[HOT] Fwd: Ecuador EQ - assisting with Ushahidi platform

Tue Apr 19 09:59:24 UTC 2016

Hi all,

I don't know any Spanish but I'd like to chip in with some lessons from my
experience. I worked as volunteer co-ordinator during the April earthquake
in Nepal, supporting the amazing work Kathmandu Living Labs was doing with
quakemap.org and quakerelief.info.

1. First task is to get enough reports on the system for it to be usable.
Lots of facebook groups, chats and twitter statuses are a rich source of
information but they still need to be mapped.

One team of volunteers need to immediately start taking these reports from
social media and putting them on the Ushahidi deployment. Once the number
of reports crosses 500, the media, public and responders will start taking
the effort seriously and you'll have reports coming in automatically. Make
sure you include the source (link to twitter feed, facebook status, news
item etc.) in the description field so that we can remove duplicate reports
when the dust settles down a bit.

2. Setup a process, everyone doing everything isn't a great idea. Divide
the volunteers into teams that do only one specific work. I've attached a
presentation that outlines the team division and the workflow that we
created during the April earthquake.If needed, we can arrange a Skype call
so that I can explain the workflow to the team.

3. When a report appears on the deployment and multiple responders engage
their resources, it is a loss of valuable time. Explain clearly to the
responders that they need to communicate with the volunteer team. If they
are responding to a report, they should add a comment on the report that
they are taking care of it e.g if the Red Cross is sending medical supplies
to a certain place based on information from a report, they should add the
sentence "Red Cross is sending a team in this location" as a comment to the
report.

If they face any problems while responding, they should add another
comment. If a report is closed(either because the casualties couldn't be
saved or relief was provided), they should again add another comment to the
report giving this update.

Please check this report http://quakemap.org/reports/view/2174 as an
example of how comments can be useful.

4. A dedicated team of volunteers should read the comments and update the
report status. They should also add any updates they might have based on
their verification as comments. We had added a field called "Actionable" to
every report that would specify whether the report was "actionable",
"non-actionable", "urgent" or "closed". The team of "comment approvers"
would read the comments coming in and change this "actionable" status so
that people could filter out "non-actionable" and "closed" reports. This
was very useful in the later days because we knew exactly which reports
didn't need to be acted upon.

5. It is very tempting to try to give user ids to every organization and
ask them to update the reports themselves, but from our experience, this
doesn't work. All organizations will be too busy focusing on relief efforts
so asking them to add comments and having a dedicated team of volunteers
reading these comments and updating the report status is the right way to
go.

6. Explain to people how to use the CSV export feature to allow people to
download the reports in excel format. This is very useful when working with
less tech savvy organizations and for printing out the reports for offline
access.

Feel free to reply with any questions or feedback.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:13 PM, Nirab Pudasaini <developer.nirab at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> KLL might be able to help with their experience of quakemap deployment
> during Nepal earthquake. CC ed in this email is Punit Jajodia who was
> heavily involved with quakemap. I will let him reply.
>
> Regards
> Nirab
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Tasauf A Baki Billah <
> tasauf1980 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: "Standby Task Force" <mail at standbytaskforce.ning.com>
>> Date: Apr 19, 2016 2:07 PM
>> Subject: Ecuador EQ - assisting with Ushahidi platform
>> To: "tasauf1980 at gmail.com" <tasauf1980 at gmail.com>
>> Cc:
>>
>> As you know, the SBTF has engaged in information gathering on the Ecuador
>> Earthquake.
>>
>> In addition, we have a request from a volunteer group sitting in Quito
>> running a crowdmap.
>> https://mapa.desastre.ec
>>
>> They need a hand for coordination of volunteers; Assigning tasks and
>> assisting with the platform.
>>
>> The working language is Spanish. You may be able to help - or you may
>> forward this to someone who have experience with Ushahidi & crowdmap
>> deployments?
>>
>> Connect with me: <per at standbytaskforce.com> or Luis <
>> luishernando at gmail.com> if you can contribute?
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>> Per
>>
>> Visit Standby Task Force at:
>> http://standbytaskforce.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network
>>
>>
>> To control which emails you receive on Standby Task Force, click here
>> <http://standbytaskforce.ning.com/profiles/profile/emailSettings?xg_source=msg_mes_network>
>>
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>>
>

-- 
Regards,

Punit Jajodia

Co-founder

M: *+977-9808650191 <%2B977-9808650191>*

parewalabs.com

<https://twitter.com/parewalabs> <https://linkedin.com/company/parewa-labs>
ᐧ
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