Saturday Meetup Notes

[David White]

Here are the notes that I took.... I had to leave early. When I left, there was a VERY juicy, interesting discussion about Skype and IRC logging. Tim Panton apparently has some really cool ideas. I look forward to hearing more about this!

Deborah
* Spike & I are glad for the help
* Welcome
* Lot of stuff happening
* Japan brought a lot of folks together
* we take that opportunity to find people willing to help in steady state
* steady state = time in between the disasters
* Let's do Introductions

Ted
-- Ruby Developer
-- Lives in London, Ontario

Spike
-- Hardware / electronic engineer
-- Works for an aerospace company

Deborah
* We hope to find people who want to try new things

- Aaron McGowan
-- IT Consultant
-- Works on Open Source technologies
-- Also lives in London, Ontario
-- Mobile / Web Development
-- Low level web development

Evan
-- Has sys admin background
-- Interested in crisis response
-- working for a NPO in DC

Deborah
-- Ran several CCs in Chicago
--- Stayed involved ever since
-- Here to support core services for the community
--- Listen to the requirements
--- We don't want to be disruptive to the community
-- Has Development background, but I know enough about infrastructure
-- Masters in Software Engineering
-- Currently:

Deborah
* We lack capacity of people who think this stuff is sexy work
* we need folks who will stick with us over time

Tim Panton
-- Lives in Manchester, UK
(did I miss some stuff?)

Tim Schwartz
-- Ran the Haiti Person Finder
-- Run the Missing Person's group
-- Lives in LA; has visited Google a number of times
-- Japan: 1st disaster where Person Finder was used a lot more than Missing Links website

----------- Introductions are done -----------------

Skype vs. IRC
* Everyone knows, we started IRC first
* Then we moved to Skype
* When we hit the Midwest Blizzard, we had folks from all over helping with Disaster Response
-- Heather established a protocol that Skype would be used for Disaster Response
-- One thing that was great: The chicago office of emergency management is interested in having CrisisCamp / CrisisCommons being an ongoing part

Ted Han Response:
-- Uses Skype on a daily basis with Work
-- Wants IRC
-- People had problems getting into Skype over the last week
-- IRC: Either you're connected, or you're not

Deborah:
-- I was also one of the people who had problems connecting via Skype

Ted:
-- IRC can use a web portal on 80

Tim Panton:
-- Has been running a gateway between Skype & IRC...
-- So now it's possible to use either Skype or IRC
--- This actually works quite well
--- Working on integrating this with Google Talk as well
-- The user experience works pretty well
-- Works like this: Sit on a Server, connect your Skype client to the server, and the server translates it into "IRC"

Ted / Deborah:
- Logging is still important

Ted:
- Things fall through the cracks
- Work flow management

Deborah:
- We experienced this in an earlier response
- Dynamic Project Management

--
- David White -
Smooth Stone Services
Computer Technical Support, IT Services, & Web Hosting Solutions
http://www.smoothstoneservices.com
da...@smoothstoneservices.com
Blog: http://www.davidmartinwhite.com

[Deborah Shaddon]

Thanks David!!

I will get to the other points that we discussed and send reference info to the group (probably post on wiki and send link).  Thanks again everyone, really really awesome meeting all of you on today's call!!

Thanks,

Deborah