integration with CrisisCommon's HaitianVoices.org?

[GlebT]

Hi

I am your fellow CC's coder working on the CC' HaitianVoices project -
a multimedia blog (more like a portal) where Haitian survivors can
tell their stories. We have requirements to incorporate the latest
Haitian news but apparently not *all* news. We need to filter survivor
stories and thoughts about Haiti's future. The purpose of our project
was "it's the pivotal moment in our history. we need a place to tell
what happened, unite and discuss our future".

Any ideas how can we hook up two projects together? We do not want
news like "nice guys from the country X brought a lot of Y to Haiti
and saved Z people".

We are on Ruby/Rails - if you need that...

Thanks
Gleb Tulukin

[Mark Sullivan]

Gleb,

I'm probably not the right person to respond for the team, but we've
developed a healthy list of RSS input feeds and are offering up our services
to help aid in collecting and then producing generic and custom RSS feed
outputs for further consumption.

I think the best way for us to approach this is through a bit of trial and
error, but if you provide some key words we can filter on to get started, we
can supply you with output based on those key words. We'll likely need to
further refine from there to the point where it will be "good enough", but
this may be a way to get started.

The best place presently to see the generic outputs weve developed is at
http://news.crisiscommons.org.

Let us know how we can help.

-Mark

[Gleb Tulukin]

What technologies do you use and where do you keep your source code -
Github, Sourceforge, etc?

Right now I am thinking about filtering by keyword 'Haiti',
'earthquake' and showing filtered feed to an admin with check boxes
for approval. Regular visitors will be able to see approved items only
in the news tab.

Thanks
Gleb

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:27 AM, Mark Sullivan
<mark.s...@ascenttechnical.com> wrote:
> Gleb,
>
> I'm probably not the right person to respond for the team, but we've
> developed a healthy list of RSS input feeds and are offering up our services
> to help aid in collecting and then producing generic and custom RSS feed
> outputs for further consumption.
>
> I think the best way for us to approach this is through a bit of trial and
> error, but if you provide some key words we can filter on to get started, we
> can supply you with output based on those key words.  We'll likely need to
> further refine from there to the point where it will be "good enough", but
> this may be a way to get started.
>
> The best place presently to see the generic outputs weve developed is at
> http://news.crisiscommons.org.
>
> Let us know how we can help.
>
> -Mark
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: crisis-camp-r...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:crisis-camp-r...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of GlebT
> Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 8:56 PM
> To: Crisis Camp RSS Aggregator
> Subject: [CCRSSA] integration with CrisisCommon's HaitianVoices.org?
>

[Sean Yamana]

Hey Gleb,

A lot of what we're doing right now is interfacing between Google Spreadsheets for data input and storage and Yahoo Pipes for feed manipulation.
We're a little concerned about scalability, so I think Chris is working on some server-based aggregation stuff through Gregarius. He can probably speak to that more.
The wiki for our project has links to the Pipes and Spreadsheet that we're using.

Sean

[Roger E. Rustad, Jr.]

Sean put it well -- lots of raw feeds in Google spreadsheets, Y! Pipes "crunching", and we're investigating other options.

Greg, what skill sets do you have?  And where might you see adding to this project?

(This project is still very young and could use all the help you and others might give!)

[Gleb Tulukin]

> Greg, what skill sets do you have? And where might you see adding to this project?

I am a Ruby on Rails developer. In case you are not familiar with Ruby
- it's arguably 10 times more productive than Java. Also, Ruby is very
web-friendly and has several very powerful web content scrapping
libraries (hpricot and nokogiri) and RSS libraries. HaitianVoices does
need news and a good RSS with human beings behind it is the best
choice. I'll join you in chat on Sat to see if I can help you with
something that I will reuse in HaitianVoices.

Thanks
Gleb