Tag Archives: Volunteers

A Master’s Thesis on the Motivations Behind the SBTF

[Guest blog post by Evelyn Hichens, an SBTF volunteer who has just completed her Geography Msci course at the University Of Birmingham, UK. For her fourth year dissertation she decided to focus on quantifying the motivations behind the volunteers of Standby Taskforce. A powerpoint presentation of her MA thesis is available here.] Hey Mapsters, As [...]
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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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Meet a Mapster: Understanding Volunteer Motivations

[This is a guest blog post by Isaac Griberg, Social Media Officer at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and MA Social Media student at Birmingham City University] Dear Mapsters, First of all, kudos for all the work you guys are doing at the intersection of GIS and relief work. I believe the humanitarian community [...]
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The Spirit of the SBTF: A Global Network of Self-Starters

I’ve recently been reflecting on what makes the global SBTF network possible. Not surprisingly, it all has to do with active volunteers. They are the ones who make this global initiative what it is. Indeed, we are all volunteers and have other professional, academic, personal etc., commitments. But we find and make the time to [...]
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Standby Human Resources

SBTF volunteers have consistently demonstrated they are a reliable, hard working and creative bunch. On little notice, they are willing to put in hours of their free time, all the while holding a job / writing a PhD / entertaining three toddlers. Their encouragement and interaction with similar volunteers comes through a computer screen - [...]
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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 for ICCM

This year’s International Conference of Crisis Mappers in Geneva just finished. The creation of the SBTF was announced at last year’s ICCM. Many SBTF volunteers were not able to make the conference and we wanted everyone to be present in a small way… so we set up this map:  Over the past two days, volunteers have been reporting on what [...]
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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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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 [...]
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