Hi all I've just received this email, but I will be overseas when it happens. Anyone else interested in helping out? If so, please contact Vicky on email address below. Thanks.
____
Your name was given to me by Allen Gunn of Aspiration but who is also wit Drumbeat, Mozilla Foundation's open web initiative. I had asked him for groups or names of the developers and techies here in Sydney to elicit their participation in organising a Drumbeat Sydney event.
We are in the process of organising a CrisisCamp for Pakistan with a tentative date of 4-5 of September. Over the 2 days of the CrisisCamp we expect to have a range of tasks from creating maps of flood damage using OpenStreetMap tools, building task schedulers for relief organisations, mobile mapping applications to blogging about the event. The Camp is being run due to the explicit requirements for more detailed maps from the relief organisations in Pakistan such as UNOCHA. You can see how similar work was accomplished for Haiti back in January here:
www.slideshare.net/sabman/haiti-quake-public-key see this email about the request from UNOCHA
groups.google.com/group/crisismappers/br...ead/f6ce7a21c19fd938
I understand you guys have a very large community in Sydney that are interested in open source initiatives. The aim of the CrisisCamp is to provide as much support as is possible to the relief agencies in Pakistan using open source tools and data. I would be interested in gauging if the Joomla community would be interested in getting involved.
We are currently looking for a venue and may be at the verge of getting one at UNSW if the internet access is sorted out. If that falls through we would be looking for an appropriate venue to host the event. Some place where we can have 20-30 people, projector and whiteboard and space to allow brainstorming such as whiteboards.
There will be lots of things to do before this and on the days of the event. So far, we've gotten support from the World Bank, which is interested in organizing parallel events in other cities of the world to help the Sydney group. They had earlier sponsored a hackathon here through the Random Hacks of Kindness group and co-sponsored with NASA and Google. This is of particular interest to them specifically as post-disaster reconstruction efforts begin.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards.
Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
