The CrisisCamper Tour for National Preparedness Month (September) is promoting digital preparedness and open data to help communities be better prepared for crisis. Throughout the tour, CrisisCommons will learn from the crisis experts and the tech community to help collaborate and support local emergency managers, public health officials, and community organizers in building relationships and technical applications/processes across these communities.

Pascal Schuback–the Seattle CrisisCamp Lead and core member of CrisisCommons is a full-time EM at the King County Office of Emergency Management in Seattle, WA– will be in town on one of the first stops on the CrisisCamper Tour (@crisiscamper, crisiscommons.org/tour/, a project of CrisisCommons.org)!

Geeks without Bounds has been a longtime supporter of Crisis Commons and we’re happy to help host the kickoff party in San Francisco at NextSpace on Friday, September 23rd.  Here’s the info:  CrisisCamper Evite

We are geeks who care to use our skills to solve more than just #firstworldproblems. In doing this, we imbue the response tools we build with the values we hold. For instance, crisis mapping is built around the ideas of crowd sourcing and open source. Anyone can post, anyone can edit, and through the trends which emerge, outliers who might attempt to skew the results towards their own ends are swallowed up. Open Source communitites and participants building tools for disaster response means the people in need of assistance also gain some autonomy. The response itself is still a huge logistical and financial endeavor which must be supported by governments and other large organizations. However, the ability for us to connect to each other as *individuals* in OS lends dignity to those most in need. The people building the response tools do so because they care about both the process of tool creation and the purpose the tool will serve. The creators’ values are then hugely manifest in the tools themselves. This then affects the people using the tools.

LockerGnome’s Brandon Wirtz talks with Geeks Without Bounds founders Johnny Diggz and Willow Brugh at OSCON 11

I had the great opportunity to make it to Berlin (my first overseas journey) for Chaos Computer Congress and Berlin Sides. The ability to attend was based on the generosity of friends from Ding Fabrik (for the highly-sought-after pass to 27c3 and a place to crash, along with being fabulous hosts in general), Nick Farr of Hackers on a Plane offering me a plane ticket at a crazy price, and my role as the first official employee of GWOBorg.

I spoke at Berlin Sides before I had even been in Berlin for 24 hours (hellooooooo, jetlag!). No recordings take place at Berlin Sides due to the number of 0day talks that happen at B-Sides events, but the conversation was lively and the global community of hackers seems keen to engage in linking spaces to each other and to humanitarian organizations. Later that same day, a gentleman spoke at 27c3 about Ushahidi and mapping elections. Professional video will be up later, but in the meantime you can find copies of the livestreams to (legitimately) torrent here.

As always, the real scheming happens in the hallways and at the after parties. At C-Base, after a fantastic round-table for signal.hackerspaces.org (a hacker radio show – you can listen to this specific one here), several facilitators of spaces across the globe and I ranted about how important good tools are. Kids from Sweden, Germany, England, Japan, and America all rubbed shoulders and clinked beer necks while we talked about building better tools.

See, most of these humanitarian organizations only get help when a disaster actually occurs. And then it’s a huge, frantic push. Thousands of work hours go into solving problems. And it’s welcome … but it’s not sustainable. The infastructure built in these conditions is difficult to work with even in the best of times – hobnobbed together by people of varying skills and backgrounds, often influenced by sleep deprivation and major stress. Until it’s cleaned up, it’s difficult to improve, to build upon, or even to use for anything but the very specific need it was designed towards. And when people are dying, any extra second you spend on figuring out the tools at hand counts.

So let’s make better tools.

We’re starting at Jigsaw Renaissance (the maker space I’m director of), in Seattle, to hold events called Hack for Good. These will happen the third weekend of each month, in tamdum with the hackerspaces.org synchronus hackathon. We’ll have a class the Wednesday before each, so people can brush up on their skills and make sure everyone has the most recent build. I encourage you to join us as we work on more of RHoK’s problem definitions. Ping me if you’re care to join in.

Cheers, and happy making!

The drizzling and gray rain that greeted us in Los Angeles was not at all what GWOBorg expected after the cold but sunny weather in Portland and Seattle the days before – we were finally in Southern California after all, it should be warm and sunny! Though the weather seemed to work against us (Shannon was particularly looking forward to thawing out after two weeks traveling through the north!) that didn’t deter the excitement of rounding out the entire 101010 tour with a final presentation at Jeff Pulver’s #140 Character Conf in Los Angeles (a Twitter conference) .

The 140Conf Back-story of Geeks Without Bounds

Six weeks previously, Diggz presented at the #140Conf in San Francisco and that was the very first time that Geeks Without Bounds was mentioned publicly. Though Diggz had been slowly forming the idea for years Jeff Pulver gave him the stage in San Francisco and that audience was the first sounding board for Geeks Without Bounds – the idea was now public.

And when Pulver mentioned the opportunity to speak yet again, this time at the #140Conf LA, it seemed so fitting and an almost poetic way to end the whirlwind 101010 tour that took the team through 11 different cities and 13 very different hacker, macker, and co-working spaces: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Louisville, Atlanta, NYC, Washington DC, Boston, Portland, and Seattle.

Presenting and Playing at #140Conf

So we braved the rain and found ourselves in the dimly lit interior of the Music Box in Hollywood interacting in the land of social media influencers. GWOBorg forged new friendships and alliances (shout-outs to Couchsurfing Ori, Captain Crunch, and others) on that first day of the conference.

Day Two was our presentation day, a ten minute slot to once again present the idea and call to action for Geeks Without Bounds, and nerves were humming as Diggz and Willow pared down the presentation to fit into the 10 minute slot.

They rocked it. GWOBorg has spent the past six week touring the US, asking questions, meeting others in the crisis response space, and forming a more complete and honest picture of this community than we ever thought possible. And with those lessons in mind the presentation not only highlighted the hackathon, but also the need for long-term consciousness and support from those who understand the power of social media.

A sincere thanks is order to Jeff Pulver, not only for the chance to once again present about GWOBorg before all of the characters at the conference, but for also asking Johnny Diggz to rock the #140Conf party with his mad piano skills!