We are in the midst of completing a second round of whirlwind CrisisCamps, where hundreds have poured blood, sweat and tears into the creation & development of the Drupal website & wiki, the development of tons of awesome projects, and planned, organized and ran what will soon be around 20 CrisisCamps.  In short, we’ve done awesome, but have inflicted a good bit of pain on ourselves along the way.  Most of our communications have been real-time, either by tweet, chat or the hated teleconferences.  While all these have been productive, and largely necessary in what we’ve formed, its time to move to a different approach.  We need to start communicating largely by listservs (well, google groups), and augment this with the irc chat room and smaller, targeted telecons.

After a good bit of bludgeoning by Brian Behlendorf and Danese Cooper, two people in the open source world very much worth listening to,  I finally see the light. Their reasoning was that in order to continue to integrate people, there must be a record of what transpired.  We need persistent communications which are searchable. Based on these past two weeks, I already have a ton of ideas how to radically improve the CrisisCamp process and how to use the Drupal site to much greater effect, but wouldn’t it be a shame if I only communicated it on an ever changing wiki page and a telecon, which was only meaningful to those who listened in.  And there’s the more practical reason – I gotta go to work next week.  In retrospect, we should have done this earlier, but such is the learning process when you go with no sleep for days on end.

I’ve set up three new Google Groups:

• CrisisCamp Coordinators:  This is for the CrisisCamp City Coordinators to share lessons on how best to plan, organize and operate a CrisisCamp in your area.
• CrisisCommons Projects: This is the Listserv for sharing lessons learned on CrisisCommons project initiation, management, production and closeout.
• CrisisCommons Website: This group is to share lessons and discuss site operations, organization, management, and administration for both the CrisisCommons.org Website and the Wiki

The intent here is that when the 40 new cities come online next week and ask all the same questions that everyone else asked – and have the same concerns, all the coordinators can now easily engage. We can all bounce ideas off each other and quickly improve each week – as we have done the last two, but hopefully with less time spent.  Same with the projects, same with the website, including requests, assigning rights, etc.

So please join these groups.  Lets see how they work this week.  And like anything, if we need to adjust, we will.

Brian also gave me another caution, concerning the “completion” of our projects.  If we develop something really useful, like  We Need, We Have Exchange, it really isn’t ready for ongoing fielding until it has an active community supporting it, with proper governance structures.  This is probably a conversation for another week, but one we need to have.  I’m guessing we can engage Brian in that process to help set this up.