CrisisCampPDX organizing
Laura Schultz
CrisisCamp to do another one in 2-3 weeks. Looking forward, how do we
want to organize future CrisisCamps in Portland?
Suggestion: A google group for people to sign up to for announcements
only (and basic questions):
CrisisCampPDX Announcements
and this current one for ongoing collaboration and planning, including
people who want to work virtually on projects now and want to discuss
it with Portland people (there are national project specific google
groups as well.)
Thoughts?
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
But - speaking of communications tools - there is a fairly large Google Wave for the PDX Emergency Communications sub-culture. I talked to Mark about it briefly Saturday, mostly trying to find out if he thinks it's usable. He wasn't to happy with Wave, but he's actually used it a lot more than I have. In any event, the Wave is still there and if there are any of you who need a Wave invite, I still have six I'd love to unload, and if any of you are Google Wave API hackers, maybe you can see a way to make it useful in the current context.
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net
"I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God." ~Alan Hovhaness
Audrey Eschright
I have limited time/energy for event planning right now and I don't
want to suggest anything to cause burnout for other people.]
My mailing list organization suggestion would be to split off a second
crisiscamppdx-planning list that anyone can join, and move the event
logistics over there, so that attendee discussions, project ideas, and
so on can remain here. That way people can stay as involved as they
have time for, and the planning grunt work is still out in the open
(this is important because it encourages new volunteers to step in).
I'd recommend against a general announcements list because it's passive.
We might want to enlist the Wiki Wednesday crowd's help in fleshing
out some Portland-specific "how to get involved" pages as well.
Audrey
Reid Beels
On Jan 25, 2010, at 2:12 PM, Audrey Eschright wrote:
> +1 (with reservations) to another event in a few weeks [reservations: I have limited time/energy for event planning right now and I don't want to suggest anything to cause burnout for other people.]
+1 from me too, though possibly not the same format of event. Now that we have a better idea, both here and at the national level, of what each project entails it seems that we could lay out a better framework to get people up to speed before the event.
> My mailing list organization suggestion would be to split off a second crisiscamppdx-planning list that anyone can join, and move the event logistics over there, so that attendee discussions, project ideas, and so on can remain here. That way people can stay as involved as they have time for, and the planning grunt work is still out in the open (this is important because it encourages new volunteers to step in). I'd recommend against a general announcements list because it's passive.
I hugely agree with the notion of avoiding a passive announcements list. yes yes yes.
GEOpdx
not sure if that's a google group or maybe a very simple and low
effort blog posting place (I have the bad habit of always wanting to
use a different tool). If it's a blog that's setup the right way then
people can subscribe to the feed or e-mail update and no sign up is
necessary...
Could also publish things for the public. Just a thought...
I'm happy to help in few weeks on another crisis - hackathon/
crowdathon.
Igal Koshevoy
and provide a central place for related resources, while leaving this
group for detailed discussions.
Just having it act as a central directory of resources would be great,
like the twitter, mailing list, wiki page, eventbright, etc. It's been
tedious for me and others to retype all the links in so many emails,
wiki pages, posts, etc we've sent out when we could have just linked to
a single site.
If there's a desire to have ongoing events, such as helping Haiti and
other crisis struck places in the future, we should really talk about
getting a site. I'd be glad to help set up and could probably get this
free hosting.
However, before setting up a site, it'd be good to reconsider the
group's name because it's more than a camp and a larger ongoing
organization (e.g., CrisisFightersPDX, CrisisTeamPDX,
CrisisTaskforcePDX, CrisisTechPDX, etc), although the CrisisCampPDX name
is good too. That name would also be preferably be the website's domain,
e.g., crisistechpdx.org.
On a similar note, I've updated the Google Group's "welcome message"
shown on the top page to indicate the event has passed. As something is
resolved about future events or website, be sure to update that text.
-igal
Laura Schultz
have other intentions?
Agreed on central website/blog idea, agreed on tediousness...
+1 with reservations as well for the next. I had a lot of time last
week and I have some time for now but I would definitely need to make
sure I had co-organizing support who has time during the week, for the
next event....
Reid Beels
> Is this group going to remain associated with CrisisCommons or does it
> have other intentions?
Personally, I'd like to see the relationship with CrisisCommons maintained. The group is doing a lot of good things which I fee are in line with what we want to do. However, that shouldn't by any means stop us from pursuing local projects separate from the CrisisCommons masthead.
Reid
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
On Jan 25, 2010, at 8:49 PM, Laura Schultz wrote:Personally, I'd like to see the relationship with CrisisCommons maintained. The group is doing a lot of good things which I fee are in line with what we want to do. However, that shouldn't by any means stop us from pursuing local projects separate from the CrisisCommons masthead.
> Is this group going to remain associated with CrisisCommons or does it
> have other intentions?
The current crop of projects I've poked my nose into seem interesting and useful and all appear to be CrisisCommons projects. So far, my goals are
1. Get Twitter Streaming API integrated into wherever it's needed. I'm not sure whether this is currently SwiftRiver, CrisisFilter, or both, but it's at least one of them. I think this can (and probably should) be done in Ruby but there's a possibility it would be PHP. If it's PHP, I'll have to drop out.
2. Find out who wants "LocalTweet" and what the requirements are. I have some ideas for how to build it but don't hear a bunch of folks saying that its necessary or even useful. And I think CrisisFilter is building the right thing anyhow, so I may not need to build anything at all. But I'm building some simple stuff at home anyway to shake down the geolocation stuff and learn that piece of the Twitter API.
3. Long-term, get back onto the natural language processing stuff. That's been my focus for months with Twitter data and I've totally tuned out geospatial. NLP is looking like a Python project at the moment, although there are plenty of external non-Python tools out there that could be integrated into systems built in Ruby. A lot of them are in Java if that matters. I don't mind learning Python - they say it's easy to learn.
Local projects? In what context? Emergency communications / planning / response? General "hackers helping non-profits?"
Justin Houk
I seem to remember several hacking parties taking part over the winter at least that related to non-profits (can't remember if they were aid agencies). Let's face it, there are few opportunities to try and use our talents to help people and this is a great reason to come together as a community. I like the idea of maintaining ties to the big crisiscommons community but also having autonomy.
How about this for a name: SuperHeroPowersForge (like we build powers for superheros)
...not sure about spandex though. Have to shed some lbs first. Like the dad in the incredibles.
...and we have to keep doing it since I missed the first one :)
Laura Schultz
Igal Koshevoy
Website Blog seems to be a go? Can someone dig in on that?
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Laura Schultz <misslaur...@gmail.com> wrote:
Website Blog seems to be a go? Can someone dig in on that?
2. WordPress is a good choice for blogging software. However, I would want you to be closely involved in choosing the right software since you'd be the primary user of it. I'd be glad to setup WordPress and backups, but you'd need someone else to help with theming it so that the website has a custom appearance.
There are, or at least were Saturday, a lot more Drupal geeks associated with the PDX and other CrisisCamp efforts than there are / were WordPress geeks. So my vote is for Drupal over WordPress unless we have some hard core WordPress plugin hackers / themers available. I'm neither WordPress nor Drupal literate beyond actually being a blogger. My blog (and I'm proud to say I only have *one* now!) is WordPress. ;-)
Rafa Gutierrez
And just curious: has someone summarized all the sites associated with PDX CrisisCamp?
Eventbrite
Wiki
rg
503.705.6592
@rafamoustafah - me
@geografa - geospatial me
http://www.google.com/profiles/rafamoustafah - my profile
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
Admin should be limited to dealing with spam and adding users when they join, deleting them when they leave, doing security updates and making sure all the automatic backups, etc. are running and fixing it when they don't.
What's the *goal* of the blog? What *outcomes* do we want from it? Publicize our efforts to the world? Integrate functionally with other components in the relief effort? Yet another intra-project human communication tool?
Laura Schultz
if it's entirely up to me. It will have to be a group collaborative
effort. The goal is to have a straightforward place for people to go
to get updates on what may be happening with CrisisCamp in Portland or
related activities, with easy access for deeper involvement if they so
choose.
Laura Schultz
I am willing to organize another CrisisCamp or related events, but I
will need people to take the lead on figuring out if there are
projects and work to be done for volunteers. I'm still a little wary
of CrisisCommons in general since it is still rather challenging to
figure out the status (and purpose or intent) of projects and who is
doing what. I know they're working on improving this situation but so
far there's very little improvement, IMO. I'm not able to spend as
much time as I have to keep on top of where things are headed.
If any of you are still keeping on top of specific projects and can
tell me what kind of volunteers we can keep busy, then I'm absolutely
willing and able to do what it takes to set it up, get them there and
manage it.
Thanks!
Laura
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
We have an OS Bridge Town Hall Meeting tonight to plan for the conference, which is most likely mid-June. All of the "usual suspects" will be there, including myself, as a videographer on my Kodak Zi8.
I'm still putting in a couple of hours a day hacking around the edges of things with technologies that I actually know something about (Perl, PostgreSQL, the Twitter API and getting slowly back into Ruby). I don't think I need to be in a physical co-working space to continue that, and in fact I'd rather have it here on my workstation because I have more disk space. ;-)