Category Archives: Uncategorized
Testing new crowd sourcing software and micro-tasking workflows
Haiti SMS Exercise Briefing from notgeorge on Vimeo. You can view here the video and audio of the pre-exercise briefing for the Camp Roberts / RELIEF Humanitarian Technology event, which some SBTF volunteers were involved in. The SMS exercise brought together volunteers from around the world to process text messages that were received during the [...]
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Changing the World, One Map at a Time (Video)
[Cross-posted from iRevolution] Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica is Germany’s largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to [...]
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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 [...]
The Technologies Used by standbytaskforce.com Volunteers
The Standby Volunteer Task Force comprises a network of skilled and dedicated volunteers from the world over. We use multiple technologies to manage live mapping operations. These include Ning, Skype, email, Google Groups, Google Docs, cell phones, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS, Google Maps, Google Earth, Access, Excel, SatScan, DropBox, YouSendIt, Doodle and Wordl. Since we use [...]
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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Want to Help Humanitarian Operations in Libya using your Laptop? Join UN Volunteers Online Now!
The UN Online Volunteer Service (OVS) has now teamed up with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the standbytaskforce.com to support crisis mapping efforts in Libya. This means you can now join the UN as a volunteer to provide direct support to the humanitarian response in Libya. The Libya [...]
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The Volunteers Behind the Libya Crisis Map: A True Story
My colleague Clay Shirky calls it “Cognitive Surplus” in his recent book. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to it as “MacroWikinomics” in theirs. What is cognitive surplus? The trillion hours of free time enjoyed by the world’s educated population every year. Don and Tony describe MacroWikinomics as mass distributed collaboration on scales we’ve never [...]
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The 6th deployment of the SBTF: Alabama Recovery