AreWeCreating an App Junkyard? How to Incubate and Sustain Inn. In the process of helping out with CrisisCommons and various Haiti relief efforts I’ve noticed recurring challenges around getting resources to sustain all the great ideas and apps being created. As I looked around at all the app contests and volunteer efforts it struck me we are creating an app junkyard. This does not not mean the apps are junk. It means there is not institutional infrastructure to sustain the apps and innovations that are created. The apps are incredibly valuable but we have no mechanism in place to grow to seed into a tree. Crises often act as crucibles to distill problems rapidly and Haiti in my mind did this in spades. 1. 2. 3. In order for volunteer tech efforts or app contests to succeed long term I think these problems need to be addressed. The bigger challenges comes from solving the problems of institutional competition and funding. Over time even the best and most popular apps have inevitable costs associated with them.
This is the easy problem. We have we need. WeHaveWe Need. TechCrunch #TechHaiti Tech comp: help. You’re a tech company in ecommerce that can donate a percentage of sales. You’re a social platform with a large amount of spare ad inventory. Whatever kind of tech company you are, you can do something for Haiti, whose recent earthquake has been described by the UN as the worst crisis it has ever faced. So all this week we plan to update this post with information on acts of generosity by the tech startup community in Europe. Every-time your company does something to help Haiti, we’ll add you to the top of this post and retweet it, as much as we are able.
We’re also going to start this hashtag: #TechHaiti Why? We want aid agencies, NGOs and relief organisations to be able FIND tech companies that could help them easily and, crucially, fast. And to clarify, no, we don’t want to ‘own’ this hashtag in any way. The list below shows how tech companies are donating time and resources as well as money to help Haiti.
DEC (decappeal) Haiti/2010 Earthquake - CrisisCommons Wiki. CrisisCamps Haiti crisis mapping. WashingtonDC CrisisCamp Haiti. Invalid quantity. Please enter a quantity of 1 or more. The quantity you chose exceeds the quantity available. Please enter your name. Please enter an email address. Please enter a valid email address. Please enter your message or comments. Please enter the code as shown on the image. Please select the date you would like to attend. Please enter a valid email address in the To: field. Please enter a subject for your message. Please enter a message. You can only send this invitations to 10 email addresses at a time. $$$$ is not a properly formatted color. Please limit your message to $$$$ characters. $$$$ is not a valid email address. Please enter a promotional code. Sold Out Pending You have exceeded the time limit and your reservation has been released.
The purpose of this time limit is to ensure that registration is available to as many people as possible. This option is not available anymore. Please read and accept the waiver. All fields marked with * are required. US Zipcodes need to be 5 digits. Geoparadigm (geoparadigm) Tech camp yields programs for Haiti. Volunteers at Saturday's CrisisCamp Haiti work on digital mapping and iPhone apps, among other projects. Meeting of tech-savvy volunteers yields programs to help Haiti earthquake victims Results of Saturday session include mapping, iPhone apps to translate Creole to English Volunteers in Washington, elsewhere plan to meet again, with other meetings in the works Organizers say people can help from home and that no advanced tech skills are required (CNN) -- A weekend meeting of technology pros looking to help victims of the Haiti earthquake yielded some ready-to-roll projects and a few more nearing completion.
Perhaps more important, participants say, the gathering produced a framework that could keep aiding disaster-relief efforts in the months and years to come. CrisisCamp Haiti brought together developers, programmers and other volunteers for meetings in Washington, Los Angeles, California, and other cities. Participants called the Saturday sessions hectic, but rewarding. PDGOODMAN.COM. Haiti:geolocatehospitalchallenge - Sahana WIKI. Ushahidi: Only 40 Left urgent need v...
Tradui Creole translation for the iPhone. Haiti: Tradui, Translation App for Android and (almost) iPhone - Crisis Commons and Crisis Mappers have become major technology and data contributors to the Haiti Relief Effort. Many technologists and geohackers are donating hundreds of hours to common projects. This past weekend saw the release of a mapping app for the iPhone (with expedited App Store approval).
Now there is a second app waiting for Apple’s app store approval. Tradui is a free offline dictionary that converts Creole to English and vice-versa. The data came from the HaitiSurf Creole to English Dictionary. I’ve included screenshots after the jump. During any crisis there is a debate about how to coordinate volunteers, manage technology projects and keep data sources clean (for example Boingboing just posted about the redundant people finders that are emerging – via jknauer).
No silver bullet will be found to solve these problems — especially not immediately following a disaster. Jeffrey Johnson will be speaking about Crisis Mapping Haiti at Where 2.0 in March. Gaia GPS - The Best GPS iPhone App - iPhone Topo Maps - iPhone O. RescueTeams "thrilled" with free OpenStre... Haiti: OSM and Sat Imagery for Free iPhone App. Update: The iPhone app referenced in this article has since been released on the App Store.
Crisis Mappers from around the world have been working around the clock to create maps and other tools for relief workers in Haiti. The earthquake caused tremendous damage to the road network and updated maps are necessary to enable food and volunteers to traverse the island. The volunteer-driven Open Street Map project has become a central data source for the Crisis Mappers. It is regarded by many as the most up-to-date map of the area. It combines UN damage assessment, digitized imagery, Public Domain Topos and other base data. In the wake of the tragedy Google quickly released Haiti data gathered from its MapMaker program. Soon, there will also be a free iPhone app with maps of Haiti coming to the App Store. This version of Gaia GPS is intended to aid disaster relief for the Haitian earthquake. Fingers crossed that this app gets approved by Apple quickly.
More images of the iPhone app. Haiti RSS Feed Challenge. Error creating thumbnail: Icon for Haiti RSS Feed Challenge (Note - the UN-SPIDER workflow for imagery, video, etc is now a separate project found here, and will consume this project's outputs) Various groups (including the United Nations and Pentagon) have asked CrisisCommons to collate many media feeds related to the 2010 Haiti earthquake into useful forms for decision support, aggregation, and integration with other systems. News feeds on Haiti (RSS or otherwise) will eventually be displayed on the CrisisCommons news aggregator, news.crisiscommons.com, and tool sets we have used and created will be made accessible to other disaster relief and public safety agencies.
General Project Requirements Currently, the working requirements for this RSS Aggregation project include: A more detailed list of what we need help can be found HERE Project Leads Penn, Chris AIM/Gtalk/twitter:cantormath Rustad, Roger irc:rog, +1(949)209-9737 / AIM/Y! Chat space information Project Flow data input crunching data. RSS Feed Challenge.
UN Spider Map/Dispatch. UN-SPIDER KNOWLEDGE PORTAL. UN-SPIDER - full version. UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal. Mobile Applications 4 Crisis Response. Cselmer (cselmer) Jonathan Nelson (JonathanNelson) Intridea - Design, Development, and Strategy for the Enterprise. Intridea (intridea) Project EPIC (epiccolorado) CrisisCenter CrisisChat. Crisis Camps projects.