2015 Aug 06

Discovered Skype no longer supports large group calls.

Used UberConference for the ~30 attendees.

Audio: File:Aug06callin.mp3

Overview of how the call will work

• Agenda (intros of up to 30 seconds about you and your group, then longer updates on deployments and organizational statuses, then wrap up)
• Note taking (we all take notes for each other)
• Time keeping (if you go over, you will first be poked via chat, and then verbally interrupted)

Introductions (Who’s Here?)

30 seconds each : 15 minutes tops total : if you just spoke, take notes for the person who speaks after you.

Present and vocal

• Willow (willowbl00) : previously GWOB, now Aspiration (aspirationtech.org)
  • Dialling Up Resilience
  • Mixed-Mode Systems
• Angela Oduor Lungati - Ushahidi
  • Gearing up for launch of Ushahidi v3 in less than a month, hectic times :).
  • Community testing period is set for August 10th - 14th, 2015. Details to be shared in a public announcement on Friday August 7th.
  • Demo site http://demo.platform.ushahidi.com username: demo password: testing
  • Would love feedback when you get a chance!
• Marie Irvine - Sarapis (sarapis.org) - marie@sarapis.org (formerly ARC)
  • providing grassroots (local/digital) and nonprofits w/ access to free/open-source tech + trainings
  • Currently piloting Sahana deployment for nonprofits in NYC (see demo at http://demo.xprepared.org/)
  • Working on Resilience CoLab, a community/repository for open-source/free tech & trainings
    • Let us know if you have any projects we can help with! :)
• Sara-Jayne Terp: OpenCrisis, formerly pretty much everything else, data scientist, VOST volunteer, Columbia SIPA data science prof (sarajterp@gmail.com)
  • OC is currently in stasis; will relaunch later this year.
  • OC activities are keeping record of crisis efforts, technologies, techniques and improving crisis data science techniques and tools.
  • VOST is currently up to their eyeballs in forest fires.
• Danna Ingleton, engine room, Responsible Data Programme
  • Looking to further develop exisiting RD tools for humanitarian sector
  • Looking for partners who want to test existing tools https://responsibledata.io/
• Heather Leson, Qatar Computing Research Institute, CrisisMappers Network, HOT
  • Researching Humtech, Digihum in MENA
  • keen to see Crisismappers network evolve
• Max Shron, Polynumeral
  • Polynumeral is a data science consulting firm primarily focused on mid-size for-profit companies.
  • We've had several projects in the humanitarian space, including a project with BRAC on data collection and the World Bank on using satellite data to predict survey responses and poverty estimates at a small scale.
• Hilary Zainab, DHN & SBTF
  • Digitial Humanitarian Network is a membership organization of organizations, companies and volunteer communitites active in crisis informatics and disaster response efforts
  • SBTF is a volunteer community of crisis-mappers who provide media monitoring and mapping services to formal disaster responders and humanitarian agencies
• Mark Iliffe - World Bank/University of Nottingham (Working as part of the Tazanian Open Data Initiaitve on geospatial and mapping initiatives, managing http://ramanihuria.org, of which HOT is contracted to execute and the Africa Open Data Conference: http://www.africaopendata.net) and Research Fellow in Neodemographics.
• Tony Surma, Humanitarian Toolbox - sustained open source dev of software for good (primarily disaster response & preparedness focused at current)
  • Use case in NYC on 3W?
• Helen Campbell - NetHope Crisis Informatics (Operational/Tableau data management and visualisation) - interested to hear about others working with Tableau <- Hilary Zainab from SBTF and I are; I have a 1-hour course I can give on it (Sara)
• Per Aarvik - Standby Task Force
  • Trying to further develop SBTF together with the rest of the group
• Christopher Brewster - Aston Business School, Aston University - UK
  • I ran the Disaster 2.0 project which finished a year and a half ago (www.disaster20.eu)
  • I am moving to TNO in the Netherlnds (www.tno.nl) as a Senior Scientist (in a semantic web group) in a couple of months so ...
  • I may end up doing more ICT/disaster/emergency related stuff there at TNO
  • Oh and I have had a fantastic PhD student doing excellent work on designing a decision support system for flood disaster response (yay!)
  • Finally I am most interested in food and agriculture in an emergency/disaster context
• Roxanne Moore - previous Ebola Coordinator
• Jen ziemke now on board of directors for open geospatial consortium. Looking to represent, happy to chat with any of you about this. Crisis mappers web and info redesign.
• Lisha Sterling. GWOB. RHoK.
  • Water stuff right now.
  • Just accepted new group into accelerator program that funds ideas born out of hackathons etc, all have to do with water.
  • Working with Taarifa in Tanzania.
• Taariq - head of IT at Kenya Red Cross, listening in on first meet, thanks Willow for the invite and looking forward to collaborating

Listening in

• Brendan O'Hanrahan: OpenCrisis - pretty much what Sara said...
• Evert Bopp - Disaster Tech Lab (www.disastertechlab.org) - contact@disastertechlab.org
  • providing internet access and communication services to communities in disaster zones across the globe.
  • Providing internet access & IT services to other disaster responders.
  • Developing IP based communications technologies for use in disaster response.
  • Just finished deployment in Nepal. Possibly deploying to Taiwan depending on how this typhoon pans out.
  • Focus on capacity building in next 6 months. More volunteers, more equipment.
  • Increased focus on resilience building and preparedness
• Chinmayi, The Bachchao Project
  • working on a project to effectively capture street harassment data using lowtech tools like offline maps
  • developing a module to capture police attrocities amongst sex workers in India
• Blake Girardot - HOT
  • Currently have mapping and/or mapping development projects in W. Africa, Mongolia, Tanzania, Malawi, CAR, South Sudan, Nigeria, Nepal, Vanuatu, DRC, Bangladesh, Indonesia and others
  • Software development projects: Improvements to our mapping coordination tool, Tasking Manager. Soon to release the initial version of our Aerial Imagery coordination tool and storage network, OpenAerialMap and OpenImageryNetwork. Working on an android GPS track collection tool as well.
• Florian Rathgeber - co-founder and head of development for Taarifa (http://taarifa.org)

Overviews

3 minutes each - 15 minutes tops

DHN/NetHope updates

Helen Campbell

• Coordinated Data Scramble (CDS) Community of Interest - need more active members (DHN)https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1weoUvekKWEyRE7EiX9CmHGE-9MGrRrvCTQ2Bf64fY48/edit#slide=id.p4
• Decision Makers Needs (DMN) Community of Interest - need more active members (DHN). Have submitted to WHS, but may have been too late... http://digitalhumanitarians.com/content/decision-makers-needs
• Map Review - links to CDS and DMN(DHN)https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17kdmBoSIgZitUM2l_5HNRc__Z8Fwvt6McWZhLm8fszg/edit#slide=id.p3

Qatar Computing Research

Heather Leson

• Gap in Arabic speaking data world
• Looking to refresh Crisis Mappers mailing list
  • I reached out to Crisis Mappers in Atlanta, and other groups through MeetUp to have monthly local meetings. The others were really excited about getting to meet others with similar interest. Would be wonderfult to see similar local chapters (Roxanne)
• How can we better get a W3 in a digital humanitarian context during a crsis?

Institute/Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team/CrisisMappers Network

Heather Leson

• QCRI is developing more MicroMappers (small tasks + machine computing) to deal with various formats. This includes working with Translators without Borders.
• QCRI will be participating in the World Humantiarian Youth Summit in Doha.
• QCRI is working on a programme to inspire more Digital Humanitarians in Qatar and the Gcc.
• HOT is hiring a new executive director. This process has been ongoing and about to approach month 7. There are plans to open source our process templates to help other NGOs plan. NOTE: This is s huge endeavor for a digital humanitarian group. Allen Gunn of Aspiration has been supporting us. I would recommend that each group has a plan for this type of 'risk'. <- H, are you still looking? I can get word out to NYC CEOs, some of whom have expressed interest (not open)
• HOT has written an activation curriculum. This will then be taught in training workshops.

CrisisMappers Network

We want to redesign the community and website.How can we include and surface all the different research, activities and new technology in an ongoing way. Note - the Crisismappers conference is now in 2016 in the Philippines.

• we may be able to help with website if needed :) (Marie)

Standby Task Force

Per Discussions going: Further development of the organization. There is a wish to enable inbetween deployments activities - preparing procedures and setups to be able to deliver rapid results during the early phase of disasters. Would very much appreciate a joint effort to visualize - present the DHN community during WHS 2016

RHoK

Lisha

• Looking for organizers this Fall
• GWOB hopefully can support SBTF by either sending volunteers or helping with planning + organization, would be happy to do that.

OpenCrisis

Sara-Jhayne Currently in stasis; still doing small works in communities (e.g. HXL standards work, investigating Kettle tool for rapid heterogeneous spreadsheet combination etc, planning/leading seminars for RDF on risks in data visualisations, and deidentification in messy cross-cultural datasets, )

AOB

Helen

World Humanitarian Summit May 2016 - Istanbul

The World Humanitarian Youth Summit is in Doha, September 1 - 2, 2015. I will be involved as an exhibitor. Question - How can the Digital community(ies)coordinate better around this topic? I feel like we collectively missed a chance to submit an item to the "public consultation", but that does not mean can share our collective learnings about how "digital" is changing humanitarian aid and vice versa.

Shared Projects (things we're looking for help with, along with contact)

SBTF

Preparing work between events, develop the organization - SBTF - per@standbytaskforce.com

• Can talk through some of the things the 'old' SVTF did between deployments, and some of the data work etc that still needs to be done as prep (Sara)

3W for digital responders

Aspiration has started on this, about ready for feedback from a wider circle

• Is this the work with Tim Davies? I owe him some NER work for that (Sara)
• Interested in helping (Roxanne)
• GDELT and MicroMappers might be able to help on this (Heather, QCRI)
• There may be an intersection with the CrisisCheckin project with HTBox (Tony)

World Humanitarian Summit 2016

(Heather wants to see a parallel digital summit for our work and, especially, youth training workshops)

• Would love to see if there something targeted on consent re: data in emergencies
• Very excited about the potential for a parallel session on digital response

Crisismappers Network webiste and community reboot

how can we serve this community?

• Happy to help w/ web/front-end development (Marie, marie@sarapis.org). Cool thanks
• Please help solve the "what does OC need to do" problem with us - so we can hand over things like mapping what's happening in the space (Sara)
• How to help - join the dialogue on the Crisismappers list. Give Jen or Heather your email to join technical working group (Heather)

RDF/Thoughtworks/Data&Society

holding an RDF on Data Viz in sept in NYC (Danna)

• (Ideas for experts on this welcome: Sara) Also ideas for the specific issues you all face re: data viz in hum res
• Helen?
• Could we have something like this in India ? -Chinmayi Let's talk - danna@theengineroom.org

De-Identification

People who want to work on de-identification problems/issues on specific projects and/or run online discussions on this topic to help raise community understanidng/ability (Danna)

• can you feed in these communities into existing policies/feedback on policies? i.e. data publication requirements from donor-funded activities. How to structure guidance to protect against de-identification is this Marie? Would love to discuss - danna@theengineroom.org
• Max S: I have worked on counter-deidentification projects, happy to talk.(GREAT :)max@polynumeral.com
• Max: talk more over coffee, am part of this (Sara)

Coordinated Data Scramble

helen_rcampbell@hotmail.com

• Danna: would love to hear more so let's be in touch!
• Please contact me - would love to work out how OC can help with e.g. virtual 3Ws and existing dataset need lists in e.g. WWHGD (Sara)

https://data.hdx.rwlabs.org/about - humanitarian data exchange

• HXL data standard = tagging dataset columns with e.g. #adm2+code, #adm2+name so can cross-match datasets easily... Simon Johnson has done work on pushing HXL-tagged Nepal datasets through 3W visualisation code, and HXL has made this work a lot easier. SBTF has been very good about HXL-tagging datasets early in recent crises.
• HXL in extensive use within the SBTF - (Per)
• Checklist + coordinating people to not duplicate work

Decision Makers Needs/Map Review

helen_rcampbell@hotmail.com

Humanitarian Toolbox

• Max S happy to connect to DataKind -- max@polynumeral.com

Gov Open Source

Is anyone working on a policy/charter/committment of governments and large organizations to make any disaster response processes and software open source? (and I guess if no one is and you want to- let's work together) rktownsend@gmail.com

Africa Open Data

conference and community in general.

• Help in giving feedback on the conference, recording and editing lightning talks to be shown on stage at the conference before the President of Tanzania speaks(people have to be in their seats for an hour before and we cannot start the official program without him- so showing videos of people from across the continent/globe to set the stage and getvoices an faces that wouldn't otherwise be represented) Conference website: http://www.africaopendata.net/
• Main HackPad for Public Planning of AODC: bit.ly/AfricaOpenDataConference rktownsend@gmail.com

Sustainable Development Goals hackathon(ish) and follow-up series

• Happening September 18-19, in DC and virtually? How to make it substantive... how to make it not solely led from DC and for DC. Planning and support for 17 hackathons leading up to the World Congress on the Data Revolution in a year+ Current partners: Aspiration Tech, US Government(State Department, White House, USAID, NASA, MCC), OpenGovHub...
• bit.ly/SDGHackPlan, rktownsend@gmail.com

Data quality and privacy on donor-demanded data

• Improving quality of USAID data and contract language, particularly in considering reidentification and guidance on protecting privacy in releasing torrents of donor-funded data. usaid.gov/data & opendata@usaid.gov

crisis mappers needs people who want to think about comms redesign

• What kind of comms? (Evert)

OpenCrisis needs help mapping out...

which of the things it used to do have moved into other orgs (so we can free up time to do data nerding, tool tests etc) (sarajterp@gmail.com)

Setting up an innovation hub/space

Kenya Red Cross needs help setting up an innovation hub/space focussed on community/development innovations/projects (twaha.taariq@redcross.or.ke; skype: taariq.twaha)

• UNOCHA was wokring on an innovation lab doc -- Willow
• Can also connect with communities who can build -- Chinmayi

Ushahidi

• Gearing up for launch of Ushahidi v3 in less than a month, hectic times :).
• Community testing period + Translation sprint is set for August 10th - 14th, 2015. Details to be shared in a public announcement on Friday August 7th.
• Demo site http://demo.platform.ushahidi.com username: demo password: testing
• Would love feedback when you get a chance!
  • Send it my way whenever it's ready! - Willow

Feedback on the Mixed Mode system paper

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsUVlhiQsdn9RBG9FYyHlAbj63cuE2HR0YaX2654WnY/edit : Willow

Aggregation of work

Marie and Devin working on an aggregator - Marie Irvine (marie@sarapis.org) - Devin Balkind (devin@sarapis.org) - sarapis.org We are working on a project (ResilienceCoLab), which will feature free/opensource tools w/ trainings, incl.

1. overview of tools for users
2. coordination among tech providers (technical inter-operability + data standards) - there's too many tools & we think we can get better at making sure the tools fit together and speak the same language
3. trainings (MOOC-style)
4. curated news on tech/data/connecting tech to community

Please let us know if you're already working on this and/or would like to CoLab :-P

• A big, high level picture. Need an aggregator. All the stuff in the weeds is hard enough to find on a regular day, let alone in disaster.
• OC did this, so has Crisis Mappers. So did Crisis Commons.
• Permissions were an issue. Who could add and pull.
• Sara and Heather and Willow