[HOT] HOT activities needing volunteers ?

Jean Millerat Jean.Millerat at wecena.com
Thu Aug 19 16:41:32 BST 2010


Le 16/08/2010 22:56, Tim McNamara a écrit :
> On 16 August 2010 04:34, Jean Millerat <Jean.Millerat at wecena.com
> <mailto:Jean.Millerat at wecena.com>> wrote:
>
>     I am considering proposing some French consultancies I work with to
>     donate some work time to the HOT activities. But I don't know if
>     such work time could be made any useful to the HOT. Would you help
>     me identifying areas (if any) where this could be made useful ?
>
> Do you think these volunteers would be interested in a related project?
> The Sahana project's response to the Pakistan floods[1] is currently
> focused on extracting structured information from unstructured sources,
> such as situation & assessment reports. We need people willing to spend
> some time to achieve this.

I don't expect these volunteers to be available before several weeks 
(having firms take action takes some time...). Maybe for the next crisis 
? At the moment, I am trying to identify :

- the exact nature of tasks they could be given

- the exact process and tools through which they could contribute

At the moment I am assessing what can be done with the tools and data at 
hand. Despite the tools and numerous wiki available, I have a hard time 
understanding how and where I could best contribute as new volunteer.

> It's less technical and easier to get started. However, it can be
> tedious but is very important work.

This is exactly the kind of tasks I am looking for. When volunteers 
start contributing this way, they get familiar with the landscape and 
can later go to less tedious, more "value added" tasks.

At the moment, I am struggling with adding flood reports locations to 
your Sahana instance. Is there any community support forum of some sort 
for volunteers ?

BTW, this seems to be an interesting source of recently updated flood 
reports :

http://www.radio.gov.pk/flood.asp

-- 
Jean Millerat
Wecena, rendre vos informaticiens fiers d'améliorer le monde
Jean.Millerat at wecena.com   +33 1 77 455 344   Jean.Millerat at gmail.com



More information about the HOT mailing list