Category Archives: Uncategorized
For Eliana…
People often think our online lives are not real, that our relationships there are somehow less meaningful and that what occurs to us personally online means nothing compared to the physical. We believe our online lives and friendships have value, and that we owe respect to this magical, digital world. The recent news of the [...]
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Eliana Zemmer – SBTF mapper, friend to many of us
Dear SBTF members, mappers to our great great sadness we discovered last night that Eliana Zemmer, a wonderful person and incredibly dedicated crisis mapper had died recently in hospital, after a sudden illness. She was only 39. Many of us have extremely fond memories of working on deployments with Eliana and a few of us [...]
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Thank You from Us!
Kofi A. Annan: International Volunteer Day, 05.12.2003: …At the heart of volunteerism are the ideals of service and solidarity and the belief that together we can make the world a better place. …But far away from the spotlight, there are millions of generous individuals who, around the clock and around the world, roll up their [...]
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How the UN Used Social Media in Response to Typhoon Pablo (Updated)
Cross-posted from iRevolution.net. Our mission as digital humanitarians was to deliver a detailed dataset of pictures and videos (posted on Twitter) which depict damage and flooding following the Typhoon. An overview of this digital response is available here. The task of our United Nations colleagues at the Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), was to rapidly [...]
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Summary: Digital Disaster Response to Philippine Typhoon
Cross-posted from iRevolution.net The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) on December 5th at 3pm Geneva time (9am New York). The activation request? To collect all relevant tweets about Typhoon Pablo posted on December 4th and 5th; identify pictures and videos of damage/flooding shared in [...]
SBTF presentation at Understanding Risk: conflict sensitive crowdsourcing
[Cross-posted from Helena's blog.] This week I spoke at the Understanding Risk conference in Cape Town on a panel that explored successes and difficulties in the application of crowdsourcing for development and disaster risk reduction, together with colleagues from Humanitarian Open Street Map, the Public Laboratory, Ushahidi, Idibon and the World Bank. I focused on the particular challenges of conflict sensitive crowdsourcing. [...]
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Lessons learned from USAID’s first crowdsourced project
[Guest post by Timo Luege - I’m passionate about information, communication and how they can be used to make the world a better place. My two main areas of expertise are: • Communication through digital media • Media relations during disasters Over the last thirteen years I have worked for the Red Cross Red Crescent [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged crowdsourcing, ESRI, GisCorps, SBTF, Standby Task Force, USAID 2 Comments
Mapsters Partner with Geofeedia to Improve Media Monitoring Efforts
Since 2010, the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) has demonstrated that digital volunteers can play an instrumental role in supporting humanitarian, human rights, development and media organizations. SBTF volunteers—or Mapsters we call ourselves—use purely manual methods to create the many live maps requested by activating organizations. This manual approach made sense since we were drafting [...]
Moving testimony on the damage that digital activism can wreak…on ourselves