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.

Crabgrass social network

“At the end of the day, we expct a Crabgrass site to be bootstrapped” said Andrew Turner. They’re work on building out a DC Crisis Common page and then adding Rover and Kapab page as tests. They’ll populate the front page and set up a template for migration for other criss camps.

Dashboard for government

Another team is preparing hard drives and USB sticks to send down to Haiti. They’re looking for possible applications of industry and, by the end of the day, will have an index of data. The data sent will be used at HaitiCrisisMap.org.

OpenStreetMap

The team is making progress made on translation, and cleanup tasks for Haiti. For Chile, they are awaiting permission for use of high-resolution satellite imagery for tracing.

Rover

The Rover team acquired the source code and has been debugging. One task to is to see if GPS is working and then get Google Maps working on device. They’d like to have a running version by the end of the day.

API documentation for WeHaveWeNeed.org

The team has been working through confirmed installation instruction and troubleshooting. They’ll be done with the installs by the end of the day.

[Editor's Note: If readers are looking for ways to assist remotely, here's a list of simple tasks anyone can do to help with earthquake and tsunami volunteer efforts.]

“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.”

“Tweak the Tweet needs to get adapted right away, since people on ground in Haiti are using Twitter and text to communicate. We’re seeing a lot of websites down in Chile. There are many networks through optic fiber so there’s some connectivity.”

After Toro’s briefing, a Spanish linguist native to Haiti in the Austin Crisis Camp volunteered to translate Tweak the Tweet.” To adapt a phrase, “si, se puede.”

Andy Carvin dialed in from his home office, where he’s been hard at work coordinating NPR social news desk’s coverage of the Chilean quake. Carvin quickly put together a Twitter list of Chile tsunami-earthquake and has helped to collect earthquake news at NPR’s news blog.  He said Crisiswiki.org is up and running, and that he was actively soliciting volunteers to concentrate on adding news resource and aid information. Instructions on who to do so are up to date and posted at the site.

Another camp will be bridging the gap from a Google document posted to collect Chile earthquake information for Ushahidi to directly feed into the new instance of Chilequake.ushahidi.com. Volunteers are needed to comb the net and add information to the document. Submit reports here.

A new Crisis Camp wiki for the Chile earthquake went live shortly after the call ended that aggregates news, disaster resources and much more, including a link to Reliefoversight.org, which is tracking the effectiveness of the action of NGOs.

After the call, the Crisis Camp DC team went back to work coding, mapping, translating and doing what they could to create applications that would be helpful to disaster response in Haiti, Chile and beyond. A gallery of images of Crisis Camp DC volunteers is up at Posterous.

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.

Projects underway include:

• Documenting the application programming interface for WeHaveWeNeed.org
• Continuing to clean up maps for Haiti with advanced crisis mapping at OpenStreetMap.org and doing Creole transaltion. The GPS map of Haiti has been one of the most-used products from the Crisis Camps, adopted by the UN, UNICEF and many other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
• A Haiti Hospital Capacity Finder, Kapab Django, focused on provuding medical situation awareness. Python developers are needed here
• CrisisWiki.org, now with interest in building out for Chile or tsunami affected countries as needed
• Crab Grass, an open source social networking tool that will be tied in to TechAid. This will be used to connect NGOs to Crisis Camp.
• A development team will be modifying code for Rover, a disaster assessment mobile app for the World Bank.  Rover will be used for more ground-based structural assessments. It’s already being used by Ministry of Work in Haiti. Initially the scope will be about 100,000 buildings. The World Bank sees broad applications for Rover around the world, including gathering information about risks before disasters.The app was commissioned by FEMA and uses existing structural assessment standards. The World Bank interested in injecting the code into its projects.

There will be a briefing on Chile from World Bank expert on the country later in the day.

Hundreds of volunteers have given up their nights and weekends to work on more than 40 different projects performing tasks ranging from hardcore development, to data collection, to graphic design, to research, to outreach, to story telling, to translation, to project management, to blogging, to… the list is endless.

In the past month, Crisis Camps have produced websites, applications, data sets, and countless other hacks that made information more easily available to those who need it. Databases were tied to maps and made available to the people providing relief on the ground in Haiti. Computers and telephones became translation tools, people finders, and the route to empty hospital beds. All through the work of hundreds of people, thousands of miles apart. For a complete list of projects , click here.

Working closely with the United Nations, the World Bank, and other groups providing aid, Crisis Camps everywhere have used the internet to create a powerful community with a positive purpose. Using every sort of collaborative and social media tool (open source projects, shared workspaces, Wikis, blogs, skype, chat, twitter, facebook, etc.) this group has pioneered a new kind of aid organization, working hard to provide tools and information vital the mission of helping Haiti recover.

With four camps happening today in the U.S. and Canada, and more planned in coming weeks, it appears that the Crisis Camp movement is showing no signs of slowing down.  These cities have contributed so far… (apologies if I missed any).

• Atlanta
• Austin
• Baton Rouge
• Bogata, Columbia
• Boston
• Brooklyn
• Calgary
• Chicago
• Boulder/Denver
• Kansas City
• London
• Los Angeles
• Ottawa
• Miami
• Montreal
• New Orleans
• New York City
• Northern California
• Pittsburgh
• Portland
• Rochester
• Santa Barbara
• Seattle
• Silicon Valley
• Toronto
• Washington DC

One of four CrisisCamps  happening in Canada this weekend, Calgary had a moderate but productive turnout for our first CrisisCamp.   Lucky for me I had 2 project managers volunteer who helped with narrowing down the scope of projects we wanted to present to the group based on their skill sets. We presented what we felt were the most viable and active projects (5 technical & 3 non-technical) to the group during our ‘All Hands on Deck’ planning session. We were able to quickly select 5 projects that resonated with individuals and which fit their skill set.

Throughout the day we liaised with other cities who were also working on the projects, to obtain access to the source code, setup permissions, basecamp accounts, check in with project leads etc.

The projects that our group chose to contribute our time and code to included:

Haiti Hospital Capacity Finder – Kapab MedNet Situational Awareness Tool http://haiti.opensgi.net/mednet/ which required python development

Translating OpenStreet Map documentation into French

Haiti Schools Situational Awareness Tool – built a prototype webapp in groovy/grails to capture and display data

Disaster Accountability Public Database – http://www.reliefoversight.org/ – updated database info & may contribute future Drupal coding

Field Voices – requested by Plan Canada,a team developed a java based web app to enable donors to see progess of construction projects in Haiti

An overview of all the projects submitted to CrisisCommons can be seen here: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Projects

At the end of the day, everyone felt they had made a significant contribution and would consider coming out for another CrisicCamp. We have planned a second camp for Feb 20th.

On a final note, it was great to collaborate on projects with people in different locations via Skype & IRC. I feel that efforts such as these truly exemplify the spirit of open source development, and look forward to playing an ongoing role in CrisisCommons.

Cheers for now

With the vast number of Crisis Camp projects under way across North America, it has been a challenge for the volunteers to pick one that best suits their skill profile. However, it has been amazing to see the collaboration amongst the group to figure out the projects they want to work on. In all interactions, technology has underpinned information gathering and knowledge sharing. Crisis Camp Ottawa has been tweeting, blogging, updating Wikis, interacting on IRCs and common IMs.

Now that most of the group has found their project of interest, they are looking into resource gaps and figuring out where they can contribute to the fullest.

–Dravya

well, hours later and i got distracted, here are some interesting “tools”…

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/605/index.html

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/SWX+Twitter+API

http://www.rooseveltcampusnetwork.org/blog/haiti-examined

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012904144_pf.html