This presentation explains some of the success factors behind the Christchurch Recovery Map. The map provided information to tens of thousands of people affected by the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011.

1. Christchurch Recovery Map
Tim McNamara | @timClicks | paperless@timmcnamara.co.nz

2. Outline
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What happened?
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What did the site do?
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Who did it help?
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Why was it successful?
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Another way of phrasing this question:
There were about 120 websites built to help
people for the February Christchurch earthquake –
why are we the ones presenting at GOVIS?

3. Will touch on a few themes from
yesterday
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Emergencies
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Interoperability
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Using small businesses as a way to get risky
things done – Brian Calhoun
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“the Cloud” and how it failed

4. Who I am
● In chronological order
● CDEM volunteer, especially trained in Urban Search &
Rescue (USAR)
● 1st job at MCDEM looking at USAR &
response capability
● Spent a while with Territorial Force (7WNHB B Coy)
● Became interested in using technology for emergency
management
– Especially free & open source, because local governments don’t
spend money on CDEM
● Emergent leader of http://eq.org.nz, the
Christchurch Recovery Map

5. What is the
Christchurch Recovery Map?
Let’s ask Fair Go
(if you’re reading this presentation
on SlideShare, click on “Let’s ask Fair Go”)
The interesting thing is that they mention
eq.org.nz before official sites

6. How does it work?
(actually, it turned out to be more complicated than this when we added
checking for duplicates and removing stale content)

7. How did it help?
● We provided information to
● families in need
– Which pharmacies are open? Which petrol stations have petrol?
(70+ categories of information)
– Included non-CDEM information such as cafés
● responding agencies
– Wifi for Humanity, Student Volunteer Army, Comfort for Christchurch
● foreign nationals
– they don’t know where CDEM resources / nearest school is.
● families who were anxious
– many people are outside of Christchurch want to know what is happening
with their info, they want information that’s street specific

8. Why did it work?
(in my opinion)

9. Kiwifoo effect...
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You place a group of people together with the
following qualities and they will perform
amazingly well:
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trusted
●
trusting
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competent
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reliable
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Networked
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Thanks esp. to Don Christie, Vikram Kumar, Sam Minee, Nat Torkington
& Julian Carver – they added the credibility and pulled levers/favours.

10. …enabled most of this
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CrisisCommons International activates its Standby Volunteer Taskforce and an Ushahidi instance on crowdmap.com. Two other sites are established, including one by stuff.co.nz.
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Koordinates funds a full powered Amazon EC2 instance to replace the turn-key crowdmap.com instance suffering performance issues.
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All three telcos approve zero-rating of the SMS shortcode; agree to coordinate their social media efforts to support the project
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Catalyst IT fund a dozen of its staff to eliminate initial backlog, provides for SMS shortcode to be free
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Victoria University of Wellington provides space for volunteer training (the next day, my old rescue team NZ-RT7 is deployed to Christchurch)
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stuff.co.nz & nzherald.co.nz embed the map into their sites; stuff.co.nz agree to replace their own Ushahidi instance with ours
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Google amends Google Search to have the map as the first result for when searching for "christchurch"
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Google Zurich builds mobile site overnight “what do you want built by the time you wake up”?
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Optimal Usability agrees for its staff and venue to host weekend training of volunteers
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Trademe links to our site from its earthquake resources page
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Fair Go features http://eq.org.nz on its Christchurch Earthquake special
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Student Volunteer Army partnership formed; reports that site is heavily used by community groups for needs assessment
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The New Zealand Geospatial Office hosts a briefing for officials and media. Several government departments attend. Officials opt-in to be volunteers themselves.
The project appears on TV3 News.
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Department of Internal Affairs and other public sector bodies promote the site heavily via their Twitter feeds
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The map reaches 100,000 visits
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InternetNZ funds me to fly to Christchurch to make local connections and provide advice about how the organisation can help
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Custom printable maps from our data available, updated at 10m intervals

11. Social factors
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Social networks
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Recruitment
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Information
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Clout & Trust
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Kiwifoo effect
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Charity
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Staff, goods, time, energy, effort

12. External factors
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Pre-existing structures
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Code (Ushahidi)
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CrisisCommons
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Labour
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Massive goodwill / desire to help
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Risk-tolerant government
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Officials embraced the system
(direct support from DIA & LINZ)

13. Technical Factors
● Technical skills
(site rebuilt for users with a focus on their suburb)
● User experience
● Design
● System administration
● Code
● Infrastructure
● Established norms of open source community
– Github, IRC, hackfests
● Skype for community/international discussions
● Donated server capacity

14. Project Management Factors
● Lots of great support
● Tremendous stand-out performers looking after volunteers
● High barrier to entry
● Self-motivated people pushed through confusion
● Lots of things to do
● Easy to harness people’s energy & time
● Vendor-neutral space
● Enabled competitors to cooperate
● Liberal licencing

15. Where to from here?
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In every emergency, loads of people offer to
help. They generally clog logistics, pose
security risks and risk getting hurt because
they’re untrained and poorly equipped.
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Let’s get them into the business of crowd-
sourced information gathering
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http://bit.ly/digital-volunteers

16. Thanks!

17. Further Reading
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“Christchurch Recovery Map”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_Recovery_Map
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“eq.org.nz – The Power of Ushahidi”
http://www.nzcs.org.nz/newsletter/article/94