[CrisisCommons Projects] Project Update - Haiti RSS Feed Challenge

[Heather Leson]

Hi Folks, I promised Sara and Kate an update on the RSS Feed Challenge/Haiti RSS Feed Challenge Project. It appears that Chris Penn is offline working on his PhD (he was project lead.) I have cc'ed the Toronto Crisis Camp team as a number of them worked on this project over 3 of our camps.

The goal: Provide Web content scrapping tool (RSS, Twitter, news, blogs etc) to improve the signal to noise ratio for crisis, emergency and disaster

Wiki Page: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Haiti_RSS_Feed_Challenge

Status Update:
(last time this project was fully worked by Crisis Camps on was Feb. 13th)
Three parts:

1. RSS Feed collection/analysis
*Cities recreated two webform inputs which organized how the data was collected and rated.

2. Manual verification: Cities worked on a verification process for all the content. This was well-documented on the wiki.

3. Technical infrastructure:
*Server installed (Andrew Turner and some folks from Boston/Chicago)
*There was testing requested.

key benefits: good analysis of signal to noise, rating/veracity/organization of content and potential teamwork across various cities. This somewhat worked well virtually and combined social media and hard tech (web infrastructure) skills.
key issues: missing requirements, hand-off/leadership time available issues, server install time, testing plan


Proposal:
Swift River is awesome and has the full potential to meet the need in a more organized, user friendly, and repeatable way. I joined a Swift River skype night (April 3) to learn about it. Having worked on the RSS feed project, I believe that our learnings about content collection/refinement, veracity rating, validation, and priority rating might be beneficial to the Swift River team. I already emailed Jon Gosier and Chris Blow to mention this topic. 

What next?
I need some help doing the analysis between the RSS Feed Project to be able to deliver a valuable learning list to Swift River folks. This way the project learnings can be shared with folks who are working in this area for open source good. While we did not meet the UN goal, we have a great opportunity to help another community and potentially close the gap more with the signal to noise ratio during a crisis.

Can anyone volunteer or project lead this? I am suitably swamped with Crisis Commons working group tasks and would love more or more individuals to virtually brain this and share. I can help it get initially organized but any help is welcome.

This way we could deliver information to Chris Blow and his solid team of volunteers.

thanks

heather

Heather Leson
heathe...@gmail.com
Twitter: heather Leson
Linked In: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/heatherleson
Google Profile:http://www.google.com/profiles/heatherleson