Questions/comments from the American Red Cross

[Andy Carvin]

Hi everyone,

 

American Red Cross social media coordinator Wendy Harman asked me to pass along this note to you to see if it generated any ideas or potential synergies with your projects. Both the PersonFinder and Tweak The Tweet came to mind reading her note.

 

Thanks,

ac

 

----------------------------------
Andy Carvin

Senior Strategist
NPR Social Media Desk

acarvin [at] npr [dot] org
Phone:  202-513-3639   

Twitter: @acarvin
----------------------------------
 

---

From: Har...@usa.redcross.org [mailto:Har...@usa.redcross.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 3:32 PM
To: Andy Carvin
Subject: Crisis Camp

 

Hi Andy –

I have a request for your crisis camp friends to tackle.

 

Red Cross hosts a site called Safe and Well where people can register themselves after an emergency event and family members can search the site to find them (if they know the loved ones’ basic contact info).

 

I have 3 elements I’d like to figure out:

 

1. Safe and Well social web and mobile integration: We are in the process of rebuilding this site and there’s talk of integrating its functionality into Twitter and Facebook. We have an @safeandwell but there’s some concern that people have to be following it in advance of an emergency in order to DM their status (we’re concerned about privacy issues). For Facebook I imagine we could hire an app developer pretty easily, but isn’t it also easier just to publish the Safe and Well website and bypass an app process? Should we make a mobile app? Who should we ask to do it? I don’t know enough to answer these questions.
2. Emergency status and needs: The communication between people trapped/in need in Haiti and the Red Cross social media accounts has overwhelmed me and quite honestly had me in tears multiple times. As of today we can see all this data and are even looking at sites like Ushahidi’s to see it aggregated and visualized, but we don’t have mechanisms for responding to it, nor do we know if doing so will be more efficient or less efficient than how we respond to disaster today. Despite this, the fact is that we won’t be able to ignore this kind of data in the future, whether it’s an intl disaster or domestic one. So we need to be prepared to handle it in the very near future.  In the same platform as Safe and Well, we’d like for people to be able to log their needs. For example, we want people to be able to say, “I am safe at X location but need water” or “I am not safe at X location. My leg is caught and I need emergency assistance.” We want family members to be able to access this information and our disaster ops will work on how we can react to it quickly.
3. Where we are: In the same vein and on the same platform we’d like to be able to input where we are providing services. Eventually I’d like to see the ability for individual Red Cross relief workers to text in their location and activities. This will make people nervous internally because it leaves our workers vulnerable to security issues, but would like to start thinking about how to do it now.

 

Do you think the CrisisCamp peeps would be willing to think about these issues for us?

 

Wendy Harman | Social Media | American Red Cross
431 18th St NW | Washington, D.C.  20006, USA | tel  202.303.4080  

Blog  l  Twitter  l  Facebook  l  Disaster Online Newsroom  l  Flickr  l  YouTube  l  Good2Gether  l  LinkedIn  l  SocialVibe  l 

 

[Gavin Treadgold]

On 2010-01-20, at 09:44 , Andy Carvin wrote:

1. Where we are: In the same vein and on the same platform we’d like to be able to input where we are providing services. Eventually I’d like to see the ability for individual Red Cross relief workers to text in their location and activities. This will make people nervous internally because it leaves our workers vulnerable to security issues, but would like to start thinking about how to do it now.

Andy, Harman - we prototyped this capability in Sahana during RELIEF 10-1 in November 2008. We basically created an Android application that putting a more friendly interface on embedding GPS coords from the phone and other information and texting that back to the server, where we would parse that information and show it up on the map. We have had interest in advancing the whole internal personnel tracking system, and situation reporting capability further. Note that this is quite different from a public Ushahidi instance, as the focus on our app is mainly for internal organisation or cluster use. The tests we did at Camp Roberts were much more about situation reporting. Our longer term view was that we would enable a generic forms interface and enable forms to be sent. At the same time, we were also enabling simple SMS messages to be sent, but these are sometimes harder to geolocate accurately.

Cheers Gavin

[Franklin Ho]

Hi Everyone,

I'd also like to note that the person finder facebook app is already here: http://apps.facebook.com/googlepersonfinder/

We should try our best not to reproduce efforts.

-Franklin
-------
Franklin Ho
| Account Associate, Ad Serving Operations
| Crisis Response Team - Person Finder Project
f...@google.com
P: (650)253-2699
C: (415)374-9008

[Philip Ashlock]

Franklin,

This is actually the 3rd facebook app that connects to Person Finder. Michael Maximilien made haiti_survivors and is in the process of integrating with the API. I put together haitipersonfinder earlier so we would have one on hand.

Right now, we're waiting for someone in the Google team (maybe you) to provide a hook for the small version to display at 200px (css is below) so that the people who work at Facebook on the DisasterRelief page can put it in as a sidebar widget (and so other facebook pages can too).

Did you see this?

Pablo Mayrgundter wrote:

Thanks for the snippet  :) 

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Philip Ashlock <ph...@ashlock.us> wrote:
  

> The Person Finder folks at Google should all be on the thread now:
>
> These minor changes should do the trick:
> http://img.skitch.com/20100120-p9n89cmyr8qn6utt7jp2rd6pnb.png
>
> /** Facebook widget **/
>
> body {
> width : 200px;
> }
>
> .footer.links a {
> display : block;
> text-align: left;
> }
>
> .footer.links {
> float : left;
> }
>
> ----
>
> <div class="footer links">
> <a href="/embed?small=yes" target="_blank">Embed this tool on your site</a>
> <a href="/developers?small=yes" target="_blank">Developers</a>
> <a href="http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=" target="_blank">Terms of
> Service</a>
> </div>
> <div class="logo">
> <img src="/static/powered_by_google.gif"/>
> </div>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> David Recordon wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> We've added the embedded version of the Person Finder to the Relief page but
> it's currently behind one of the tabs
> (http://www.facebook.com/DisasterRelief?v=box_3).  We can place it directly
> on the Relief page itself (in the left hand column) but need the size of the
> widget to be adjusted.  To fit it must not be over 200px wide.
>
> Can you please work with the team running the application to provide a size
> parameter which causes it to render no wider than 200px?
>
> Thanks,
> --David
>

Franklin Ho wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I'd also like to note that the person finder facebook app is already here:�http://apps.facebook.com/googlepersonfinder/

We should try our best not to reproduce efforts.

-Franklin
-------
Franklin Ho
| Account Associate, Ad Serving Operations
| Crisis Response Team - Person Finder Project
f...@google.com
P: (650)253-2699
C: (415)374-9008

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Gavin Treadgold <g...@kestrel.co.nz> wrote:

On 2010-01-20, at 09:44 , Andy Carvin wrote:

1. Where we are: In the same vein and on the same platform we�d like to be able to input where we are providing services. Eventually I�d like to see the ability for individual Red Cross relief workers to text in their location and activities. This will make people nervous internally because it leaves our workers vulnerable to security issues, but would like to start thinking about how to do it now.