Crisiscamp Ireland 2 debrief

The second Irish Crisiscamp took place last Saturday, September 29th in the 091Labs building in Galway. The choice of venue proved to be a good one as it attracted the right kind of people. Someone with an interest in taking technology “apart” and applying it in a different way. And most of all people who liked to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in.

 

The morning started slowly while most people tried to wake up their grey matter by dousing it in caffeine. The Welcome word was given by myself (Evert Bopp) and I explained a bit about the concept & purpose of Crisiscamps, how my work with Haiti Connect (and more recently Disaster tech Lab) has made me aware of the whole Crisiscommons community and some of the projects in which I was currently involved. This was followed by our very special guest Willow Brugh. Willow spoke about the various events & hacker-groups she’s involved with and some of the spin-of projects.It was great to have someone who could tell us about so many relevant events and projects taking place across the globe. A copy of her presentation can be found here.

Next up was Sal McDonagh. Sal had already spoken at the first Crisiscamp Ireland about his “OPen Telecoms” idea. The idea has since progressed and Sal gave us some insight into this process. The value of having the right audience was proven in the very indepth and technical Q&A session that followed his talk.

The last speaker of the morning was Sara-Jayne Farmer video Skype/video link from London. Sara-Jayne has stood at the cradle of the Crisiscommons movement, is heavily involved with the Crisismapping community, volunteered for Humanity Road, worked as the Chief Platform Architect for the UN’s Global Pulse program and much, much more. She spoke about all these different movements, their aims and projects but also very much was able to give an insight on how this is a global community where everyone knows each other and where cooperation between different groups and communities is not only stimulated but also encouraged.

<insert lunch>

After lunch it was ti to come up with some ideas and see who wanted to get stuck into developing them. Willow set up a video-chat with the people from Taarifa who were in the UK working on their project. They needed some help with coding a speech to text solution for their mapping & data project so a few people at Crisiscamp got stuck into that. Filip & myself got hands on with working out the project specifications for our Disaster Response Volunteer check-in database project.  The next few hours were spent knee-deep in coding, hackpads, IRC and other tools.

Around 5 pm the day was closed of with a evaluation of what had been achieved and an outline of future planning. It was agreed that there will be a monthly Crisiscamp get together at 091Labs to spend a few hours going over and working on current projects and that there will be a full day event every quarter. (exact dates to be announced).

Notes:

• The Crisiscamp Ireland mailing list can be found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/crisiscamp-ireland
• A forum/wiki will be added to the Crisiscamp Ireland website soon.
• The hackpad notes can be found here: https://hackpad.com/nAtlnNzLz8Y#CrisisCamp-Ireland