Mini Situation Update: Boston Sorry for …

Mini Situation Update: Boston

Sorry for the delay, it’s been busy and I have to make this quick so will stick to main points. I’ll forward a more detailed summary shortly.

CrisisCamp: We have some 20+ CrisisCampers right here at the Situation Room. Ashirul is coordinating.

Local Presence: Mark at Internews has offered to pay for an Ushahidi rep to be based out of PaP for the next three months. Jaroslav is my preferred candidate. He will let me know within 24 hours whether he can do this. Note, this could be huge for Ushahidi on many fronts. Not least since Jaroslav could help out with future disasters by being our on-the-ground rep. Of course, this needs to be discussed with the entire Ushahidi team. My personal preference would be to have him, he’d be a huge help to me in my strategic partnership work.

SMS: We have shifted 80% of our core time/resources to SMS mapping and have outsourced the majority of media monitoring.

Funding: We are preparing a full funding proposal (Fletcher/Tufts not Ushahidi) to get enough funding to run this Situation Room for the next three months, Feb 1 – May 1. We’ll be submitting this to donors with the help of Internews. We have a good friend of Pam Omidyar’s here, and of course the Omidyars have a strong connection to Tufts. We’ll also bounce this off State, etc. Will share draft with you Sunday night.

Exit strategy: We do a “Call for Proposals” (RFP) on March 1 soliciting proposals from organizations interested in taking over the Fletcher situation room operations. After all the media attention we’ve gotten, we’ll have plenty of proposals to review.

Sustainability: We are setting up Situation Rooms in London and in Portland. We had one major training this morning, about 30 undergrads. We have a larger training set for this afternoon at 3pm. We have also mobilized the Haitian community in Boston, several of their community leaders are here with us working directly with the mapping team. We are also in the process of mobilizing all Haitian students in the Boston area, they are fully committed to help now and for the long term.

GIS Expert: We now have a full time paid-for GIS expert in our situation room, courtesy of Tufts University’s GIS Center. He is going to create some kick ass layers.