News Since Last Week

Upcoming CrisisCamps and calls:

• Friday 27th : Silicon Valley Camp
• Saturday 28th: London Camp. Pkfloods call.
• Friday 3rd: Toronto Camp
• Saturday 4th: Sydney Camp, London Camp. Pkfloods call

Phone bridges. JimPalmisano has set up a phone bridge to Islamabad, Calgary and Sydney, and is working on bridges to Germany, Turkey, Iceland and Dubai. Jim can also give a SIP account into the bridge to anyone in any country who has an internet connection and can download a free softphone. CrisisCampCambs has also accessed the bridge via Skype.

Liveblogging: CrisisCampParis have set up a live blogging stream for pkfloods at http://pk-floods.blogspot.com/

The lists of groups and individuals involved have stabilized. New contacts this week are:

• http://HumanityRoad.org/ are crowdsourcers who route aid and needs. HR contact is ChristineThompson @redcrossmom.
• Robert Munro (Energy for Opportunity) – built Crowdflower to pakreport link.
• George Chamales. Tech lead on pakreport.org.
• Technology people in Karachi – via Dave Jorgensen via Jeannie Stamberger (Silicon Valley).

The list of tools has also stabilized. New sites found since last week:

• ESRI maps – being crowdsourced.

Task News:

• Urgent request in from ShoaibBurq to get village names into OpenStreetMap. Basic problem is that damage assessments have all been input using village names: because these aren’t yet on the map, the UN can only get aid to the district, not the specific place that aid is required.
• We have 3 main tasks to do, and we need more people! Tasks are: mapping, Ushahidi data entry and Sahana data entry.
• KimberleyQc put together a list of union council contacts in Pakistan – the UN needed these.
• Dynamic river level mapping is now done

Project news:

• Ham radio project – JeannieStamburger (SV) leading.
• ReliefOversight Drupal project – Sara Farmer (London) leading. We got several volunteers for Drupal coding, including people who responded to an IT4Communities call (thanks to Anne Stafford). We have two Drupal projects at the moment: ReliefOVersight’s pkfloods donation-tracking site and CDAC; ReliefWeb is also going Drupal and looking at apps but that will probably be later this year – SimonHilton leading.
• Facebook feed into tools. Silicon Valley has two solutions to this now – have passed to Ushahidi and Sahana to make sure that their end of this pipe is okay.

CrisisCampUK is the UK part of an idea that started last June/July in the States, when a bunch of people at a Gov2.0 convention thought “we could use this for crises too”. It held a meeting last autumn to work out what to do, and spawned off several other ideas, including Random Hacks of Kindness (building tools for crises) and the Aid Information Challenges (tracing aid donations to the places where they’re used). The CrisisCommons founders (Noel, Andrew and Heather) thought they’d spend 2010 working out what they were creating and what it would do.

And then Haiti happened. The US camps started up first – they were already ready for the idea – and London joined in pretty soon after. The exact dates are on our wikipages, but the thing that I remember most was people from all sorts of communities (barcamp organisers, humanitarian software builders, NGO workers, friends of friends of friends) got together in a meeting on Thursday and held their first camp on the Saturday. Barcamps, hackathons, most of the camps that people were used to organising, usually take months from first meeting to camp: this was done in two days.

As to what we do at camps, that depends. We’ve helped with Haiti and Pakistan, but we’ve also been on the sidelines as Chile handled its own crisis, and were ready to respond to lots of other events that didn’t develop into a full-blown crisis (we were ready to start an Ushahidi instance for the AshCloud, for example, but flights restarted the day that we were going to go into crisis mode).

For Haiti we were 50/50 programming and data teams: half the camp were developing software to help with crises, and the other half were getting data into the systems that the rescue and then rebuilding teams were using on the ground. We work in a team with with other CrisisCamps worldwide, and we also work together with lots of partner communities – we usually have an OpenStreetMap cell developing their software and providing tech support to the mappers in London camps, and we have a lot of User Experience experts in the camps so we’ve worked a lot with the Ushahidi and UNOCHA design teams to improve their software too.

After Haiti we did a lot of work helping UNOCHA improve their site – it’s quite humbling that they see what we did for them as an example of the types of tools and apps that they’d like to build in the future. We also did a lot of community building work, running the CrisisCommons projects list and keeping the wikis relevant and clean of spam.

For Pakistan, we’ve taken the coordination role that Washington did for Haiti: finding all the systems providers in-country, connecting them up to technical support and users, and crowdsourcing information going into their systems. Our main partners are OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi and Sahana – right now we have requests for village names to be added to OpenStreetMap so that the people coordinating aid responses know where to send that aid to (without village names, the aid will go to the region containing the village rather than the village itself), we’re inputting (and translating) SMS messages into the Pakistan Ushaidi instance, adding situation data into the Pakistan Sahana instance and reformatting tweets for help into machine-readable form. We’re also working out how to get other types of datafeed into these tools – specifically we know that Facebook is much more popular than Twitter in Pakistan, and that the ham radio network is up and could be used to carry data (Silicon Valley camp is currently leading that), and helping with donor tracking sites for ReliefOversight.

Where do we go from here? Well, we should keep responding to any crisis where the information infrastructure is overwhelmed to the point where we can make a positive difference. We don’t know when the next one will be, but we know that there will be one. We have two camps in the UK now – London and Cambridge, both with passionate and able people coordinating them, but the one thing that we always need is more people. We’re hoping that the idea will grow across the country, then across the rest of Europe (we have had people wanting to start camps in most European countries, but we need to build them an easier way to join in). We started as a very technical camp, with lots of difficult technical challenges – between the Haiti camps, the RHOKs and Google adopting and developing some of the original camp tools, we now have a good toolset that can be deployed in many places (Ushahidi is currently deployed for things as diverse as Russian wildfires and mapping bicycle issues across a city, and another London group has just started an instance for the coming tube strikes). We’re getting better at responding to events, but we’d like to be here and ready with coordinators across the UK who know what to do when a crisis strikes, and ordinary folks across the UK who know that they can help online.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do this because of my grandmother. I love her very much, and if something like the floods happened, I would be worried sick until I’d heard she was okay. There are a lot of people in the UK in that situation today. Hopefully we can help a little.

The Pakistan flood response was starting to happen, and we needed a camp to set everything up. CrisisCampLdn had a lot of attendees from Cambridge who wanted to start their own camp, and we’d already talked on Wednesday at CrisisCampLdn about setting up a CrisisCamp in Cambridge.
At midnight on Thursday, someone suggested running a camp in Cambridge at the weekend. By midday Friday, we had a venue (the Aptivate offices) and less than 24 hours to set up and run an entirely new camp. This is how we did it.

• Get an organizer. Alan Jackson was already the facilitator at CrisisCampLdn, and an excellent person to set up a new camp on the same lines. We had the small issue of him not being around that weekend, but things like that have never really stopped us at CrisisCampUK.
• Get a venue: somewhere with wifi that will hold at least 20 people. Alan borrowed his office for the weekend. He asked for a room from 10am to 5pm, and got the Aptivate meeting room. Which was perfect. Alan thinks we can fit about 40 people in there. We’ll see…
• Get a web presence. We set up a CrisisCampCambs page on wiki.crisiscommons.org and created a camp hashtag #crisiscampcambs so people had something to cluster around.
• Get people. Alan told all the CrisisCampLdn people from Cambridge, put up an EventBrite page for the camp and got a shout out to 500 people across Cambridge. We still had people who’d just heard about the camp arriving at 4pm, but that’s not a problem: even if people give just an hour, it’s still an hour a work towards the cause.
• Get something to do. This camp was aimed at setting up the Pakistan Floods response, with the camp setup as a secondary aim. Other first camps will exist primarily to start themselves up, with the secondary aim of getting people trained on crisis response systems (Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, Sahana etc) and contributing to them and our knowledgebase. Whatever the camp does physically, one of the most important things it does is create a connected set of people who can, in future, be called on at a moment’s notice to help with an urgent response.
• Get food. This is an added bonus: we assumed that people would have to bring their sandwiches but Aptivate were lovely and donated pizza for lunch for everyone (we remembered to get them a receipt from the pizza company so they could try to claim the tax back though).

So that got us to Friday evening. Spike and Sara then travelled up from London to ‘campsit’ for Alan. First things to do were:

• Walk to the venue. Even if you drive to the venue, it’s worth checking out the walking route from the train station, the local bus and metro stops and the nearest recognizable landmark. People get lost, and if you’ve walked the area, you’ve got a chance of working out where they are.
• Check out the local area. Where are the places you can buy milk, biscuits, coffee, stationary. Find the nearest decent pub/café/etc so you have somewhere to suggest meeting up after the camp finishes. And think about camp-specific things too: for example, this was a Pakistan-themed camp so we found the nearest place serving Halal food (forgetting, embarrassingly, that it was Ramadan and people were fasting – sorry guys!).
• Buy camp supplies. This basically comes down to stationary, drinks and snacks. London has a CrisisCampInnaBox containing these items between camps: Cambridge was smaller, so we went out and bought CrisisCampInnaBag. Which contained
  • 1 flip-chart pad. These are incredibly useful, for sketching out designs on the table and for using on flipchart holders to write down group meetings (e.g. CheckIns). And it’s rude to use up your host’s flipchart paper.
  • 1 pack multicoloured postit pads. Also useful for designing things – CrisisCampLdn gets people to write ideas on postits, then puts up a flipchart sized sheet of paper for people to stick those postits to in groups.
  • 1 pack a4 pads. Useful for people writing down notes.
  • 3 packs cheap pens (black, blue, red). Someone always forgets to bring a pen.
  • 1 roll sticky labels. It’s a cheap form of nametag, and remembering everyone’s name as well as running a first camp is just too too difficult to do.
  • Bluetack. Because you’re going to want to put things on the walls at some point. We got white-tack (the stuff that doesn’t leave marks) so we didn’t damage the Aptivate walls with it.
  • 6 packs assorted biscuits, including ginger nuts and chocolate biscuits. Because these are the fuel of ideas.
  • Local newspapers – to give the people doing camp publicity some context (i.e. what style of stories are the local papers likely to print).
  • Normally, we’d also buy milk, coffee, teabags and sugar – we didn’t this time because we didn’t know if there was a kettle and thought there might be a coffee machine (there wasn’t). Also worth thinking about: we also had to pop out and buy some plastic cups because there were only 5 mugs in the room.
• Wait outside the venue for a) someone to let us in, and b) anyone arriving early for the camp.

So now we had a venue, some biscuits, some people turning up: how did we turn this into a functioning camp?

• We checked for the fire exits, then found the toilets and the kitchen (source of water for the kettle). You need to be able to direct people to these.
• We rearranged the tables in the room into a big workarea with everyone facing each other – for the London camp (which was larger), we arranged the rooms into ‘islands’ of about 8 people to a table.
• We found a projector for the initial talk and twitter feeds.
• And then we found a whiteboard (although a set of flipchart sheets would have worked just as well) and put on it:
  • The wifi code for the camp.
  • The website address for the camp (http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Cambridge)
  • The hashtags for the camp #crisiscampcambs and #pkfloods
  • The mailing list the camp was using http://groups.google.com/group/crisis-camp-london
  • The timetable for the day.
  • The list of major tasks for the day.

And then we started. The timetable that we used for this first camp was:

• 10:00-10:30 Welcome and sign-in. Settle people in as they arrive: get them to put their names (and emails if they’re willing to be contacted by the camp) on a sign-in form, take a sticky label and put their name on that and stick it to themselves, and start them chatting to each other. Then run a 15-minute talk on what a CrisisCamp is, what it does and why we do it. And never expect to start the presentation at 10am sharp: some people will be later than others, so give them a bit of room.
• 10:30-11:00 Plan work. Check list of things to do, and get volunteers for each major task. At this point, we also switched the projector over to show a TweetDeck of all the twitter feeds for the day (#crisiscommons #crisiscampcambs #pkfloods #pkflood).
• 11:00-12:00 Work. As a facilitator, your job is to make sure that everyone understand what they’re doing and has the resources they need to do it. And it’s not just the people in the physical camp – we also had people working as VirtualCrisisCampers who needed connecting up with tasks to do. Spike handled this part – he usually spends the day watching feeds and talking to people outside. Oh, and don’t forget to take photos – you’ll need these for your history and publicity!
• 12:00 Checkin. Stand by the flipchart, and for each task listed, check how it’s going, and ask for comments, i.e. if there is anything else that the team needs to do it. If a task is finished or needs extra resources, then move people around (voluntarily of course) to match. Checkins are also invaluable for checking that nobody is unhappy – sometimes crisis work is mentally tough, and you need to watch out for each other.
• 13:00-13:30 Lunch. There are different schools of thought on whether you should work over lunch or not. In the UK, we generally stand round the pizza and chat (this helps bond the group), then drift off to work when we’re ready. The people who were fasting worked through lunch, so we needed to keep facilitating too.
• 13:30-14:30 work. Most people are happy and settled by this point, but at this time in the day they were starting to run out of work too.
• 14:30 Checkin. As above, but get one of the other people in the camp to stand by the flipchart and run this. The more people who know how to do things like this at a camp, the more chance you have of keeping a camp running if the original facilitators can’t attend it.
• 14:30-16:00 work. As above. By this point, the camp was starting to wind down a bit – we deliberately front-loaded the work at CrisisCampCambs so that we had a working pkfloods site before North America woke up (we usually start to see activity around 2pm UK time).
• 15:00 Call Karachi. We work with external people, and often link in with them and with other camps running on the same day. In the UK, this usually happens midafternoon (when the US is awake).
• 16:00-16:30 tidyup. People often do a lot of good work offline at camps. The tidyup is where we ask them to put this work online somewhere (e.g. the wiki, github etc) so we and they can find it again both between camps and at the next camp. This time is also valuable for writing up things that aren’t quite finished but need explaining to the next person (or yourself in a weeks’ time).
• 16:30-17:00 Checkin. The final checkin is a “what have we done” session (as above), followed by a feedback session. For the feedback session, we divide a flipchart page vertically into plusses (what went right) and delta (what didn’t go so well). Then we ask everyone at the camp to tell us what their plusses and deltas from the camp are. And we think very hard about the deltas and work out how we can avoid them happening again.
• 17:00. Tidy up (physically): put the room back (i.e. move tables) as you found it.
• 17:00ish Go to pub/ home/ sleep. It’s good to get people talking to each other after the camp: it helps them to gel, and gives them a pressure-free environment to comment on things that did and didn’t work for them during the day. It also puts in a release valve, especially if it’s been a very hands-to-the-pump day.

The camp doesn’t stop for you just because everyone’s gone home. Things to do after the camp are:

• Send out a ‘thank you’ email to everyone who attended
• Make sure that all the external deliverables from the camp (code etc) got to the right people
• Start organizing the next camp

A second camp could run to a very similar timetable, but with one crucial difference. At the start of the camp, after the first hellos, the camp splits into two for 30 minutes: the people who have been to a camp before do the camp setup (table shifting, writing up the boards for the day etc) and one of the ‘old hands’ runs the slideset introduction session with the newbies. This gains you about 30 minutes more working time per camp, whilst making sure that nobody ever goes into a camp ‘cold’ without knowing what the camp does and why it is there.

CrisisCampCambs worked. And it worked because amazing people turned up and gave a day of their time to help with something they cared about. Here’s hoping to many more Cambridge camps in the future, and that writing all this down will help someone else start up a camp somewhere else (we’re looking at you, Karachi and Brighton!).

The first CrisisCampLdn pub meeting is tonight from 7pm in Penderel’s Oak in Holborn.

We’ll be running an introduction to CrisisCampLdn for people who want to help, and we’ll be drinking beer (del)(del)(del) discussing things like the Pakistan Floods response and how CrisisCampLdn operates (including the CrisisCampLdn link to CrisisCommons).

It’s your evening too so please tell us what you want to talk about – contributions and ideas for discussion are welcome at
http://piratepad.net/KZmEC3LAlF

Directions to the meeting are here.  The meeting hashtag is #crisiscampldn: use it if you’re lost and we’ll come out and find you.

This is a message to all attendees of Crisis Camp London from “Mothership”.

Thank you!

We want to thank you for all your volunteer efforts at CrisisCampLondon.

Crisis Commons grew from 150 people at the first CrisisCamp in June 2009 to 340 people during the first weekend after the Haiti earthquake to now over 2000 volunteers in 7 countries by the end of February 2010. We’ve built tools, helped find missing people, helped get aid to the right places and connected people in danger to the people who could help them. We’ve done all this in less than 4 months, and it’s all thanks to you wonderful volunteers.

And this is what you’ve achieved so far:

* Volunteered through our social networks
* Responded to disasters in Haiti, Chile and China
* CrisisCamps in Europe, North America, South America and Australasia
* Tweak the Tweet, We have We need, Open Street Map, Inveneo Wireless Network and dozens of other projects that made a difference to people in need
* Partnerships with Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, the World Bank, the UN and dozens of other relief organisations

But it’s not over yet. CrisisCommons still has a lot of work to do: sadly there will always be crises, and we need to help where we can when we can, and prepare for the next Haiti before it happens. You can help by:

* Helping our Oil Spill Response Mobile App: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Oil_Spill_Response
* Attending one of the camps – they’re still happening.
* Joining the VirtualCrisisCamp – you can help from home!
* Helping us to build Crisis Commons through our wiki, blog and google groups
* Filling in this survey: http://j.mp/crisiscamp-survey

We, in return, promise to support you and to keep in touch. We’ll be sending out regular newsletters, mid-July 2010 we are holding a Crisis Commons Congress – we’d love to see you there!

Thanks again and we promise to keep in touch,

Crisis Commons Team

We will be meeting on Saturday May 15th, 10am till 5pm at the London Knowledge Lab. You can sign up here!

Today we’re back at Crisiscamp: the work on open mapping continues, as does the work on ReliefWeb applications. Meanwhile Crisiscamp London is figuring out how to continue and grow.

We have worked out a basic responsibility structure, which may serve as a template for future camps and camps elsewhere in Europe. The people you need to run a camp are:

a manager – overall responsibility and information hub, password coordinator

a facilitator – makes the projects happen

a venue coordinator – looks after hardware, space and passwords

an outreach and noise coordinator – information coming in, info going out.

a ‘playgroup’ coordinator – (for want of a better term) someone to manage the ‘tasks anyone can do’ projects for people who are less techie but still want to participate.

In other news, crisiscampldn seems to be a strange attractor of pizza. Even though Dominos has officially stopped sponsoring us, pizzas arrived on time anyway. We want to see if the pizza feed follows us wherever we go in future.

The fourth CrisisCampLDN will be taking place from 10 to 5pm this Saturday, February 20th, at London Knowledge Lab.

We’re at the London Knowledge Lab, working on the third CrisisCampLDN: an event where the technically-minded (in the less technically-minded) get together to work on applications and ideas that solve problems for disaster relief in Haiti.

CrisisCampLDN is coordinated by the crisiscommons movement, which is organising camps all over the world to deal with disaster relief tech issues.

Here are some of the projects we have been working on today:

Martin, Daniel and Andrew are creating an application that will provide maps and other resources to disaster relief workers in usable forms:

‘We wanted to demonstrate a much simpler website/application that uses all the available data – a filtering application. What we’ve chosen to demonstrate is a mapping tool. Currently the resource maps organisations can access are large pdfs that are hard to download in the field, and they cover the whole area, whereas you might be interested in a smaller area. This is demonstrating how we can search the maps on an existing website: for instance you can view tiled images, as in googlemaps, and zoom in to the area you’re interested in. Hopefully that’s more useful.
Maps are generally useful for NGOs, but it’s more a proof of concept that we can use the data from these sources in other ways that may be more useful.
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