[HOT] Activation Coordination Courses: How-To and earn your Activation "Community Care Role" badge at the same time.

Blake Girardot HOT/OSM blake.girardot at hotosm.org
Sat Oct 21 21:39:07 UTC 2017


Dear Friends,

The amount of help you all have provided over the last 6-7 weeks is
outstanding and I have many thanks from major organizations around the
world to pass on to each and everyone of you. My inbox has several
requests to pass on thanks you, everyone who has OSM mapped or helped
with any HOT/OSM activity ever literally.

So many people have really stepped up and helped, dedicated so much
care and effort to helping in whatever small way we could and several
folks have really stepped up gone above and beyond, probably working
too much. You have all done awesome work and many organizations, some
huge and some small, have used the data you generated to make a
difference in people's lives.

Which leads me to the topic of this email.

The HOT Activation teams have really done incredible work, many long
hours for several weeks in a row now, some of them volunteering more
than full time for 7 straight weeks.

Professionalism, experience, continuity and dedication are critical.

Self care and community care are just as critical.

This means, taking breaks, taking time off, making sure you and your
peers are getting enough sleep, food, water. I have the honor of
volunteering alongside you and other dedicated, tops in their field,
people who continually amaze me at their high level of skills,
experience and professionalism making a huge difference to people on
the ground. The only way we can all maximize our impact is by taking
care of ourselves too. 8 hours off is worth so much more than 20 hours
straight.

So please, let us all take a few moments to make sure we are meeting
all our self care needs and make yourself feel good by taking a break
for a job amazingly done so far.

But that also means we need people to join the Activation teams so
people can feel even better taking time off for self care.

In the big picture everyone is part of the activation team, everyone
who maps, edits the wiki, helps or has helped HOT/OSM in any way in
the past (the OSM data has been built over years and every bit of it
is important) is part of the activation team.

But there is a HOT Activation protocol and there are formal roles that
make a commitment and take on real responsibility for several parts of
an activation. It just takes available time and experience and
knowledge to fill one of the formal roles. HOT has a process to bring
people's skills up in the Activation Coordination process, formal
teams and roles. And you can learn how to get started joining an
activation team by taking the self paced courses that train you to be
a part of an Activation team.

There are only 2, top level, fully peer endorsed Activation Leads at
the moment. That means they have completed every course in the
Activation Coordination group of courses. And they have gone further
and helped out in every role over the course of a few years, in actual
or simulated activations and earned the edorsement of their peers.

(There are several of you reading this email who are fully qualified
of course and can step in for any role in any activation, including
Lead, just as you have done for years, you just have not gone through
the courses and requested the peer endorsement. The content of the
course is so good, you want to click through them all. I promise you
it will not be a waste of your time, but it will take a few days to
click through them all. Trust me, it is worth it. Just watch the video
below and you will be able to click through each course in about 20
mins just as I did in the video, I think there are 11 courses.)

The online course software is not great, but the content is amazing.
You will learn what you need to know and feel confident contributing
to the world of Activation coordination. HOT/OSM needs you.

I just took the Community Care course as I know it is something we
needed and I wanted to see what we should be doing.

I created a 20 minute long, very informal (that means I mumble a lot
and talk too softly) video in American English that shows you how to
use the HOT Courses website to take a course and I walk through the
full content of the Community Care course. The information in the
course itself is something we all need. I encourage everyone to at
least suffer through the video and read along with me as we learn most
of the great material in that important course together.

The signs and symptoms section and the how to self care parts are the
most important sections to listen to.

Try to make it through the whole thing as there is important
information throughout the whole video about self care, even if some
parts might not apply to you. Read the video description carefully.

https://youtu.be/Tlrj84pazIw

Thank you Russ for making such a great course!

Any questions or problems taking courses, just contact me or
russ.deffner at hotosm.org directly.

As I often say: It is really an honor to be able to say, I look
forward to working with everyone on this list in the future in some
way!

And literally millions of people around the world thank you for
joining with them as they face the most harrowing of circumstances.

As Heather likes to say: "Lets all go be awesome together!"

Respectfully
blake

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Blake Girardot
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team



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