[hackerspaces] Hacking for Haiti

[Hank The Curmudgeon]

>>>Take special note of the last paragraph.<<<

Source: http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/disaster-sociologist/Hacking-for-Haiti.html?elq=109ed3ab4acd4c92a4b41787fca3a319

Disaster Sociologist

by Jeannette Sutton: Social media news and views for disaster response

Hacking for Haiti
January 16, 2010

Today techies across the U.S. and in the U.K. are joined together in a
collaborative effort to develop tools and technologies that will be of
use to responders and victims of the Haiti earthquake disaster.
Volunteers with tech skills ranging from programming, natural language
processing, and mapping (among just a few) are working on various
projects that have the potential to connect people to vital
information resources and speed rescue and recovery efforts.

Teams are gathered in London, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, Denver,
Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.

Representing the "non-techie side," I'm observing the bustling
activities of the two teams working here in Denver. One group is
collaborating on a project called "Tweak the Tweets," a project
identified during the Random Hacks of Kindness and driven by
researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder . A second is
considering tasks of translating tags being used to filter information
on flickr, delicious, and blogs in English into French Creole. A host
of projects are being developed in the other five sites.

You can follow the activities of the Crisis Camps on Twitter
@crisiscamp, or by observing twitter hashtags #cchaiti, #ccla, and
#ccden.

This emergent network of disaster hackers comes on the heels of
several crisiscamps launched in the past year. Led from within, no
organization is leading and yet this self-organized group of creative
and concerned global citizens is reaching out to assist in a
humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is yet another example of
an emergent group that has identified a set of unmet needs and
altruistically gather together to address them using their various
skill-sets.