While most of my colleagues were focused on project inception discussions with our partners, I had more time to spend on other activities at the workshop on “Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in Iraq and the Middle East.” Social impact is a very new area for me. Here are some awesome organizations and projects that I’d never heard of before the workshop.
Ushahidi’s tagline says it well: “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information.” It’s a php app that aggregates real-time reports on localized crises submitted via SMS, web, and email and maps them. They’re working on a hosted model that will make it even easier for anyone to set up an instance. (I learned of them via being squeezed up against Brian Herbert in a cab from the airport.)
Cartagen (pronounced “cardigan”) does interactive, style-sheet-able maps rendered with the HTML 5 canvas tag instead of tile images. (Note: works best in Safari and Chrome.) Cartagen is interestingly applied in Newsflow, which shows which parts of the world are reporting news about which other parts of the world. Those were created by Jeffrey Warren, who also does amazing grassroots mapping with balloons.
“Virtual Gaza is a website where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words.” It provides an amazing look at a topic that’s shamefully under-reported in the United States.
Comm.unity is a research project that does peer-to-peer networking on mobile devices. The video at the project page tells a story about very smart but basically standard social networking, but there are also interesting “data mule” applications of the same technology for sharing data in places where mobile infrastructure is either unavailable or untrusted (for example because of a hostile government).
My only exposure to this space before drinking from the fire hose at the conference was our RapidSMScode jam at the recent ThoughtWorks US Away Day. It was incredible seeing just how much is going on here.
Amazing Social Change Projects
While most of my colleagues were focused on project inception discussions with our partners, I had more time to spend on other activities at the workshop on “Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in Iraq and the Middle East.” Social impact is a very new area for me. Here are some awesome organizations and projects that I’d never heard of before the workshop.
My only exposure to this space before drinking from the fire hose at the conference was our RapidSMS code jam at the recent ThoughtWorks US Away Day. It was incredible seeing just how much is going on here.
This list is just a tiny bit of what people at the conference are working on. You can learn more about these and a host of other awesome projects and people at the conference wiki—particularly take a look at the videos of Ignite Talks—or browse a whole bunch of related social media from the netvibes page.
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