Quick mini update: We’ve received some funding from The Fletcher School’s to tie us over for 2 weeks = food + coffee will be covered for our core volunteers who spend 8-16 hrs in the Situation Room. We should also be able to provide a paid internship for an MIT software developer from CrisisCamp to continue supporting our work in the Situation Room. We’re having a full Situation Report debrief session at 21:00 on Wednesday. So expect more a detailed tomorrow.
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patrick
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patrick
Situation Report: Boston
Am liaising with Deans at Fletcher to get short term support for the Fletcher Situation Room. Going to DC on Friday to meet with various partners. Steady progress on providing training materials to Haitian diaspora. Will soon be including a link on the top of the Haiti page that reads “For Haitian Volunteers” which will link to guides, etc. Still on top of most urgent incoming SMS’s, average mapping time is under 10 minutes. New tools for processing SMS’s (courtesy of CrisisCamp) will be launched within the next 12 hours. I plan to start writing some blog posts on Ushahidi this week. Jaroslav is heading down to DC tomorrow and will meet with colleagues at Internews on Wednesday before flying on to Haiti.
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patrick
Our goal with Ushahidi-Haiti: By May 1, 2010, the entire project is fully run by the Haitian diaspora in Boston in joint collaboration with appropriate Haitian NGOs on the ground. We have already started this process and the response has been hugely positive. All training material, CrisisCamp tools, etc will be made available in English, French and Creole on a dedicated wiki. It is important that Haitians take full ownership of this process and that they are the ones who hold the (forthcoming) development community accountable in the rebuilding of their country now and in the years to come. They will decide what categories to add as the situation evolves and how to collaborate with UN and other actors.
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patrick
Situation Report: Boston
Hi All, nothing “new” per se to report since the previous situation report. We’re continuing our work on all fronts. We’re keeping up with the processing of all incoming text messages (since Jan 20th).
We’ve reached out to some amazing community leaders in the Haitian diaspora here in Boston and they are key to the sustainability of this project. Ownership of this deployment should become theirs as quickly as possible and the Situation Room here will continue to facilitate this.
Yaroslav Valuch in the Situation Room will be heading down to Haiti where he will be based for 3 months to serve as Ushahidi’s Field Representative.
The very helpful gadgets developed by CrisisCamp yesterday are now being tested by the core team and will be shared with all volunteers within 24rs. These new tools will significantly increase the speed and efficiency of the mapping.
We will begin conversations with the Deans at Fletcher to identify ways that Tufts can support the long term efforts of the situation room. We’re preparing a grant proposal to sustain all the efforts we are engaged in.
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patrick
Hey @caleb,
Here are some design suggestions:
* Thanks for adding the download feature on top of the website. Lets take the original one off.
* On Categories section, lets get “Vital Lines” all on the second line (just like #6).
* For the “Other Layers” box, lets stretch it out all the way to the right. This will look better and also give us more space to add layersin the coming days.
* On the 447624802524 number, lets format it this way +44 762.480.2524
* Lets turn “Official & Mainstream News” to “Mainstream News” and add a “Citizen Journalism” box below that takes Global Voices feed on Haiti.
* On the “About Us” page, lets get rid of the bullet points and just use commas.
* Instead of “Submit an Incident”, lets just go with “Submit Incident”
* In the “Submit Incident” page, lets try and get the “Select a City” menu and the Lat/Long boxes on one line. On the category tree, lets have “Persons News” all on the second line.Thanks!!
Patrick -
patrick
Situation Report: Boston, Jan 23
***Jaroslav has accepted the offer to represent Ushahidi in Haiti. The plan is for him to leave no later than February 1st.
***CrisisCamp: Crisis camp people are awesome. Made quick find GPS tool. Tells you coordinate, works with a variety of tools and OSM. Set up SMS management tools, can triage. Also search SMS function. OSM to continue working with us for a week. We will feed in these new processes to our volunteers.
***Wiki is updated. Ready go live tonight.
***SMS Report: Running smoothly. We are working backwards. We have archived the backlog of SMS before Jan 20th (will get them up later), focus on current urgent SMS. We are going to start training the 10,000 Haitians to map better in addition translate.
***Mapping/IDP: WFPs has new spreadsheets of 500 camps. We trained 10-15 people who are now very good. Total IDP camps mapped = 100.
***Volunteers: Trained over 80 new volunteers today. Geneva Situation Room going well, starting to map. London is going well, should be operational in 24 hours. Geneva and London will become European Hub and will collaborate closely in training, support, etc. Should have Portland Situation Room operational by Wednesday. We need to start focusing on retaining volunteer base and providing regular update. We need Ushahidi T-shirts to help make this new community cohesive and proud. Have Erik Hersman Skype in Live in coming days so he can interact directly with volunteers. Everyone has watched Erik’s TED talk and I’m sure that this will be a special treat for them. We need to set up and schedule shifts sooner rather than later. We will create short 2 minute videos for training purposes.
***Communications: Putting together list of NGO on the ground, lots of contacts.
***Grant writing: Team meeting tomorrow afternoon to start writing grant.
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patrick
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.
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Erik Hersman
Wow! Will follow up shortly about some of these points.
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patrick
Important layer to add on hospitals, updated regularly by Sahana: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.kml
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patrick
BOSTON SITUATION ROOM: JAN 21 – META-UPDATE
*Biggest question right now is sustainability of Ushahidi’s involvement in Haiti, even before issues regarding closing the feedback loop and demonstrating success stories. We’re hitting breaking point again on available human resources, the team is stretched. We need to outsource a lot more of the Situation Room’s work; planning to leverage the Tufts undergrad community for a major training on Saturday. We also need to leverage Crisis Camp Boston in a big way.
*There was a lot of frustration (more exhaustion) among the SMS Team today with technical glitches even though they’ve scaled up. That said, they’re very happy to report that when the tech stuff runs smoothly, they can do a super job.
*We’re going to leverage the Tufts undergraduate community and get their help; hopefully a training on Saturday morning. If we can’t use this community to outsource 90% of the media monitoring, then we need to make some important decisions. Either we stop media monitoring and focus only on SMS or we decide to stop operations at a given date, eg, Feb 1st.
*I’d like to propose that Ory and Erik join us for a conference call on Sunday with the team leaders
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patrick
BOSTON SITUATION ROOM: JAN 21 – From the Group | Am posting meta sit report shortly
Minutes: De Brief Meeting
Present: Anna, Laura, Denise, Jarov, Beka, Carol, Josh, Erin, Hana, Ashtun, Nona, Sabia, Vanessa, Jennifer, Althea, Hile, Lillian, Patrick, Yanina, DC Crew.Accomplished:
* Cleared all reports. Approved SMS reports that were in the system. There was a back log from end of day yesterday but now cleared. We need to clear those more quickly.
* Continued to work with WFP sites and got plotted maps from GIS. As of tomorrow, there will be a paid undergraduate GIS expert in Sit Room for support.
* Spoke to German Ambassador to the US very proud of what we are doing, and Board of Overseers are very excited. Fletcher alum, this will be communicated to Sarah George.
* WFP location are harder to find. Out of 300 IDPs we have mapped just over 1/3.
* Complicated Day with SMS. All trained SMS and running very smoothly on their own. There is 10 people full time SMS!
* Complications with the system, very productive today but around 6pm we had 100 SMS locations mapped very well, cleared 400 processed msgs total.
* There are serious problems in the systems. The second operator started to using 4363, and problems during past two hours is caused by this. We are trying to find out with Brian, what is going on. The messages were coming but were misplaced on the website. They were coming with the wrong dates.
* There is improvement in Haitian volunteers, they are getting better hour by hour.
* Two new features: New box on action-ability, which means that if volunteers tick box then it goes directly to US Coast Guards. Today we see that they are being proactive and that they are taking action when they get them. They are contacting us for get more information. Difficult to see if there are any results right now, and we are working on feedback. The actionable tag, can only be msgs (SMS). This was an agreement with US Coast Guards, the reliability of SMS is higher than tweeter.
* The SMS team put together a manual for themselves. Hopefully not many changes.
* Who is in the ground that is saying we are using the report? getting that from Instedd. Suggestion: To close the feedback loop. Being in touch and ask for them. The US coast guard willing to share success stories. Up to us to contact them. How to get any feedback from relief NGOS? we are not in touch with relief workers? What is the channel? And how get response from them? We can’t contact them asking them right now, this may be complicated. Get in touch with clusters that are organizing on the ground. The SMS are working on sorting SMS based on clusters. This may be a good connection point, because at the clusters they are meeting and they are reporting what they have done and what they can do.
* Trained 25 people. One major thing. Virtual training?
* We have 92 subscribers on Wiki that includes Core team, and all the volunteers that were on the sign up sheets or that have since gone through the training. They are all added as readers. The Wiki is being updated as new sheets come up and the organization evolves.
* Sabina (Tufts undergrad) is a huge resource, she speaks Creole, and knows Haiti. Josh did communications and is a writer. very smart strategy. This is a question to the group, how to use the Haitian community.
* Media/Branding: What is the message? Before was the text msg. What is the next message? Key information that we would need to and communicate to go to 1000 Haitian-American, beyond the organization.
* Mac wishlist sent out tonight.
* For Saturday: How long can we do this? Propose solution that we have reading assignments and have a way to do this. How long, purpose, compare advantage? Do we now face back? need to start addressing, and sharing that for Ushahidi. We cannot continue at this pace. Saturday need to ask and decide, and solution.
* Saturday traning with Humanitarian Class coming in, enthusiastic in quality. Working with engineers on the ground for two years. College of engineers in GIS classes, we are clearing house that they have asked, they want fundraising challenging in direction.
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patrick
SITUATION REPORT UPDATE: Boston – Jan 20th
———————————————————Situation Room in Boston is now getting into the practice of doing 1/2hour debrief at 9:30pm every night. Patrick will be in DC on Thurs/Friday but will stay in close contact with situation room.
NEW INFORMATION
* Overall coordinator at Fletcher Situation is vanessa.corlazzoli@gmail.com
* UN agencies, Coast Guard, are still saying we’re the most accurate information on the ground (Anna)
* If you compare SMS’s location info we got in the beginning with what we’re getting know, there is a huge improvement in data accuracy (Jaro)
DEV NEEDS
* Need to add 20 new admins that only have access to the SMS backend of Ushahidi
* Add link feature on submit reports so that if reports are linked to each other we can do so, if there is a text box where we can enter related report numbers, that would be great.
* Need more data quality control of the reports that get mapped, seems to be a rogue “acceptor” <– David, we need to know who accepts these reports, can we trace?
* Need the tree structure for the layout of the categories on the submit report section (Caleb)
ACCOMPLISHED
* Developed organizational chart for Fletcher Situation Room (Vanessa)
* Carried out trainings for new Mapping Team members and new SMS Team members (Misc)
* Trained 6 new members of the SMS Team, shifts of 4 (Denise)
* Mapped IDP locations, and rural concentrations, shifting away from mapping for SAR teams (Anna)
* Set up Name@CrisisMappers.net email addresses for the core team (Ash)
* We’ve mapped ~100 of the 300 IDP concentration areas requested by WFP, resulting in 2,500 people getting fed; will complete the remaining 200 tomorrow (Anna)
* About 350 SMS’s processed and about 50 mapped (Denise)
* Conference call with SOUTHCOM, they have our IFRAME and our RSS feeds (Patrick/Brian/John)
* All SMS’s on 4636.ushahidi have been gone through and tagged if they are actionable, and all actionable SMS’s that did not have decent la/longs were fixed (Jen Ziemke)
* Getting videos up of trainings done yesterday will be up on Vimeo to share not openly but only for our volunteers (Carol)
* Monitoring Ushahidi in the media and sending out update at the end of every day this will be sent to all volunteers (Carol coordinating with Sarah)
* Trying to get iMacs for Situation Room (Carol)
* Set up @CrisisMappers Twitter account for all the Twitter users that are being followed by the situation room (Althea)
* Wiki being set up to improve communication flow between/within Situation Room: (Jennifer/Beka)
* Setting up http://www.crisismappers.info/haiti to streamline data entry of reports, a google form that will populate a Goolge Spreadsheet (Beka/Ashirul)
* Geneva situation room has about 20 volunteers, 10 core volunteers; the room is starting be run on it’s own on a Doodle (Laura)
* All haiti@ushahidi.com goes haitiushahidi@gmail.com and processed (Laura)
UPCOMING TASKS
* More Mapping and SMS trainings will be carried out at 08:00 tomorrow
* We need feedback loops, get SAR/WFP teams to let us know they’ve responded, will coordinate with InSTEDD to get a list of places searched by teams (Anna)
* For response, we need to get the cell phone numbers of the major orgs who we know are using our feeds through 4636; suggestion then is at 8pm every night we poll these organizations by sending out an SMS asking them to text back the report numbers they have responded to, + 0, 1; 0=responded but not resolved; 1= responded and resolved (Patrick/Josh)
* CrisisCamp Boston taking place this Saturday, will make sure to interface (Patrick)
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caleb
The category tree structure has been implemented on the front-end. I’m working on implementing it in the admin area right now, should have something up by the AM.
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ookolloh
Definitely more needed on feedback loop your suggestions especially re polling the orgs every night is excellent.
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patrick
From Wayne Gaines Suggestions: * Your ca…
From Wayne Gaines
Suggestions:
* Your categorization of data needs to be code assigned like: PT=Person Trapped MAN=Medical Assistance Needed F&W=Food and Water Request etc..
* Someone needs to categorize the spread sheet detail and combine multiple same item incident under one heading to reduce clutter and duplication.
* Symbols on the map are too vague and misleading. Better exact symbols representing PT=People trapped MAN-medical assistance needed. Anything is better than what is there now. Even clip art.
* On time of incident: Consider converting to military time format. On spread sheet there is not indication of AM or PM but everyone gets military time and it is clean.
* Assign code to the front of each Incident number indicating type of incident and color code emergency level or at least a assumed number scale of intensity of need.
* Someone needs to cull out assigned incident or attach follow up reports by incident number if feedback if available.
* Sort by location grouping incidents by location and priority level along with specific incident need code. This to priortize information.
* A good number of incidents are history and people listed are back stateside or elsewhere so someone needs to cull the data down to actionable items otherwise it is just confusing data that can’t be acted upon.A few minor data improvements in coding will go along ways along with a general clean up of the data especially grouping of repeated incidents that show up multiple times.
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jongos
I concur with the idea to switch to 24hr time. The API requires time but it also requires ‘AM’ or ‘PM’ with that time, most basic language functions have no way of calling that info, so it becomes more difficult than necessary for someone to timestamp. It’s also counter intuitive to server settings, which many languages pull their time data from. It might make more sense to adapt the form that so that on the front users select standard 12hr time, but on the backend, the time is converted to 24hr time before going to the db.
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patrick
Important library of layers: http://ispatial.t-sciences.com/haiti/main.php
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patrick
Some important feeds to add: WFS FEED – …
Some important feeds to add from MapAction:
WFS FEED – http://arcgis.mapaction.co.uk/ArcGIS/services/Haiti-USAR-data/MapServer/WFSServer
KML FEED – http://arcgis.mapaction.co.uk/ArcGIS/kml/Haiti-2010-01-13.kmz
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patrick
Caleb – the home page needs to change ‘on Digicel’ to read ‘on Digicel or Comcel/Voila’
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patrick
Situation Room Boston: January 19
First and most important: we need to pace ourselves. burning ourselves out is unlikely to help anyone. if you need time-out, take it and let the team know when you plan to be back on the grid. leave a phone number in case of emergency.
Second, Fletcher students are working on getting the GPS coordinates for 300 IDP concentrations requested by WFP for food distribution. They will try to work on this through the night.
Dev Side
* How are we doing on server issues for the site? Have we moved to larger servers?
* When you click on a cluster of reports, eg, “35 Reports” the list returns all reports ever collected instead of just those 35 reports
* On visualization, important to have both Cluster and Point visualization
* The report totals don’t add up across different parts of the site.
* Unsure whether SMS’s being turned into reports increases the number of total reports recorded
* Still not possible to delete SMS in back-end
* Provide option of CSV download by just one category.
* On this page, when you press about, top menu turns into Creole:
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/page/index/1?l=en_US
Design Side
* Add “Tree View” to categories on submit report page (Caleb)
* Improve layout of How to Report on main page (Caleb)
* Place public “download to csv” button higher up on page (Caleb)
* Make PersonFinder Google box same height as other boxes on home page (mid-way down, to keep symmetry)
*Make Incidents and Official/Mainstream News boxes same height (at the bottom of page)
* On main page, “About Us | A Propos de | Enfomaysion”, for English version, we only need first one. same respectively for French and Creole.
* About page still very problematic layout. Need to polish up, make text larger, etc. This is an important page, we need to make this look professional!
Non-Dev Side
* Held group training session at Fletcher for 60+ new student volunteers. We now have 182 members on the volunteer Google Group. Two seminar rooms at Fletcher School are going to be used from now on as situation rooms (1 for news/sms processing, 1 for mapping). We should be ok on sustainability by the end of the week.
* We need to double our efforts in documenting success stories, perhaps a concerted strategy to get more quotes from users and Tweeting them out. We know that the following orgs are indeed using the data on Ushahidi:
Red cross
United Nations Foundation
Plan International
Charity Water
Clinton Foundation
US State Department
International Medical Corps
AIDG
USAID
FEMA
US Coast Guard Task ForceBut getting these orgs to let us know when they’ve taken action on what is difficult since they’re still in full emergency response mode and don’t have much time to fill out completion surveys. In any case, we should divide up this list of orgs between us and contact the liaison for each org twice a day for updates.
This should become the Ushahidi Non-Tech team’s primary efforts.More feedback to follow if I have updates.
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patrick
Reply function still doesn’t work. Impo…
Reply function still doesn’t work.
Important:
* Add legal disclaimer on haiti home page that states we are not responsible for the way that the data is used
* We contact two respected lawyers including a world Haiti specialist, there are no privacy issues with us posting numbers and names. We have this on the record and in writing. So we’re posting all info from now on. -
patrick
Can’t seem to add replies to the sit rep below. This is high priority:
* Please have the haiti@ushahidi.com email forward to HaitiUshahidi@gmail.com in addition to my email address. The team here at Fletcher will take over that feed. Thanks.
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Kennedy Kasina
The mail forward is in place
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patrick
Situation Report: Boston, 10:30PM
Busiest day yet.
A] Dev Side
* The SMS’s inside Ushahidi can’t be deleted, and when they’re turned into reports, they don’t get added to the total report count either.
B] Design Side
* All categories section is confusing, goes from 1 to 6 and then 3, 2?
C] Non-Dev
* We’ve updated our guides, will be shared shortly to map, etc.
* We’re having our Boston-wide training tomorrow at 6pm.
* Laura Gorden is setting up Geneva Situation Room
* Anna Shultz has become the go-to person for SARs teams, UN, other orgs in Haiti for GPS coordinates.
* An iMac was donated to the Fletcher situation room for Anna to better do her analysis of VHR satellite imagery.There’s a lot more, Dense and Yanina will be adding what’s happened and where we go. I can no longer keep track of everything, so am distributing the sit rep.
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Denise Sewell
SitRoom updates
A) What we did today
a. Monitoring feeds: We continue to have a strong group of Fletcher volunteers monitoring Twitter, Facebook, and News feeds on and off location
b. Mapping: The number of non-volunteer reports submitted has grown (although not all are useful) to the point where they are almost overwhelming the admins for approval
c. SMS
– In the Fletcher SitRoom we have 6 people covering SMS. Also, we added 2 more SMS-ers from the DC SitRoom.
– We were able to read and process (i.e. submit reports, delete, or ask for clarification) on at least half of the SMS messagesB) Improvements/Developments of the Day
a. SMS – through numerous examples and working with the system, we decided on the following courses of action for the following problems:
– Translation issues (such as messages not be translated or needing to send a response): we’re trying to gather a group of Haitians that can be available via cell phones/email for translation as well as location questions
– Responding to texts: in general, we only respond if we need more information, but for the rare cases where other information is needed and possible for us to give, we are sending information back to the original sender
– Repetition: sometimes repetition is used to confirm an event is occurring, but most of the time we just acknowledged that with crowd-sourcing, repetition happens –> this will also be fixed by our ability to delete messages that are repetitive
– Other SMS issues: technical issues that came up today, such as such as message overlapping, deleting messages, and more message editing features, have been problem-solved and almost resolved
b. Report Comments
– At time of writing we have had 23 comments on our incidence reports. The majority of them have either confirmed the event or are other people seeking the same information.
– We have people reading the comments and seeing if there anyway we can follow up with either the original poster or the new commenterC) Planned for tomorrow
a. New organization
– Team Leaders: SMS: Denise & Jaroslav; Geocoding: Anna; Mapping: Jennifer, Hilde, & Laura; Monitoring: Althea; Satellite Office Managers: Laura (Geneva), Yanina (DC); Translation Managers and Coordinators: Nona & Sofija
– Certain teams now have dedicated email address and skype groups in order to take pressure off of Patrick and Anna, they are: haititushahidi@gmail.com (general info), haiti4636@gmail.com (monitoring, especially twitter), and mappingsms_haiti@gmail.com (SMS and mapping). All other teams will have dedicated skype groups and google documents by the morningb. More SMS
– We are trying to get through all of the back-log of SMS with our current team of SMS-ers without adding more — the messages that came in today are at on the site
– We will look at the statistics of today and see how we handled the report load, and from there we will decide if more people need to be added
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patrick
For Later: On Transparency International’s Perceived Corruption Index (2009), Haiti comes in at 168 amongst a total of 180 countries. The higher the figure, the higher is the extent of corruption as perceived by indigenous observers. We could phase in corruption categories after the emergency.
sxpert are discussing. 
Denise Sewell is discussing. 
sxpert 11:30 am on January 24, 2010 Permalink |
could we get the cell companies to triangulate where the person sending the SMS are ?
caleb 12:17 am on January 26, 2010 Permalink |
Hey Patrick,
Just a quick update: I’ve processed all of the above updates except the following:
* On the 447624802524 number, lets format it this way +44 762.480.2524
* … Add a “Citizen Journalism” box below “Mainstream News” that takes Global Voices feed on Haiti.
We’re in the process of moving to better servers so it may not be until late tomorrow that these get promoted to the live site. Either way, I plan on working on the remaining two items tomorrow.
patrick 5:42 am on January 26, 2010 Permalink |
Thanks Caleb!
caleb 5:01 am on January 27, 2010 Permalink |
Hi Patrick,
Just wanted to let you know that the remaining items have been promoted to the live site.
Caleb
patrick 5:04 am on January 27, 2010 Permalink |
rock on, thanks Caleb!