Last February I organized a CrisisCamp in Calgary, which took place in coordination with several other cities.  The focus was on developing apps that could be utilized real time during the Haiti earthquake crisis.

Recently I read through the writeup from iHUB Nairobi's RHOK (Random Hacks of Kindness) camp and it was kind of cool to see them also picking up on projects we had worked on such as the We have/We need project and the Haiti AMPs Network.

On July 15th I flew into Washington DC to be a part of the first CrisisCongress.  All city leads (the organizers of each CrisisCamp) gathered to provide insights about our experiences and to discuss the way forward for the organization.

To be with a group of people who totally get Open Source and the benefits of open code or data was fantastic! It allowed for us to skip the rhetoric and move to true organizational change.

Several open source projects had representatives at the Congress, as we had engaged with them during Haiti & Chile.

Sahana is a web-based disaster management application that provides management solutions, focusing on large-scale humanitarian disasters. It enables enhanced coordination by promoting integrated information gathering. It assists collaboration by providing a number of communication mechanisms in the aftermath of a disasters. Sahana is built from free and open source software and released under OSI licenses http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org

Ushahidi allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. http://www.ushahidi.com/

OpenStreetMap (OSM) creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page 

Haiti Project   http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti

OSU Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the Drupal content management system and over 50 other leading open source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally.  http://osuosl.org

There were many other individuals who came to contribute to our sessions such as representatives from the American & Canadian Red Cross for example.

We had an opportunity to visit FEMA and gain insight into the organization and how they interact with state or municipal levels of government and responders.  During our overview session, Director Craig Fugate @CraigatFEMA spent some one on one time with us, and he really gets open source.  He recognizes the need to change the viewpoint of emergency organizations in that the true first responders are those who are survivors (note..not victims) and on the ground at that moment.  Governmental organizations in the future need to embrace the public and ideas such as crowdsourcing.  

At the end of our CrisisCongress I felt we had formed a "Fellowship of the Rings" and I do want to re-engage with the community.  We discussed the concept of holding ongoing barcamps to keep our volunteers engaged.  Of course there will be some who will only respond during the surge times (such as Haiti & Chile)

It was also great to meet everyone after talking on conference calls, skype, IRC etc.  A particular shout out to the international CrisisCommons members who joined us from Australia, New Zealand, France, England, Argentina, Chile and Colombia.  We are truly global and I look forward to engaging the open source community in Africa to become a part of CrisisCommons.

Thanks to the key organizers and funders of our CrisisCongress who made it possible for all of us to come together and bring this great community to the next level

Canadian CrisisCamp reps from Toronto, Montreal & Calgary