Crisis Commons
18 people have come to work on projects for CrisisCamp Chile DC at the World Bank. There are also CrisisCamps occuring in Orlando, Stanford, and Bogata, Columbia. In coordination with the Digitales for Chile, a group of technology volunteers in chile, we are working on Ushahidi and Google Person Finder for Chile. Other people are also writing about this - Spacial Sustain has an entry about CrisisCamps happening today.
As has been the case at each of these events, the rooms of volunteers are rich with quiet, intense conversation punctuated by the tapping of keys and familiar pulse of Tweetdeck notifications.
Ushahidi in Chile and populating the People Finder
After hours of work, each of the project managers at Crisis Camp DC reported on the status of their projects.
One room is packed with people migrating information entered into a Google document posted to collect Chile earthquake information for Ushahidi into Chilequake.ushahidi.com.
The team has added RSS feeds and is looking for ways to automate the process. The earthquake “People Finder” for Chile (Chilepersonfinder.appspot.com) which went live this morning due to some quick work by Google’s disaster team is now tracking over 3400 records. This team is also scraping missing persons site and setting up a list for hand off to other camps.
Later in the morning, after the kickoff for Crisis Camp DC, volunteers gathered for a conference call to connect efforts across North America and beyond. The World Bank’s Joaquim Toro offered a briefing on Chile, which experienced a serious earthquake in the early hours of the morning.
“This is basically the opposite of what we saw in Haiti” said Toro. “Historically, Chile has had a centralized government. It’s now decentralizing more, as regional offices are working now. President Bachelet is heading the emergency management agency.”
“We know the epicenter of the Chile earthquake was off the coast, north of Santiago, near Concepcion. We don’t know know much of the damage yet. We do know that in Santiago many felt it, almost 300 km from epicenter. Concepcion and other cities nearby are developed but have few big building. We do expect poor neighborhoods to be affected.”
“Everything will go through the authorities. However, because of the history of earthquakes in Chile, there is a lot of community involvement. There’s a huge community to tap into there that’s quite advanced technologically.”
Once again, developers, geospational engineers and online media professionals have come together to work on crisis response applications.
Today at the World Bank in Washington, dozens of volunteers are now at work at Crisis Camp DC. They’ll be working on finishing projects that have been created since the first Crisis Camp in January at the Sunlight Foundation, following the disastrous earthquake in Haiti.
And, after reports of a powerful earthquake in Chile that has resulted in tsunami advisories all around the Pacific Ocean, a team will be helping to feed information into the Ushahidi media monitoring platform for Chile. They’ll be reading Terremotochile.com and, along with tens of thousands, watching live online video from Chile at uStream. And, thanks to the disaster response team at Google, an earthquake “People Finder” for Chile is live: Chilepersonfinder.appspot.com.
Read more »
