Heather Blanchard's presentation at Tech@State 2011 given on February 22, 2011. For more information on the event please visit http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Tech_@_State_2011

1. What We Learned From
CrisisCamp Haiti
February 11, 2011
Presented by
Heather Blanchard
Co Founder
CrisisCamp & CrisisCommons
at
Tech@ State
Washington DC

2. CrisisCamp Haiti Columbia
• Call to action; global footprint
• Low barrier to entry; replicable
• Recognized by CROs and VTCs
• 62 events, 8 countries, 30 cities United Kingdom
• 2,300+ highly skilled volunteers
• Focus on mapping, missing
persons, language and search Canada
France

3. What We Learned
• Disasters can create opportunities for innovation, rules
relax, people are willing to be open to solutions from
anywhere
• Disasters create the rise of the “crisis crowd”
• Disasters can benefit from existing programs with
training and leadership have the best change in effectively
harness the emerging crisis crowd into their existing
community
• Disaster response requests need to originate from the
local area/field

4. What We Learned
• Disasters are not the time to deploy new technology or
develop new policies of engagement with stakeholders
• Disasters bring a cloud of economic interest and competition,
even within the open source community
• Disasters require pre-existing relationships and a “game plan”
for engagement. Predetermined mission assignments are
necessary to connect technology volunteerism to official
response processes

5. What We Learned
• Disasters have little if any Technology After Action Reporting, thus
limited best practice sharing, standards development and lessons
learned curation (especially regarding society’s use of tech and tech
volunteers)
• Incident management protocols lack policy to effectively coordinate
with the rise and growth of technology volunteer communities
• Development which occurs in disasters are prototypes at best and
require iteration to meet basic safety, security and special needs
accommodations standards (and a community of developers
committed to the project)
• Tools for disasters need to be used everyday. Disaster-only tools,
especially on the fly development, are harder to implement.

6. Opportunities
• Community-based technology after action reporting, shared lessons learned
and best practices curation
• Community-based technical and policy standards development
• Incorporation of volunteer technology communities within domestic and
international crisis management systems - with a focus on harnessing the
crisis crowd for initial surge capacity efforts
• Provide sustainable risk-free environments (physical and virtual) for
innovation and crisis-tech R&D which promotes multi-disciplinary
collaboration before the disaster which solve everyday problems (and can be
used for crisis)
• Community-based curation of open source code to allow prototypes
developed to be shared across communities