Crisis Commons Camp for Haiti organized in Toronto - Sat Jan 30, 9-5pm U of T, Sid Smith Rm 2110

Please have a quick read of the information regarding an volunteer opportunity to support the response efforts in Haiti, consider helping out if you can and please send this information on to others that may be interested. I am affiliated with a volunteer group that develops free open source software for disaster management called Sahana http://www.sahana.lk/node/12 . It is used by NGO's and governments such as Sri Lanka (Tsunami) and China (earthquake), also now Haiti.

We are working with a group called the Crisis Commons www.crisiscommons.org, in Toronto we have organized our first "Crisis Camp" at University of Toronto this Sunday, January 24th and will repeat with a larger Crisis Camp on Saturday January 30th. Crisis Commons has organized these Crisis Camp hack-fests all over the world.

A Crisis Camp brings people interested in technology, communications, social media, GIS mapping, and emergency management together to write applications and process data to directly support the needs of relief agencies working in Haiti.

Here is a link to the Toronto Crisis Camp. http://left-button.com/crisiscampto/

And the sign up page here http://crisiscamptoronto.eventbrite.com/, please fill it out if you plan to attend so we know what numbers to expect.

Some successes we have had already include a text messaging system for people in Haiti to send requests for resources and rescue and a people registry partnership with Google.

So far over 36,000 people have been registered on a missing persons/reunification registry and there have been thousands of twitter requests for help compiled.

This information is aggregated and given back to the aid agencies to be acted upon.

Some of our partners and clients include The World Bank, United Nations, National Public Radio (NPR), and Google.