CrisisCamp Pakistan Floods, 4 Sep, Sydney

The University of New South Wales is hosting "CrisisCamp: Pakistan Floods", at UNSW, Sydney, 4-5 September 2010. Volunteers are asked to help with computer coding and other online support to help with the Pakistan Floods. This event has a similar format to the Random Hacks of Kindness, which I helped with at UNSW in June. It is in addition to and complements the work my colleagues at Sahana Software Foundation are doing with the Sahana System for Pakistan Flood Response.

Event Details

CrisisCamp Pakistan Floods in Sydney

Help the Pakistan flood victims using your existing skills

The Pakistan Floods are without question one of the largest humanitarian catastrophe of modern time, with over 15 million people now homeless.

If you are interested in making a small difference in helping the humanitarian effort of attending to the short and long-term needs of the displaced peoples in Pakistan... The CrisisCamp will be on the weekend of 4th and 5th of September. We will be going through a number of tasks that will help the aid agencies on the ground. These include:

• Adding reports of emergency incidents from the ground to http://pakreport.org/ushahidi/ using http://pakreport.crowdflower.com
• Working with expatriate Pakistanis who can help you translate local terms and names of places for entry into the reports
• Reading reports from relief agencies, identifying information about hospitals, shelters and schools and adding the data about their locations, capacity and other relief-related information to Sahana and OpenStreetMap
• Tracing satellite imagery to add the location of roads and infrastructure
• If you are an expat Pakistani who speaks Pushto, Seraiki, Sindhi or Panjabi come along and help find the names of remote villages.
• Documenting lessons learned from the CrisisCamp to help others
• Writing tools and software help automate the above tasks

Why organise this CrisisCamp?

In late July 2010 after an unusually wet monsoon across South Asia, substantial areas of Pakistan were flooded, affecting nearly a third of the country. UNOCHA has described the Pakistan Floods as a disaster surpassing the Boxing day Tsunami, Pakistan Earthquake and Haiti Earthquake combined in terms of the number of people affected and the social and economic destruction caused. Pakistan was already suffering socially and economically from the effects of the conflict in the region. Without help, this disaster could have untold long-term consequences for the future of the most vulnerable in Pakistan.

Who is organizing this camp?

To assist in the relief efforts, an enterprising team of volunteers and organisational supporters such as Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) and Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at the University of New South Wales, and Drumbeat, an open web initiative of the Mozilla Foundation and the World Bank are coming together on the weekend of September 4-5, 2010 in CrisisCamp in Sydney, Australia. ...