- CRCA researcher Tim Schwartz initiated a massive effort to help develop a set of tools & a website to assist with registering & tracking missing people affected by the devastating earthquake in Haiti.
Here is how Tim describes the activities of the last week:
I awoke wed to see disaster in Haiti. Got an email from a friend with links to donate, I thought immediately that there could be a better way to apply my skill set. (I'm an artist that uses technology heavily -> artinfo.com/news/story/33154/googling-ourselves/ and I am the CTO of www.famegame.com) I realized immediately that in our web2.0 environment with tons of social networking sites that missing people information was going to go everywhere on the internet, and it would be very hard to actually find people and get back to their loved ones if everything was scattered. So my initial goal was to create a unified database that would be the one repository for missing people data, and other online applications could connect to it. I quickly emailed all of the developers I had ever worked with:
"An idea:
A site that is up within 3 hours that has a quick and easy method to add and update a survivor in Haiti or a list of survivors.
A hub for information on individuals in Haiti.
A unified DB that can scrape and process other feeds on the internet.
Want to make it?
No governmental organization is going to get off their asses enough to help us out. People right now are trying to use CNN iReporter and Facebook to try and find information on individuals in Haiti. It's going to get messy fast. If we could make a simple website where someone could add a name and information on the person either asking for a status or from in Haiti adding the status of the person. OR perhaps twitter can be our friend and we just need to scrape their feeds and put it into some managed interface. How can we as developers help?"
Immediately 10 developers began workign with me to create http://www.haitianquake.com By the early afternoon of the first day we had a website up with a database that was taking in information on
missing ppl and survivors. By that night we had automated twitter updates on people and rss exports of our data. Most importantly we had written a scraper to bring all of the data from the ICRC's site into our database. (ICRC is affiliated with the red cross, but is a terrible system for family reunificiation in that, their site will not talk to anyone else's web application, which in our web2.0 state of things is rediculous, the site also doesn't have any way to post updates on anyone missing or survived, leaving the application mute.)
So that first night we had a database of 6000+ entries that had been entered by users and collected from other sites, and our site allowed people to post images and leave updates on people in the database. By the next afternoon I had coordinated efforts with the development community and google had just started to move on ideas about family reunification. We coordinated our efforts with them and by friday morning google had the begining of their application out with an embed-able widget to take in data. Early on it was clear to me that as long as google was 100% behind their product and understood the scale of what they were taking on it would be incredibly important to fold our project into theirs so that all other websites working on family reunification would do the same. This would be the only way to create ONE repository. So friday night we moved the first set of 6000 entries over to google, and last night I moved over 16,000 more entires. Google is now up to 30,000 records and growing. They have an API for other applications to talk to their database. This tool will be THE application for missing people for this disaster and all disasters in the future as well I believe this can take over as the core application for missing people in the united states and abroad.
What we need most of all right now is for all other projects out there to either fold into google or to use google's api to communicate with their data, so that we dont have silos of data all over the internet, we must be connected.
The code that everyone built in the first two days became the basis for the SMS volunteer system setup by Josh Nesbit and Brian Herbert. In the first 24 hours or so they recieved 700 SMS messages from Haiti that have been redirected to the right people on the ground. Here are a few of the successful ones from the SMS system, and stats about what they've accomplished:
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/761
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/584
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/606
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/642
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/580
A recent message sent out through the 4636 short code:
FYI sending another useful message to people 650 citizens:
[1/18/10 1:47:30 PM] Nicolas di Tada: Help available at Société Nationale de la Croix-Rouge haïtienne 1 rue du Muguet Route de Desprez 7, 6112 Port-au-Prince at Croix-Rouge you can phone relatives and register yourself or others as missing.
Breakdown of the kinds of calls:
28.06% Missing Persons
12.23% Water shortage
10.07% Food distribution
10.07% Asking to forward a message
9.35% Earthquake and aftershocks
5.04% Persons News
4.32% People trapped
3.60% Emergency
2.88% Health services
2.16% Medical Emergency
2.16% Died bodies management
2.16% Response
1.44% Looting
1.44% Shelter
5.04% Other
Some of the developers names: CRCA Researcher Tim Schwartz, Austin Smith, Garland Davis, Josh Marcus, Jeremey Johnstone, Noah Schoenholtz, Ryan Leary, Matthew Hockenberry, Guy Hoffman, Udi Pladott, Wendell III and CRCA Technical Director Todd Margolis.  - posted on: January 19, 2010
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- Friday, February 05, 2010
and the world is ours..
Please come join our CRCA researchers for:
and the world is ours,
Tim Schwartz and Robert Twomey
Opening Reception 2/11/10 • 6-9pm
Exhibit Runs 2/11/10 – 3/30/10
- more...
- Monday, January 25, 2010
Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing
The Eighth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing
JOIN US - REGISTER NOW!
https://www.regonline.com/c5_2010
Co-Chairs: Sheldon Brown, UCSD
Rick Mc Geer HP Labs
January 25-27, 2010, Calit2 - The California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology
La Jolla, CA, United States
- more...
- Monday, January 18, 2010
Taller de Experimentación Sonora
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 6:00pm
End Time:
Friday, January 29, 2010 at 8:00pm
Location:
PROTOLAB / Blvd. Agua Caliente # 10535 Edificio Gallegos Planta Baja.
- more...
- Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Crossing Boundaries design improvisations 2010
Tuesday January 12, 2010, 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Calit2 Theatre, Atkinson Hall
- more...
- Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Music under the influence of computers presents: Environment
Concert Anouncement:
Music under the influence of computers presents:
- ENVIRONMENT -
Wednesday, January 6th
12:00-1:00pm with discussion to follow
Black Box Theater Atkinson Hall, UCSD campus
free admission - more...
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 Micha Cardenas
Micha's website
Micha Cárdenas / dj lotu5 / Azdel Slade
is a transgender artist, theorist and trouble maker. She will be a
Lecturer in the Visual Arts department at UCSD in Fall and Winter of
2009. She is an Artist/Researcher in the Experimental Game Lab
at CRCA and the
b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2 . Her interests include the
interplay of technology, gender, sex and biopolitics. She blogs at
Transreal.org . Micha holds an MFA from the
University of California San Diego, an MA in Media and Communications
with distinction from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer
Science from Florida International University. Micha is a curator and
collective member of the Lui Velazquez space in Tijuana. She has
exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York,
San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain and many other places.
Micha has received grants from UCIRA, calit2 and Ars Virtua and her work
has been written about in publications including the LA Times, San Diego
Union Tribune and Rolling Stone Italy.
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