Author Archives: Anahi

WHO Libya Deployment: Lessons Learned and SBTF Feedback

On December 12th, Robert Colombo Llimona, a GIS Analyst
for the Vulnerability and Risk Analysis & Mapping (VRAM) 
inside the WHO Mediterranean Center for Health Risk Reduction (WMC) based in Tunisia contacted the SBTF, OSM and GISCorps to request support on a project related to the public health system in Libya. The purpose of the [...]
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Data Protection Standards 2.0

As noted in Patrick Meier’s blog post on “Crowdsourcing, Crisis Mapping and Data Protection Standards”, humanitarian organizations have yet to develop and publicize data protection protocols for social media, crowdsourcing and volunteer geographical information. This is why, in November the standbytaskforce.com actively participated in an important workshop to discuss these challenges. The [...]
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WHO on the Libya Deployment: Where We Are & Where We Are Going

[Guest blog post from Robert Colombo, GIS specialist - Vulnerability and Risk Analysis & Mapping (VRAM), Mediterranean Center for Health Risk Reduction (WMC) - based in Tunisia]   For the last 4 weeks, the World Health Organization Mediterranean Centre for Risk Reduction (WMC) has been following and interacting with great interest in the Libya Deployment [...]
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Combining Crowdsourced Satellite Imagery Analysis with Crisis Reporting: An Update on Syria

[Cross-posted from Patrick's iRevolution blog] Members of the the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) Satellite Team are currently tagging the location of hundreds of Syrian tanks and other heavy mili-tary equipment on the Tomnod micro-tasking platform using very recent high-resolution satellite imagery provided by Digital Globe. We’re focusing our efforts on the following three key cities [...]
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Libya Crisis Map Deployment Report

We have just completed the after action review of the SBTF deployment of the Libya Crisis Map. You can view the report as a Google Doc here. Please feel free to add comments and questions as this is an open and editable document. The entire point of this report is to catalyze conversation and learning. This is [...]
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The changing face of translation for crisis response

Translation is the oldest task in humanitarian information processing and it is still the largest. Before digital technologies existed, ground-truth information needed to be translated into the language(s) of aid-workers and this is true now more than ever as the volume of digital communications rapidly increases. The need for real-time cross-linguistic communications hasn’t changed, but [...]
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The 6th deployment of the SBTF: Alabama Recovery

On May 1st we received an email from Heather Blanchard of CrisisCommons. The project request and preliminary assessment was from the American Red Cross who was also representing the Alabama Emergency Operations Center. Crisis Commons had already created a wiki for the project. The potential was there for a volunteer team to explore the initial [...]
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What the SBTF is Not

We feel that it may at times be a bit confusing for people to understand what the SBTF’s aims are and what we want to achieve. There are several misconceptions about what we do and who we are so we decided to write this blog post to clarify some issues.  1. The SBTF doesn’t aim [...]
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Why We Need a Disaster 2.1 Report

The recent Disaster 2.0 Report published by the UN Foundation, OCHA and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) represents one of the most important policy documents to have been written in recent years. The report acknowledges in no uncertain terms that the humanitarian space is moving towards a more multi-polar system and that this represents an [...]
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The Libya Crisis Map Information Flow

Organizing and working remotely with almost 400 volunteers all over the world is not an easy task. The standbytaskforce.com for this reason has a structured system that allows the volunteers to join different teams, divide the work to be done in sub-tasks and then aggregate the final product in the Ushahidi platform.  This [...]
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