Emergencyhacklab

Unleash your civic hacking spirit to build tools and solutions for emergency preparedness and response. This includes developing tools for the community and government to collaborate on rebuilding after the devastation of natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy so that small communities and cities start to think and act like - as well as build - the web.

There are a lot of tools out there for crisis response. Many need open versions, many need code contributions, and many simply don't work well. Some are amazing. A way to discover, propagate, contribute, and/or create tools and how-tos is needed.

Community Aid Badging

In crisis response, there is a distinct gap between exertion and understanding impact. The field is messy - the task a volunteer sets out to do is often not executed because it's already been taken care of, or people have moved, or something more pressing came up. What does matter is:

• The affected population is aided
• The volunteers know their efforts matter
• Organizations have some semblance of impact factor evaluation (hopefully for self reflection, sharing, and refinement of process)

To address this, we are building a way for communities/affected populations to award badges to individual volunteers.

Collaborate

We've created a collaboration space to document ongoing efforts at Mozfest 2013: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/emergencywebmaking

Build

Visual Design

Badge

Outputs

• report for community : who helped, what they were awarded
• report for organizations
• report for volunteers : what communities you helped with

Pamphlet with Info for Groups

• Group_ID for group
• Description of why it's useful to do this: "Want to indicate if this was useful to you? Want to thank the person who wanted to help you? Here's how!"
• Place to write in Individual_ID (s)

Splashpage for Project

Meta Data

Group_ID

Individual_ID

Timestamp

Any media sent in with MMS

Geotag

Assess

How many links exist for any Individual_ID?

• Threshold for badge
• Thresholds for additional badging

Issue

• Send badge to volunteer, notify them of badge.
• Send aggregate of efforts to each Individual_ID and Group_ID holder

Use

Get people to start using this. Community involvement in non-disaster times? Queue for readiness in Mozilla community already using badges for next disaster time. Get in front of aid organizations for use.

How To

Emergency Hacklab Bullshit Detector

Other Useful Projects to Consider

• Participatory Aid Marketplace
• Emergency Prep checklist App
• Digitalhumanitarians
• Closing the loop on using badges for emergencies
• Jessica Klein's blog post on building and protecting her community
• 5 reasons to attend the hack the rock learning lab
• Honoring open government and civic hacking champions change
• Virtual hackjam emergency hack lab
• Introducing pybossa the open source micro tasking platform

Case Studies and Research

Case studies and literature to learn and work on for this:

- The Critical Role of Telecentres and Libraries During Disasters in Chile

• The critical role of libraries and telecenters
• Public libraries as critical communication and information infrastructure

- Wireless and Open Tech Mesh Networks:

• Open Technology Institute Case Studies

- Flooding in Thailand and the role of tech centers and telecenters:

• Potential of Technology and Social-Media in Disaster Response In Thailand
• Emergency Response in Thailand During the 2012 Floods
• Disaster Tweets During Thai floods
• ITU Emergency Workshop
• ITU Emergency Workshop

- Fukashima Disaster in Japan

• Post Apocalyptic Citizenship and Humanitarian Hardware

- Disasters in the US and the role of libraries

• the lessons learned from hurricane sandy
• state library disaster resources

General: Lifehacker

• Lifehacker - what to do before, during and after a disaster

FEMA Case Studies Textbook

• Emergency and Risk Management Case Studies Textbook