Thoughts on CrisisCommons from Boston
Thom
asked me to discuss on tonight's call. After listening to the full
discussion, tonight, I'm not sure I still agree with all of it, but
I'm posting it un-edited in the interest of preserving the original
message.
- Thom
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Hi Noel and Heather,
The CC Boston organizers spent some of the "down time" on Saturday
afternoon talking about what idea for the future of CrisisCommons and
CrisisCamp. I haven't been on a lot of the governance calls, so I
thought it best to send this directly to the two of you, and you can
figure out what's worth sharing (and hasn't already been covered).
This is my take on the conversation, and I don't necessarily speak for
all the organizers. I'm CCing the major Boston organizers, in case
they have thoughts to add or corrections.
1. I don't know how committed you are to the March 06 date, but
there's a Gov 2.0 conference in Boston that weekend, and the lead
Boston organizers are all registered (and are hoping do a
CrisisCommons lightning talk and/or session).
2. I know this has been discussed in at least one conference call, but
we need a better politics between organizers and project leads. As the
CC Boston project planner, it's frustrating to me to be sending emails
on Friday afternoon to project leads, trying to discover is their
projects is active, what sorts of people they need (developers? what
language?), and how I can get people started. This week was better
than our last camp, so I think progress is being made.
3. My feeling is that the future of CrisisCommons is to not be in the
business of creating projects, but rather in vetting projects and
supplying labor. I had a conversation on Saturday with Seth Hunter.
Seth is a student at MIT and he's working on a project to improve
awareness among different groups working for Haiti support. Just
"north of the Charles," he knew about us, a couple groups at MIT, a
group at Harvard, and groups at Tufts, all of whom were starting
projects and none of whom were talking to each other. While some of
the problem is just plain awareness, it seems to me that CrisisCommons
could fill something of a centralizing role, where NGOs and other
entities pitch projects in an effort to get development support. In an
ideal world, part of that pitch would be a demonstrable ability to
field and support the project, once built. It might also be nice if
they have a prototype (though see point 4). Of course, some of this
assumes a more mature CrisisCommons, but it would give us a direction
to aim. (Also, I don't think this is my unique insight; it seems like
this may be what you guys have in mind, too.)
4. We envision, at least for Boston, a structure where we have annual
(or possibly semi-annual), full-weekend CrisisCommons conferences.
These conferences would primarily serve two purposes. First, they
would be heavily marketed to get new volunteers—both those who could
provide steady on-going work and those who could be pre-trained for
the next emergency CrisisCamp. Second, they would present an
opportunity for clients (e.g., NGOs and government organizations) to
pitch new projects. To this end, Saturday morning's activities would
be largely introductory in nature—short presentations on ongoing
projects, pitches of new projects, and discussion of CrisisCommons
itself. At some point Saturday afternoon, things would start breaking
up into more focused groups. New developers would start setting up
their environments, new projects would get sessions to debate their
feasibility, less technical folks could attend training sessions on
things like entering OSM data. Sunday would then be something a bit
more CrisisCamp-like—developers could spend the day coding on existing
projects; new projects could spend time hashing out user stories,
networking/coordinating with other interested parties, and maybe even
grabbing a few developers to whip up a prototype; non-technical people
could work on data maintenance tasks, and maybe attend more training
sessions.
4a. In this model, most work would occur on people's free time and at
mini-camps organized by a single project, or maybe a couple related
projects. These mini-camps could be held frequently enough to keep
development moving, but not so often that developers get burned out.
CC organizers may or may not show up at mini-camps, but they'd stay in
touch with project leads so they're aware of project status in
general.
4b. When a major event occurs, local CrisisCommons groups would
organize one- or two-day CrisisCamps, much as has been done this time.
It would be less necessary to have them weekend after weekend (though
that's still an option), since there would have been ongoing project
work during non-crisis times. In addition, the conferences and mini-
camps would mean that a trained labor force would already exist. These
people would already be familiar with tools and projects and could
start working right away, with almost no set-up time. In addition, the
pre-trained work force would have new people get up to speed more
quickly.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful. This may already been what folks had
in mind—I apologize for diving in without having stayed up to speed on
the governance conference call. I'm happy to discuss these and any
other ideas, and I'll try to be on tonight's governance/wrap-up call.
(Though it's at my kids crazy bed-time, so I'll mostly be a mute
listener.)
Thanks,
Thom Goodsell
CrisisCamp Boston