CrisisCampDC

Technology + Humanitarian Relief Barcamp (June 2009)

Digital divide growing or shrinking?

San Franciscan's better equiped to handle zombie attacks than earthquakes (ha!)

How to bring sectors together and in what format to do so. Can we shadow an existing format and piggyback? Is there an ability to create a safe place to test this out?

The analagy of a crisis puzzle. Started to tag characteristics with puzzle pieces (ARC is volunteerism; google is mapping; etc.). What community has the expertise to make this work?

Vocabulary issues. Many different vernaculars. Need consistency in how we communicate.

We aren't going to come up with a unified theorem.

What's the coalescing function that brings us all together? This cuts across the community. It opens up a lot of doors. Crisis, emergencies, opens up doors and gets people at the table. The prior administration has supported this subject through funding. Still need tools to activiate the bueracracy (any federal, state, local, enterprise, international). It is a big deal.

We are concerned about preparedness and mitigation and we are concerned about emergency management. Agility is the key.

How about the incentives of preparedness? Ready.gov doesn't have a call to action? GetReady.gov? Understanding human nature? Communication/social marketing is how to do it. During a crisis that is when NGOs go out. Government can't really get out and get the message out. Couldn't get free booth space.

We need a virtual meeting space. ARC has talked about people's readiness. Heidi Klum talked about preparedness.

Linking preparedness to a state of well being. As a cultural value. Selling preparedness is like selling life insurance/flood insurance. (If one lives in a flood plane, to get a mortgage you have to get flood insurance).

Government agencies...coalescing "pockets of expertise." What are we trying to accomplish. Identifying those gaps...the gaps between reality and what it should be. Developing a system that responds to chaos. We are trying to solve a problem that we don't know what the problem is.

Before you get to the solution, we need to engage the key stakeholders involved in the conversation and the process of developing/evolving CrisisCamp. Critical to have a Crisis Camp San Francisco, UN, etc.
When including stakeholders, need to make sure we aren't including too many people.

Possible to create Crisis Camp around subjects (like a dictionary)? We need to create metrics, too.

Preparedness isn't as important as prevention. Part of the disaster are the people (focus on people). A lot of the people here work in tech, but tech around human affairs. Exercises are important because they create relationships.

We have to bridge the fear gap for those who are major decision/policy makers.

Making stuff that's better? Need to make our stuff that's good now, but not great. If you have to train people on the tool, it isn't good enough yet.

We owe it to ourselves to make sure we know what's out there. If I'm an adminstrator of finance, I need to know that value add.

What can we as a group do in moving forward? A lot of technology experts here; have no desire to talk about these applications until we make all of these techonologies here interoperable. Crisiscomments.org (with a link in there for dictionary that's empty).

Two camps in this crisis camp: hard core techonlogiest and creative message crafters (communication specialists).

The tool can be very well crafted, but we need to know how to communicate about it.

Need to let people know about this technology and how it exists.

Technology use can be cotified by generational tendency. Generational dynamics happen in fours: boomers, gen ex'ers, gen'y'ers (and who?). Gen ex'ers need to step into the leadership roles.

Need to use web 2.0 to improve situational awareness by using tools (discussion threads) to educate.

Geo/caching? Flash mob? See doing a crisis camp flash mob?

We are trying to scope this 'thing'; we are speaking to our own expertise. In terms of what we can do, and our expertise...there is a whole new community that is physically disperse. We (at Google/us)...our piece is to really be the sme's on the demographics of those who use this technology (not our mom's who don't know how to e-mail or text). If we build it they will come.

CrisisCamp as a group can easily get a seat at the table when it comes to reaching 'this' part of the community. We may have aspirations and know how to activate this disperse group (and let them tell their parents how to text).

Fundamentally: what is the goal of the group? It is self organizing. We don't have $$ now, so we don't have the luxury of focusing on specific projects...

Is the goal to help people who help those in a crisis.

We can't do everything; we need to scope and focus. Technology plays a different role in a developed country. We need to put some guardrails on this. "The Use of Technology in Crisis Response."

Preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery: technology has a different use in each of those four phases of emergency amangement.

Four main audiences:
General public
First responders
Policy makers
????

Design doc? Here's the funnel...all the consituencies...sme's weigh in on these 'things'; a project manager/management group distills the needs; determines the specs; eval/iterate/eval/iterate circle.

Organizational change brought about through technology.

Find one or two things that can be successful and bring them forward to policy makers. Look at everything and take the 'nuggets'.

Has to have some focus...it has to be a self organizing function...what your inspired about and how to engage/promote it.

No longer can you do it the 'old way'. Policy makers want to know why 'this is useful'.

Need to tell the story about why a technology is useful and how it affects people (or the policy maker).

The compelling story is this group is that we came up with solutions (in technology) to help the 2nd wave of pandemic.

Social distancing...and people turn to their technology (when sick at home).

What's the bat singal of this group? Are we to do if the bat signal comes up?

A way of thinking about it...which is what we may need to tweak? Beforehand an accurate picture of where we are? Then during a crisis, we know the resources to get to the "to be" state. May just be about getting accurate about what we've got and then what we need.

We can connect people in high visibility. Push the solutions/facilitate between this group and the implementers.

ECBproject.org.

Are there ways to use SMS and to pursuade organizations that have that data and share it on a common platoform. Some sort of platform to analyze this informaiton. August: prototype match up taking place?

The role of this group is to have a discussion about what's going on? Someone brings forward a problem/question and the group thinks it out about brainstorms possible solutions. This is the third leg of the stool. Using 'this' (international) problem as an example of how the group works.

Seed an idea: in the US we are at the beginning of a major financial crisis. People may not have banking services. How do we use technology to assist in this crisis?

Presented a problem; technological solution. (Pakistan) if we can have a 'hack-a-thon' and present the problem. We get to syndicate the problem across the globe and what we get is the ability to work on multiple things at once. We abandon what doesn't work and take what rises to the top. Index the existing solution; identify the gaps; and then (once we've defined it) then we go out to the developer community as ask them to create/build it. Define what the problems are that need to be solved and go to the developers to build it. Get the hack-a-thon off the ground. Then the communicators can take this tech solution and explain/market/promote to the policy makers.

All of us who believe in this, we need to bring others (who we know should be here and are not) to the table. That's the only way this will work. Coming together and really taking ownership. We need to take a community building role. Getting the speres of influence together.

Views: 19

Replies are closed for this discussion.

© 2024   Created by Heather Blanchard.   Powered by

Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service