Standby Task Force

Nearly 13,000 houses were crushed and more than 22,000 damaged on the eastern island of Samar, where Typhoon Hagupit made landfall on Saturday, December 6, 2014 (http://goo.gl/i1Da6C).

Monitoring of Typhoon Hagupit and preparing AIDR to collect tweets using defined hashtags began on Tuesday, December 2, 2014. The activation in response to Typhoon Hagupit began for us on Friday December 5th, 2014.

To assist the relief work on the ground, Standby Task Force and a number of other digital organizations have engaged volunteers to collect relevant information from social media and other sources. We have had incredible support from our volunteers [veterans and newbies] and our partner organizations. Here are a few links to visit to see some of the products we have produced to date.

Standby Task Force collaborated with Rappler and Project Argos during this deployment and our volunteers have been supporting their Alert Map. This collaboration has identified another critical response partner in the work we do. SBTF  would like to thank, Zak Yuson, and his team for all their support. SBTF looks forward to working with the Rappler team in future deployments. A media article covering this collaboration is available here.Project Agos was able to document at least 260 crowdsourced data (via alert maps) on evacuation centers, cyclone path, status of media outlets (radio and TV) and ongoing relief operations.

In the past three days nearly 400 messages have been manually sourced and geolocated from Twitter. Volunteers have identified actionable information from another 60 Facebook posts, that enabled us to point relief workers to 26 roadblocks in affected areas. This information ensures that populations needing critical emergency relief are able to be reached.

Over the years SBTF has been activated by UN-OCHA on a number of occasions. We are pleased to continue to support their efforts on the ground through our quality informatics and crisis communications work. Caroline Bannock, highlighted these efforts in her report on the Guardian Online published today. Thiscoverage can be found here.  The work of the different communities engaged in information harvest, categorization and geolocation during the last days are surely recognized.

Quote from the latest SitRep from UN OCHA:

“The Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) and the MicroMappers continue to provide real-time updates on the impact of the typhoon. The result can be viewed in these links: http://bit.ly/1AMM8KL andhttp://micromappers.org/. Hundreds of Standby Task Force Volunteers (SBTF) across the globe, as well as the Rappler team and the Project Agos volunteers in the Philippines, continue to crowdsource information via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.”

We continued testing AIDR and the MicroMappers platform, the results have been positive so far. There will be an update on their performance published on Patrick Meier’s Blog Irevolutionat a later date.

Thanks again to our incredibly dedicated network of global volunteers. We have had immense support from diverse communities including engagement with many in the Philippine Diaspora and individuals on the ground. We would especially like to thank MicroMappers, Qatar Computer Research Institute(QCRI) and also GISCorps for supporting us with extra volunteers.  It has been our pleasure hosting them.

Check out this great piece on some big things happening in the digital humanitarian community. Each response is an opportunity to identify our best practices, hone our tools and enhance our capacity. Standby Task Force is honored and excited to be at the forefront of these developments.

Originally posted on iRevolutions:

The MicroMappers platform has come a long way and still has a ways to go. Our vision for MicroMappers is simple: combine human computing (smart crowd-sourcing) with machine computing (artificial intelligence) to filter, fuse and mapa variety of different data types such as text, photo, video and satellite/aerial imagery. To do this, we have created a collection of “Clickers” for MicroMappers. Clickers are simply web-based crowdsourcing apps used to make sense of “Big Data”. The “Text Cicker” is used to filter tweets & SMS’s; “Photo Clicker” to filter photos; “Video Clicker” to filter videos and yes the Satellite & Aerial Clickers to filter both satellite and aerial imagery. These are the “Data Clickers”. We also have a collection of “Geo Clickers” that digital volunteers use to geo-tag tweets, photos and videos filtered by the “Data Clickers”. Note that these “Geo Clickers” automatically display the results of the crowdsourced geo-tagging on our Micro-Maps like the one below.

The Standby Task Force has been shortlisted for the United Kingdom Women in IT Awards 2015, an award that recognizes the outstanding innovation achieved by women in the IT industry. SBTF has been nominated under the category Advocate of the Year. The Advocate of the Year award is given to a technology company that has gone out of its way to support the cause of getting more women in IT in the last 18 months. Judges assess companies by examining the women led IT initiatives the candidates have pioneered as well as their impact on and integration with, the business.

Justine Mackinnon, has served the Standby Task Force since 2011 and has been President since December 2013 and has actively worked to ensure that women take an equal lead role in charting the way forward during this exciting time for our young organization. Under her leadership, the Standby Task Force has provided critical support to ongoing humanitarian crisis around the world; building on the collective organizational experience of 40+ deployments. Her central role in the early days of the international response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africaproviding information and communication coordination helped lay the foundation for a cooperative multilateral response effort under the Inter-Agency IM Working Group.

It is extremely exciting that Standby Task Force and Justine have been short-listed for this prestigious and premier award for women in the IT sector in the United Kingdom. This recognition comes on the heels of a successful deployment to supportUNOCHA humanitarian relief to communities in the Philippines affected by Typhoon Hagupit [Ruby]. There is always more work to be done toward improving the services we provide to individuals, first responders and our partner agencies. It speaks to the dedication of our volunteers and the entire membership network that we have received this recognition.

The Women in IT Awards 2015 will announce finalists on 29 January 2015 at a dinner award ceremony being held at the Grosvenor House on Park Lane in London. There are over 50 short listed individuals and organizations up for awards in 12 unique categories. We at SBTF are thrilled to be counted in that number and look forward to learning more about all of the dynamic initiatives, like ours, who have made it to this final round of selection. For a full list of short-listed candidates please visit this site. For more information on the individual awards, judges and event particulars please visit the official event site here..

The UN Dispatch is blog from the United Nations Foundation. Their posts inform readers worldwide of global initiatives, important topics and the latest news in the humanitarian field. Their latest post features the Standby Task Force!

This January 2015 issue, titled “10 Stories That Will Drive the Global Agenda in 2015” spotlights the effectiveness of crisismapping and the innovative technologies used to collect and organize data. Look at article number 10. Your efforts continue to be recognized and respected.