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.

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.

Word Doc version:
Tech community sitrep – haiti 22 jan 2010

See it inline below:

Technology Community Sit Rep: 22 Jan, 2010
Prepared by Luke Beckman, National Response Liaison, InSTEDD, +1-650-740-5853, Beckman@instedd.org
*** If info not on SitRep, it may be on prev. ones since I want to include the newest, most current efforts without making the SitRep too long, or I don’t know about the info***
Coordination is key. We must continue to work together and do a better job of it every day.

Great Aggregators
• http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/index.php?title=.php&title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake
• http://inventory.ict4peace.org/Haiti+Earthquake+-+January+2010
• http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/earthquakes/resources.html
• http://hypercube.telascience.org/haiti/
• http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/
o Sahana looking for translation support http://translate.hfoss.eu/wiki/Translation
o Collaboration and to-do lists posted here #sahana irc.freenode.net for collab. Our TODO is hosted at http://bit.ly/sahana-haiti-todo

Ushahidi
o http://haiti.ushahidi.com/
o Real time situation room http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/
o To submit online reports http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports
o How to volunteer http://wiki.ushahidi.com/doku.php?id=4636instructions

Open Street Maps (OSM)
o http://haiti.openstreetmap.nl/ Best map of the situation on the ground I know of. Hundreds of volunteers working around the clock doing mapping on the ground.
• US SOUTHCOM online civ/mil coordination community. http://community.apan.org/
• In Haiti? Text 4636 (If outside of Haiti: 447624802524) on Digicel with your location and need. Report emergencies and missing persons .
o Include as much location information as possible.

Crisis Camps on Saturday

• Atlanta – Location Ignition Alley, Date/Time TBD, @jonathannelson @brendanlim @ignitionalley @mikeschinkel @netsurfqueen
• Boston – Location ITA Software 141 Portland Street Cambridge, @melmaxmcd @macotech, Saturday January 23, 9-4 pm, Sign up to attend
• Boulder/Denver – Saturday January 23, 10am-5pm MST, Location TBD Register Here and Sign Up for the Google Group
• Washington, DC – Saturday, 1/23, NPR HQ (635 Massachusetts Ave NW) 9am-6pm. Register
• Los Angeles – Saturday, 1/23/10, 10am-10pm, UC Irvine. Virtual LA camp: ongoing Skype chat / Register / @chadcat / @CrisisCampLA
• London – London LKL Workshop at London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QS – 10am-5pm. More details here:Crisis Camp Haiti – London LKL Workshop
• Miami / South Florida – Location: Miami Herald bldg, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132, Saturday, January 23, 2010 from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PT). Website / Register to attend.
• New Orleans, LA – LaunchPadNOLA, 643 Magazine, New Orleans, LA, January 23rd, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM. Registration here. @crisiscampnola
• Northern California – Yahoo! Sunnyvale Campus, 701 1st Avenue Building C Sunnyvale, CA 94089, date, January 23, 12pm-10pm. Register to attend.
• Portland – NedSpace Old Town, 117 NW 5th, January 23rd, maybe 24th, 1pm – ?, @crisiscampPDX crisiscampPDX@gmail.com
• Seattle area – Location Shorewood Apartments Pavilion, 9011 W. Shorewood Dr, Mercer Island, WA 98050, Saturday January 23, Time 9am-5pm, Register here @crisiscampSEA @melody_s @wesleyzhao **sponsored by Garlic Jims
• Silicon Valley http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Main_Page yahoo Sunnyvale Jan 23 12-10pm
• Toronto -CrisisCamp TO – Jan 24th Organization Kick- off meeting University of Toronto Bahen Centre for Information Technology 40 St. George Street Toronto, Ontario M5S 2E4 (room B024) Canada@crisiscampTO @HeatherLeson

Lessons Learned

• Five major problems we see emerging in no particular order
o Decision-makers on the ground still do not have access to accurate, real-time data. That may be because of firewalls, lack of bandwidth, people are unaware these resources exist, the command structure of an org does not allow people to use open sources, or the decision makers do not want that data.
o Poor supply logistics at the airport. There needs to be a streamlined process moving aid to those who need it most. Red tape does not justify people dying.
o Much of the population is leaving PAP. Do we want to move supplies to the people or preposition the supplies and bring the people to them once structure and supply chains are created?
o We need to weave relationships with people who are now arriving on the ground and those who have been there since day one. We cannot afford to lose the on-the-ground the knowledge that has been built up.
o We need to immediately begin to rebuild local infrastructure at all levels and re-stimulate the Haitian economy.

People Finder Update

• http://haiticrisis.appspot.com
• Haiticrisis will soon be syncing with the American Red Cross’ Disaster Safe site, developed after Katrina. https://disastersafe.redcross.org/
Sahana
• http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/
Mapping NGOs in Action
• http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/index.php?title=.php&title=Mapping_NGOs_in_Action
Health
• Alabama Incident Management System has stood up a deployment for Haiti that is starting to be integrated with other platforms
o http://h.aimslive.org/AIMS/UI/Response/Maps.aspx
o Also stood up a Need/Have medical system
• http://h.xchlive.org
• Medical Common Operating Picture http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/11255
OCHA Information from 22 Jan
• OCHA Situation Report #10: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/retrieveattachments?openagent&shortid=MUMA-7ZX776&file=Full_Report.pdf
• Contact Lists: http://ocha.unog.ch/ochafileupload/upload.aspx?publicID=u22011004215P7loCkq7Ih
o Cluster Coordinator & General Contact List (in one XLS file over multiple work sheets)
o IFRC Contact List
o UNDP Contact List
o Government Contact List
• MAP: OCHA Haiti: Earthquake Affected Areas (as of 21 Jan 2010): http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/fullmaps_am.nsf/luFullMap/7CC4E9A64261EB7C492576B3000DD6D5/$File/map.pdf?OpenElement
• MAP: Map Action – Field Hospital and Temporary Settlements: http://ocha.unog.ch/ochafileupload/upload.aspx?publicID=u22011004215P7loCkq7Ih

Ground Truth

News
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122834576
• Crisis Commons now has Simple Things Anyone Can Do listed on its wiki
• http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Simple_Tasks_Anyone_Can_Do
o It includes screencasts and step-by-step instructions to get internet novices up to speed on how to use OSM or upload data to USHAHIDI. This approach allows the technical community to leverage the interest and compassion of the larger internet community .
• Great situational awareness tool http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index.html?hpt=C1

Mapping

• The Fletcher School crisis mapping team needs five iMacs to continue supporting Coast Guard and Search and Rescue operations
• To put this map onto your GPS follow these instructions:
o Download the map at
o Rename the file to gmapsupp.img
o Plug the GPS unit in “mass storage mode” (Setup->Interface->USB Mass Storage)
o Put the file gmapsupp.img in the Garmin directory (create the directory if it does not exist)
o Unplug the GPS unit
• High Resolution (15cm) Google imagery is now available for Port-au-Prince
• (acquired 17 Jan) . It is burned into the basemap in Google Maps (confirmed) and basemap in Google Earth (unconfirmed).
o http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-imagery-of-port-au-prince.html
o KML Version http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/haiti/Haiti-Earthquake-nl.kml
o Most of this imagery available I available for download, for non-commercial use related to emergency relief. http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/imagery.html
• Google Repository http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/geoeye.html
• There will be continual updates made as new data becomes available in OpenStreetMap.
• Haiti view of OpenStreetMap: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=18.72&lon=-72.68&zoom=8&layers=B000FTF
• ESRI Overview of all GIS http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/earthquakes/resources.html
• Early collaboration around all data sources http://geonode.org/
• Crisis Commons Wiki http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake

For coordination/collaboration questions or issues, please contact Luke Beckman, National Response Liaison, InSTEDD +16507405853, Skype: lukebeckman, Email: Beckman@instedd.org.
Coordination also is ongoing in conjunction with STAR-TIDES (linwells@gmail.com, +1202-436-6354) and The National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (niusr@cox.net)

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

***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.

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.

Swift Haiti Twitter Tracker: http://appfrica2.com/haiti/

Working on Swift Architecture document at – https://docs.google.com/a/ushahidi.com/Doc?docid=0AXtjM3UhUoCeZGZ0azVwYjdfMWdjeDc5Y2Rj&hl=en. While I will continue to work on Haiti Tracker, I feel our team’s time is better spent getting a fully realized SwiftApp done. Working on mock-ups of final Swift app. Getting new team members up to speed by breaking down all features into smaller manageable tasks.

Overall 3296
Deemed Useful 2039

With usable coords: 32%

Breakdown:
Food distribution 23.27%
Missing Persons 11.06%
Asking to forward a message 10.94%
Response 9.79%
Water shortage 9.33%
Health services 5.65%
Medical Emergency 4.38%
People trapped 4.38%
Shelter 3.46%
Earthquake and aftershocks 3.23%
Emergency 3.00%
Persons News 2.19%
Collapsed structure 1.73%
Non food items 1.73%
Vital Lines 1.04%

You can access it via the URL:

http://app.beextra.org/appflickr/embed/collectionid/haiti/missionid/605/count/12/title/1/bg/white

• count - number of photos you want to display in the grid
• title – title visibility {true, false, 1, 0}
• bg – optional parameter to change background color {black, white, gray, etc}

And here’s sample iframe code:

<iframe src=”http://app.beextra.org/appflickr/embed/collectionid/haiti/missionid/605/count/12/title/1/bg/white” width=”270″ height=”400″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″></iframe>

Here’s an example of it on our site:

*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

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.

Swift Haiti Twitter Tracker: http://appfrica2.com/haiti/

Today I’m committing EDXL, GeoRSS and PFIF xml feeds to SULSa and working on buttons for Haiti Tracker. Namely “Delete” and “Mark as Chatter”. ‘Send to Ushahidi’ button needs to validate with a token in the database to avoid duplicates from multiple users. Working on user and admin permissions. Two dedicated volunteers are contributing a great deal of their time, which is much appreciated. Exploring options for visualization. Victor is working on an NLP tagging module which he’s testing today.

Jean-Marc pulled through in a big way, earlier this evening. SMS to Digicel were in queue and he released them.

Also, exciting news: Digicel’s SMS broadcast services are being restored. We need to settle on content of that broadcast, e.g. “SMS your address and need or message to 4636″ in Creole. Every Digicel user will receive that message, and we’ll want to have volunteers and feeds set.

More info to come tomorrow re: call center being set up in-country.

Volunteers at 4636.ushahidi.com are simply amazing.

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)

Here’s an example of the detail even as street level: http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/1253