Author Archives: Patrick

Psychological Support during SBTF Crisis Mapping Deployments

[This is a guest blog post by Maggie Jarmolowski, our dedicated SBTF Counselor] “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them [...]
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Double Activation of the standbytaskforce.com: WHO-Libya & OCHA-Colombia

The Standby Volunteer Task Force has just been activated by two major partners: the World Health Organization (WHO) in Libya and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Colombia. WHO-Libya: This activation is not in response to an acute emergency but rather related to preparedness and health system status in Libya. The goal [...]
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The [unexpected] Impact of the Libya Crisis Map and the Standby Volunteer Task Force

[Guest blog post by Andrej Verity. Andrej is an Information Management Officer at UN-OCHA in Geneva with a focus on both leading OCHA's collaboration with the Volunteer & Technical Communities and supporting OCHA's information management staff around the world. In Andrej deployed to both the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods. In March Andrej lead OCHA's collaboration with [...]
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Who are we really? Stats on the SBTF Membership

The SBTF Membership currently comprises 700+ volunteers from 70+ countries around the world. But who are we really? I finally made some time to find out by reading through every single bio on our Ning platform—a total of 720 when this blog post went to press. Volunteers are invited to write whatever they’d like in [...]
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SBTF Recognized in Online Volunteer Award!

The entire SBTF membership is truly honored and proud to be recognized in this year’s International Online Volunteer Award! The official press release is available online here, which includes this video describing the SBTF’s work on the Libya Crisis Map. Sincere thanks to Andrej Verity for his comments in the video below.   Responding to Crisis Online from [...]
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Thank You video from UNHCR’s Deputy High Commissioner

My fellow SBTF Satellite Team co-lead Shadrock Roberts and I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with UNHCR’s Deputy High Commissioner Alexander Aleinikoff whilst in Geneva for ICCM. Here is a short thank you video from Professor Aleinikoff to everyone who worked on the UNCHR-Somalia Satellite Imagery Project. Apologies for the low volume, if anyone [...]
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Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery Analysis for UNHCR-Somalia: Latest Results

253,711 That is the total number of tags created by 168 volunteers after processing 3,909 satellite images in just five days. A quarter of a million tags in 120 hours; that’s more than 2,000 tags per hour. Wow. As mentioned in this earlier blog post, volunteers specifically tagged three different types of informal shelters to provide [...]
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Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery Tagging to Support UNHCR in Somalia

[Cross-posted from Patrick Meier's iRevolution blog] The Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) recently launched a new team called the Satellite Imagery Team. This team has been activated twice within the past few months. The first was to carry out this trial run in Somalia and the second was in partnership with AI-USA for this human [...]
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A Thank You Note from AI-USA for the Syria Satellite Imagery Project

We are very grateful to Amnesty International USA (AI-USA) for their support and partnership on the recent Syria Satellite Imagery project. This initiative leveraged high resolution satellite imagery kindly provided by DigitalGlobe, the advanced Tomnod platform and over 70 volunteers from the SBTF Satellite Team to crowdsource evidence of mass atrocities in three key Syrian [...]
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The Standby Volunteer Task Force: One Year On

[Cross-posted from iRevolution] The Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) was launched exactly a year ago tomorrow and what a ride it has been! It was on September 26, that I published the blog post below to begin rallying the first volunteers to the cause. The first blog post announcing the SBTF Some three hundred [...]
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