First Hackathon and Hackathon Firsts
Note: This is a personal piece from our Content Creator, Lindsay Oliver, with additional input from one of the EveryoneHacks winners, Wendy Fong. EveryoneHacks was the first hackathon that I actively participated in. Seriously. I’ve been around them plenty of times in the past few years, but only from the sidelines, in passing at my ...
Occupy Sandy: Notes from Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield, Speedbird blogger and author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, has written an account of the Occupy Sandy relief effort in New York from the perspective of an in-the-trenches volunteer. His post, Preliminary Notes to a Diagram of Occupy Sandy, provides an in-depth look at the structural and cultural factors contributing ...
The Importance of Meaningful Data in Crisis Response.
Where we’re at. As recently as a week ago, victims of Hurricane Sandy were without heat or power during a snowstorm. Some families are still without the most basic amenities. It wasn’t for lack of effort from NGOs. It seems every known (and unknown) disaster relief organization descended on the east coast to hand out ...
V&TC summit summary
Huge hearts to Galit for so much help on this doc, and to Matt Stempeck and Heather Leson for their heavy input. On October 10th, a small group of Volunteer and Technical Community leaders and academics focused on crisis and humanitarian response gathered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. The V&TC summit was ...
RELIEF summary part II
Co-authored post from Ella and Willow Yesterday, you read about Civil Air Patrol and the basis of RELIEF. We continue that conversation today into security and the complexities of mismatched cultural backgrounds. On the security side, Rogue Genius’s George Chamales and Geeks Without Bounds’s Eleanor Saitta spoke with RELIEF attendees about their systems. While the ...
RELIEF summary part I
Co-authored post from Ella and Willow This week, Willow Brugh and Eleanor Saitta represented Geeks Without Bounds at RELIEF at Camp Roberts in California, an event that’s a long way from our usual beat. A “Joint-Interagency Field Experimentation”, most of the people at RELIEF are from US military humanitarian response groups or agencies like FEMA ...
Keeping the Channels Open
This post is based on a talk given at the Datenspuren 2011. The talk provided ideas for network planning people, people developing services as well as users of network based services. General Considerations There are several reasons for a breakdown communication (networks). These can be technical problems (e.g. human errors, mass events), catastrophes (e.g. floods), ...
Humanitarian Networking Part 3: Collaboration Benefits
This is the third in a 3-part series on collaboration amongst humanitarian agencies, NGOs, and similar organizations (see parts one and two). ________________________________________________ Wonderful! Now, give me some concrete examples of how to use this humanitarian network to effectively collaborate. Gladly. The new wave of humanitarian response that is brewing just under the noses of ...
Humanitarian Networking Part 2: First Steps
This is the second in a 3-part series on collaboration amongst humanitarian agencies, NGOs, and similar organizations. Part one is here, and three is here. ________________________________________________ How can humanitarian aid collaboration be accomplished? How can we change the system of cutthroat competition to one of healthy collaboration? In order to create an environment of collaboration ...
Humanitarian Networking Part 1: Post-Scarcity
This is the first in a 3-part series on collaboration amongst humanitarian agencies, NGOs, and similar organizations. ________________________________________________ What are the biggest issues facing humanitarian aid organizations and disaster relief agencies today? Ask any organization and they’ll tell you: acquiring funding, efficient communication in emergency situations, and implementation of aid in hard-hit areas. You’d think ...
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