Repost from CrisisCommons: CrisisCamp Sydney update of day 1

Earlier today, ABC Radio News interviewed some of us about CrisisCamp. Our friend George caught part of the interview while in his car using his iphone4, sent it to us, and ended up on the crisis commons blog. Gotta love the speed of the internet.
http://crisiscommons.org/blog/2010/09/03/crisiscamp-sydney-on-abc/

Reposting from http://crisiscommons.org/blog/2010/09/04/crisiscamp-sydney-update-of-day-1/

In just a little over two weeks of planning and organizing for a weekend of geocoding and crowdsourcing, CrisisCamp Sydney organizers kicked off a rainy Saturday morning with 15 volunteers ready to do what they can to help with the reconstruction efforts in the unprecedented Pakistan floods crisis. Partner organizations that made this event happen include: Humanitarian Open Street Maps, Mozilla Drumbeat, Crisis Commons, the University of New South Wales’ Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) the Students in Free Enterprise UNSW (SIFEUNSW) and the World Bank.

The initial plan for the weekend was simply to ask volunteers —developers, IT professionals, university students, community activists and do-gooders to help with drawing a detailed map of the flood water boundary, iron out mapping glitches and creating SOP for map making. Then, after a brief orientation and instruction on geocoding, we needed volunteers to geocode incidents from the ground. Within the first hour of the opening day, volunteers were getting their hands wet on how to geocode. Within a few hours and a few GIS experts and software developers among us, we added crowdsourcing aside from the geocoding that was being done.
As the volunteers work a video of a tutorial for mapping villages has been uploaded to Youtube.

We are expecting to work throughout the day. In the meantime, we appreciate the support and help that the Crisiscommons’ teams in Toronto and Bangkok have provided so far. In a few hours, London will be up and we hope to be able to share our work with them and get on a collaborative mode in ways that we never could have imagined without the internet.