Using open source tools, the Data Anywhere solution is to set up simple database, which will replicate itself, and simple scrapers on various virtual machines.  These are cheap (about $5+/mo on digitalocean), and many go unused/underutilized.

The immediate goal is for the servers to aggregate any type of data, and make it accessible to the public. The longer term vision of this project will appeal to the data geek.  We’d like to use the data for examining unexpected relationships  chronologically at first, but could be compared along any index.

Although just taking off, the Data Anywhere project has the potential to help many organizations. It integrates a persistent data model; if one machine is shut down, no permanent loss is incurred to the data set, since it replicated itself to several other machines. These servers can be used to aggregate any type of data, and make it accessible to the public at large, through a simple RESTful web interface.

We are actively looking for more individuals and community partners to grow the Data Anywhere community.  Our very first workshop was at the March Occupy Data hackathon.  We had two groups initiate projects, and we’re planning our next workshop for a summer Occupy Data hackathon.  At these events, participants are provided with simple instructions on how to set up and secure a server, and databases that maintain themselves, and replicate. Knowledge of Linux or Python is helpful but not necessary. Patience and a willingness to learn is MUCH more important.

About us: The Data Anywhere team is led by an EXTRA-ordinary, no less than amazing software developer and Linux admin, teaching Linux basic system admin, MongoDB setup and usage, and flask web API.  The opportunity to work with her alone, will be well worth it.

More Info: Hope to see you in June!  That’s when we’re planning for the next Occupy Data hackathon.  For Data Anywhere announcements subscribe to our discussion list, follow @occupydata on Twitter, or join us Meetup.com. More information on Occupy Data can be found at OccupyResearch.net and occupydatanyc.org.

During response, there is a lot of chaos. It’s the nature of the beast. As technologists, we like everything to be able to fit into orderly functions and objects, and optimize for best path (well, I do it because I’m compulsive, but close enough..). But sometimes such a path is difficult to find, and trying to force reality into order only makes it worse. Remember this post about Sandy response from Lindsay? As Matt Stempeck and I talk about (not quite sure where the phrase comes from – we both attribute it to each other, so it must have come from the ethers), “design for the messiness.”

As digital responders, sometimes there is no action necessary to take, no tool to deploy, but it is still useful to create that common view. Aggregating information into one place can move the conversation from “what is happening?!” to “what can we do about it?” When we have a more closely shared view of reality, we can build great things together. We create a baseline on which to operate.

What we did:

To create that common view, we curated a document of vetted media that was coming in. Where there were live broadcasts, what people were hearing from the police blotter, and correcting information as we went. Gdocs have this beautiful attribute of allowing for iFrames pulled from their contents, so we embedded it on the GWOB site (but it could have been anywhere, really), where it automatically updated. We also created a non-iFrame-based page, which had to be manually updated, but could be viewed on mobile and tablet. The URLs of these pages were broadcast outwards for people seeking information.

How we do it:

A bunch of people pile into a chat room. Usually Skype, which hurts my security-aware soul, but you also have to go where people are. Those rooms are built upon pre-existing connections between members of the community. What happened this time, that I thought was super useful, was the forming of an event-based room which had a few representatives from various groups in one space sharing the meta view and compiling various resources pulled from our specific contact realm. It was a coordination of efforts. The room will dissolve post-After-Action-Report.

From that chat, you have the public-facing document. There is also an internal document tracking what is in progress and internal reflection – what we could be doing better, who is on what task, etc. While each deployment is fairly ad hoc, these components seem to appear in one form or another each time.

Digital humanitarians

We’re not just doing business. We’re checking in on each other. There is humor, and there is grace, and there are stumbles. We come with our own baggage and expectations of protocol and procedure. But through it all, there is always the main objective: to make things suck less.

Especially want to thank Sara from Change Assembly, Heather from Ushahidi, Arlene from OpenIR, Erhardt and Matt from Center for Civic Media, Cat and Chris from Humanity Road, Jen from Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Om and Rose from Standby Task Force, Lyre from Boston Crisis Camp, Hilary and Christina and Donna and Joanna, Pat from Sahana Eden, and of course (and as always) our own Lindsay. Honored and proud to work with such an amazing group.

Photo by Calum Morrell

The Second International Space Apps Challenge was the largest international hackathon ever with over 8000 registered participants around the globe.

Photo by Calum Morrell

I’ve written so much about the Glasgow event over at the Space Apps Glasgow Tumblr and in a variety of other emails and reports, I’d like to just take this blog post to share some of my favorite images from the day.

The Scottish event was held in a former day care center room in an old church building which is now owned and used by the University of Stratclyde Student Union. We had one area set up with a projector and screen for talks and presentations. We played music videos on that screen sometimes and ran live feeds from other random sites at other times.

Another area was set aside for Dougie Kinnear and his 3D printer, which was definitely a hit. Not only did Dougie create a fantastic brooch representing the Dark Side of the Moon with love and wit, he also printed tiny space ships for our youth participants and some glasses for one of our mascots, the space meerkat.

Photo by Calum Morrell	Photo by Calum Morrell
Photo by Calum Morrell	Photo by Calum Morrell
Photo by Lisha Sterling	Photo by Lisha Sterling
Photo by Calum Morrell	Photo by Calum Morrel

The event was a hit with everyone involved, and we’re already looking forward to next year!

Photo by Calum Morrel

One of the projects that was at both events was Taarifa. Taarifa is a web and mobile platform that allows you to create, visualize and share stories on a map, forked from the Ushahidi project. It allows individuals and groups to reports and work through reports in their own terms using the tools they already have.  At the last hackathon the team worked on a HXL extractor to reduce some of the manual intervention necessary to produce OpenStreetMap maps from available data. That work is currently being used live in Uganda, and other implementations are coming online.

This weekend, the team worked on a new API to make the data even more accessible for a range of applications. The early part of Saturday was spent with the team hovering around a whiteboard as they discussed the architecture and the plan for development. Then, with their ideas well defined and jobs divvied out amongst the group, they spent the rest of the weekend writing code, testing the API and creating usable documentation.

Another project which was represented at both events was the Ontology group. Within information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and represents the relationships between those concepts. The ontology allows for more effective retrieval of information out of the noise of large data sets. This group of linguists and programmers used the Cihai ontology to structure the earthquake data from the GDACS website, and store the structured data in a SPARQL data repository that supports data querying over the repository.

The ACAPS regional analysis group produced a new piece of software called Dafne designed to produce location- and situation-specific information sheets for disaster responders from the vast array of digitally available information. This is also a continuation of work that was done at the last H4D2, but in the last hackathon the effort was put onto data scraping and in this event the team focused on data presentation. GWOB’s Willow Brugh assisted this team with a visual workflow to help them guide development early on. The team was then able to quickly create the software they needed by using the Drupal 7 web application framework as a base.

Another team using Drupal 7 as a base for development was the Sierra team. Over the last few months, Seyyed Shah has been creating an architecture for decentralized resource management during disaster as part of his graduate studies. During the April H4D2 event, this application was published to GitHub and an installer was created so that users could easily create their own instances. A new website was also created for Sierra to describe its functionality and provide documentation on its use. This software is still in early beta stages, but it is expected that within the next few weeks it will be ready for testing in the wild.

Many attendees from the last event returned to continue work on existing projects, and we also saw some new faces who brought valuable insights and skills to the weekend of code.

In preparation for Saturday, here is some logistical information before the event gets started.

Challenges and Projects
We’ve curated a list of challenges we’ll be participating in that we feel are most beneficial to society as a whole and give back in a humanitarian way. Check out the list below for a more detailed explanation of the challenge and the effect it will have on a global and local scale.

• My Virtual Mentor
• Revitalize the PDS
• Space Station Benefits to Humanity
• We Love Data
• Seeing Water From Space

Project creation is now live on the SpaceApps site. Participants can create a project by clicking “Create Project” in the top bar of the main site or from any challenge page.

To create a project, teams need three things:

• A Title
• A Description
• The License they want to release it under (a list of open source licenses is provided on the project creation form)

All other information may be added as we progress through the weekend. Please note that this may take a bit of time to query. Feel free to look around, but we suggest waiting until the event begins to submit a project.

Location Logistics
We’re holding our event at Google for Entrepreneurs Krakow (thanks, Google!). If you’re having trouble getting in or finding us, please send a tweet to @SpaceAppsKrakow and we’ll help you find us!

Address:
Rynek Główny 12, 3 piętro
Krakow, Poland (map)

Getting into the building: Enter through the door to the Pasasz 13 side of the building with the Google logo at the entrance. Go straight and turn right at the end of the hall. The elevator will be on your right.

Schedule
We’ve got some amazing speakers coming to the event to lead workshops and give lightning talks. There are also reserved speaking spots for attendees if you would like to give a lightning talk (5 minutes or less) on any topic related to SpaceApps or technology in general. Email lindsay@gwob.org if you’d like to sign up for a lightning talk. Check out a detailed breakdown of the schedule here on the Geeks Without Bounds blog, and check the event page here for updates.

Cloud Computing Resources
Two organizations, CloudSigma and Dimension Data, have offered complimentary cloud computing resources to participants in the Space Apps Challenge. Cloud Sigma is offering general services, and Dimension Data is providing $200 USD in free credit to participants. Credentials to these resources will be available onsite the first day of the event.

Please note: These resources come without endorsement of NASA or the SpaceApps Challenge, and we are unable to offer technical or other support regarding them.

Social Media
Hashtags: #SpaceApps #SpaceAppsKRK
Official Twitter Handles: @SpaceAppsKrakow @GWOBorg @SpaceApps
Tumblr: SpaceApps Krakow
Sponsor Social Media: To say thank you! @Tropo @Webmuses US Consulate General Krakow @Google

Facilitators
Willow Brugh @willowbl00
John “Diggz” Higgins @diggz
They are wonderful and hard-working. Please show them some love!

Sponsors
Many thanks to our generous sponsors!
Geeks Without Bounds
Google for Entrepreneurs Krakow
Tropo
U.S. Consulate General, Krakow
WebMuses

If you know of anyone who would like to attend, spread the word! You can still sign up here until the day of the event, and at the door on the day of the event.

Drew Hornbein wrote a blog post recently about how Data Anywhere can help the world of Disaster Response management. He described his experience doing some work with Staten Island Community and Interfaith Long Term Recovery Group, and how the data that he needed to work with was tied up in a format that could not be queried database-style. It took weeks to gather information that a simple query could have managed under different circumstances. Furthermore, the data was tied up in Google Documents that could either be shared in their entirety or not at all. In addition to massaging the data into useable information, he also had to export it into a format that could be shared more easily without over-sharing. He explains how Data Anywhere can help in situations like that.

He lays out an ideal picture of how data could be shared in unified Data Anywhere databases:

• Data would have a persistent home.
• Data would be machine readable.
• Data stewards could manage access to the data, making some public and keeping some private.
• Reports could be generated on the fly.
• Third party applications could query the data.

It is important to note that data privacy is an important factor in this project. One of the goals of the project is to give granular control over access so that the collecting organization can keep all of the information that they gathered stored in Data Anywhere, but other users of the system will not have access to things that they should not. This is a keen challenge for those interested in developing tight, secure code for big data.

At a recent #OccupyDataNYC hack day attended by Hornbein, developments on Data Anywhere were led by Gloria W and consisted of setting up a simple database, which could replicate itself, and simple scrapers on various virtual machines. Together they attempted to scrape a wide assortment of data as a proof of concept for the project. They also created an API for querying data to use it in custom applications.

There are many continuing challenges with this project. Standards need to be created for the format of data. Security features need to be built into the system and tested thoroughly. APIs must be written to handle a wide range of use cases.

Some of these challenges are highly technical, but some challenges need a different sort of expertise. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the area of research and statistics would be very helpful in designing the data standards as well as describing use cases that will help shape the APIs. And although Hornbien’s focus is on Disaster Response uses, the initial idea behind Data Anywhere was for a much broader use of existing data on the Web, so SMEs who have research experience in a range of specific topics can bring their knowledge to bear.

You can explore the code for this project and fork a copy of your own at GitHub.

Read Drew Hornbeim’s post here.

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce child mortality.
5. Improve maternal health.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental stability.
8. Global partnership for development.

Konektaz is creating tools that especially support goals 3, 4, 5 and 6 by empowering people to share and find vital information about health and community resources. They have built a tool that allows users to find resources using mobile phones or an ordinary web connection. At this time you can search or add information about health centers in a number of locations in Africa and Asia. They are also working on connecting with community service providers to create new ways to share and use data that can help improve health, safety and community development.

The project is in an early development phase at this time and is looking for partners who can help define which data would be most useful. User needs are presented as statements from the target audience such as, “As a mother I want to know where the nearest health facility is in my area so i can look after the health of my family.” or “As a mother I want to earn an income so that I can support my family.” The initiative functions from the perspective that the user needs should be defined by the users themselves, and rooted in local knowledge. As user needs are defined, new developments can be presented as challenges to be developed by the community.

Konektaz is looking for developers to support their efforts. The system built so far uses the following technologies:
Client side

• Content management through Django CMS
• Content delivery through Bootstrap templates
• Location data is captured in Microformats
• Mobile content delivered through HTML5
• Icons are sourced from the The Noun project

Server side

• Geodjango
• PostGIS

You can find the code at GitHub at https://github.com/konekta/where-is-when-is
Try Konektaz for yourself.

Chosen Challenges

• My Virtual Mentor
• Revitalize the PDS
• Space Station Benefits to Humanity
• We Love Data
• Seeing Water From Space

Detailed Schedule Breakdown
Saturday

• 9:00 – Doors open, coffee
• 9:30 – Intros and schedule overview!
• 10:00 – Lightning talks (5 min. each)
  • Barbara Strojnowska: Nanotechnologies, Printing Stem Cells, and Grafen.
  • Bartłomiej Adamczyk: TBD
  • Open Attendee Slots: 15 minutes (3 speakers)
• 10:30 – Challenges and team formations
• 11:00 – Workshops: Choose two (30 min. each)
• 11-11:30 – Ian Scarffe: “Lean”
• 11-11:30 – Michal Zolnowski – Rantiga Osservatorio from TEDx Krakow
• 11:40-12:10 – Kasia Mrowca – data visualisation and the economy
• 11:40-12:10 – TBD
• 12:15 – FEED
• 17:00 – FEED AGAIN
• 20:00 – Doors closed

Sunday

• 9:00 – Doors open, coffee, commence with the hacking!
• 12:00 – FEED
• 15:00 – Presentations and judging
• 16:00 – Prizes!

Mega thanks to all our Sponsors!
Tropo
Google for Entrepreneurs Krakow
WebMuses

In just two weeks people will be gathering in person at 75 locations around the world and on the International Space Station for the Second International Space Apps Challenge. Geeks Without Bounds organized the San Francisco event last year, and we are proud to be organizing two different locations this year: Krakow, Poland and Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

I am leading the organizing team of Paul Mason from SQA and William Nelson of the University of Strathclyde GeekSoc in Glasgow. Our event has major funding from SQA, location and logistical support from GeekSoc, and some prizes and goodies from GitHub. We still have a few spaces open for the weekend, but we expect that to change quickly as we get local press coverage over the next week.

We had originally planned to work only on software and open data challenges, but we’ve hit a jackpot with one attendee agreeing to bring his 3D printer so that we can work on physical items as well including the Dark Side of the Moon and In the Sky with Diamonds challenges. We will have a short tutorial on 3D printing at the event, including what kinds of software you can use to create your models and then translate them into the code that the 3D printer uses.

Other challenges we have chosen are split between highly technical projects requiring programming, database, and/or systems administration knowledge and those requiring mainly design or communication skills. Of course, even the most technical challenge needs writers and designers to help developers make useable tools and even the design projects can benefit from technical support. The combination should help to ensure broad participation and cooperation across teams throughout the weekend.

In addition to the main Space Apps Challenge event over the weekend of April 20-21, we have also arranged for the participation of a group of year 7 students (age 11-12). We will visit the school on the Tuesday before Space Apps Challenge to get the kids started on their projects and then we’ll return to the school later in the week to lend some technical assistance where needed. The kids will then come to the event on Sunday afternoon with their teacher and parents to present their projects and see what the adult teams have done over the weekend.

If you happen to be in Scotland for the weekend of International Space Apps Challenge, register and join us at the event! If you can’t come, you can still follow us on Tumblr and Twitter.

We’re entering into a partnership with Splunk as one of our program sponsors. We feel extremely fortunate to be working with a company that not only makes data easy to understand and analyze, but also actively engages in social good via their Splunk 4 Good program.

What does this partnership mean for Geeks Without Bounds?
Splunk will be supporting GWOB through funding (see our transparent accounting doc here), mentorships with our accelerator teams, product trainings on the Splunk platform for our teams and other humanitarian organizations in our network, and sponsored hackathons.

Christy Wilson, the head of the Splunk 4 Good division, will take a seat on our advisory board to help Geeks Without Bounds scale and grow in the digital humanitarian space. She’s already provided excellent mentorships to our accelerator teams and given them resources and food for thought. We can’t wait to see the further good that will come out of this partnership and its future initiatives!