time?
If so, take the Open Data for Development Challenge!

This unique 36-hour ”codathon” organized by Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada will bring together Canadian and international technical experts and policy makers to generate new tools and ideas in the fields of open data and aid transparency and contribute to innovative solutions to the world’s pressing development challenges.

The event will feature keynote speakers Aleem Walji, Director of the World Bank’s Innovation Labs, and Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. It will have two related dimensions:

Technical challenges that involve building applications to make existing open aid and development-related data more useful. Proposed topics include building a data viewer compatible with multilingual data, creating a publishing tool suitable for use by mid-sized Canadian non-profit organizations, developing and testing applications for open contracting, and taking a deep dive into the procurement data of the World Bank Group.
There is room for challenges proposed by the community. Proposals should be submitted through the event website no later than January 8th. Challenges will be published prior to the event, along with key datasets and other related information, to enable participants to prepare for the event.
Policy discussions on how open data and open government can enable development results. This would include the use of big data in development programming, the innovative ways in which data can be mapped and visualized for development, and the impact of open data on developing countries.

The international aid transparency community will be encouraged to take promising tools and ideas from the event forward for further research and development.

We invite you to register, at no cost, at: https://www.accreditationcanada.gc.ca/ODDC/accreditation.aspx as soon as possible and no later than January 10. A message confirming your registration and providing additional information about the venue and accommodation will be sent to confirmed participants. Please wait for this confirmation before making any travel arrangements. Participants are asked to make their own accommodation arrangements. A limited number of guest rooms will be available to event participants at a preferential rate.

To find out more about the Open Data for Development Challenge, please go to DFATD’s website.

(Note: content snipped from the civicaccess discuss mailing list)

26Oct

I see “Dead” Data @ Mozfest

We are all teachers of the Open Web. The School of Data team from the Open Knowledge Foundation with 28 participants are Learning how to run at Data Expedition at Mozilla Festival.

Data and knowledge need to be activated. People are often intimated by data, so our goal is to teach a world of data makers. We’ve divided into 4 teams consisting of storytellers, analysts, engineers, scouts and designers are doing a fast-paced exercise in expeditions. We will take “Dead” data and activate it. The experience is to help others teach data expeditions.

Using Immigration Data to Learn about Data Expeditions

We’ve collected 3 different datasets about immigration data. The teams are reviewing it and determining stories and potentially activation methods. (eg. maps, diagrams) One team is analyzing datasets to determine the number of deaths of people attempting to migrate from Africa to Europe. Another team is using the data to show the true costs and benefits of immigration to the UK. Using cartographe, team 3 is building a map of countries that are difficult to travel. Comparing economic data and visa requirements is the mission of the fourth team.

About the data:

Outcomes /Learnings

Created by Berto

Leave the exercise raw. This opens us up to new ideas and potentially minimizes assumptions
Always save your projects (One team lost their work)
Build a clear problem analysis before going down the data or tool rabbit hole
Be aware of simplifying data and what context you might lose

Are you Data Curious? How would you activate this data?

Anyone can participate in this data expedition. The full details and collaboration space about the Mozfest data on Etherpad. Be a Data Expeditioner Too!

Anyone can be a data maker. How can we get to the next 100, 000 data makers teaching and sharing data stories?

Join us at School of Data

11May

Go Open Data

Data, So what from Heather Leson

Futures Panel @ Go Open Data

Notes

Slide 1:
What is our Open Data Vision for Ontario? Canada? the World?  How will we get there?  Last year at OSCON – Tim O’Reilly told the participants that “we won”. After 14 years, open source is often a default.
Last year at Mozfest – Mark Surman told participants that Mozilla “won”. The Browser is now competitive. Our next mission is the “Open Web”.

What are our versions of this for Open Data? How do we get there?

Sunglasses by Sunlight Foundation for http://transparencycamp.org/

Slide 2:
Ushahidi is information collection, data visualization and interactive mapping software. We are used for election monitoring, city building, Civil society work such as anti-corruption and harassment reporting. Plus, we are used for environmental actions.

Uchaguzi was our partnership and community driven project for the Kenyan elections. (March 2013)
We tried to incorporate both citizen and official data.
uchaguzi.co.ke

http://sitroom.uchaguzi.co.ke/

Slide 3:
The Uchaguzi project started with base layer information of all the counties, all the polling stations and an offline communications strategy. We had radio announcements, grocery store screens had TV ads with our short codes. Next, our team and partners trained people from partner organizations collected information via SMS (primary channel), email, web forms, mobile apps, and, of course, social media. We received 1000s of messages, we had strategies to verify and escalate issues to official organizations. But the partnership with the government was not possible. A citizen program of communication and voice is this much closer to being tied to official action. Someday.

Some of other ways that data science mattered – we had a QA Integrity team to doublecheck for private information and tribe information. We were prepared to have visualization around the Results, but the electoral commission (IEBC) had technical failures. In the end, they did manual counts.

Slide 4:
Around the world organizations like Oxfam, ICT4Peace, World Bank, ICRC and the Woodrow Wilson Center are working to build research in the area around new technology and humanitarian work. When we are building projects and using data to tell stories and help people, we need to mindful of these and incorporate these in our strategy. If we can protect the people most at risk, we build trust with our fellow citizens, institutions and governments.

The ICRC, hosted by the International Crisismappers community, provided this framework for data standards.

Some of the Key Standards for Data management they outlined included – 1. necessity & capacity 2. data protection laws, 3. do no harm 4. Bias/non-discrimination (objective information/processing) 4. Quality check/reliability

http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/data-protection-standards-2-0/

http://acmc.gov.au/2013/04/in-search-of-common-ground-protection-of-civilians-in-armed-conflict/

http://ict4peace.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/The-potential-and-challenges-of-open-data-for-crisis-information-management-and-aid-efficiency.pdf

http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/publication/p0999.htm

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Privacy_MissingPersons_FINAL.pdf

http://www.unocha.org/top-stories/all-stories/humanitarianism-network-age

Slide 5:
Rhok.org
datakind.org

http://spaceappschallenge.org/

http://spaceapps.tumblr.com/

http://codeforamerica.org/

http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/datasciencefellowship/

http://opengovhub.org/

http://www.ihub.co.ke/

Slide 6:
How will we connect our mission for data to what real citizens need? How can we involve them in our plans? Even more so, how can we be guided by them and be excited for this common journey?

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

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

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)