Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.
The CrisisCongress took place last week in Washington, DC. The event, a convening of more than 80 tech-savvy leaders from five countries, aimed to create social media-based solutions to help communities facing disasters like the recent Haiti and Chile earthquakes. Solutions have ranged from CrisisCamps to wikis, and are comprised of veterans from the non-profit aid group CrisisCommons.
The Congress, gathered in its own camp format, looked for better ways to provide aid to both governments and citizens faced with crisis. Moderated by Allen Gunn, a veteran of more than 1,000 camps, the Congress discussed a wide variety of topics, including what worked in the past, possible legal structures, mission statements, and how to better embrace international cultures. Here’s a look at the roots and future of CrisisCommons through it’s very first Congress.
Why CrisisCommons Works
CrisisCommons has inspired a huge swath of people from various global communities to come together to help. Whether it’s a hardcore coder building the Oil Reporter mobile app, a member of the Ushahidi team, or a social media communicator, people with different skill sets connect and work without any personal agenda to achieve solutions that make a difference.
“First, we need to recognize that disasters have a way of bringing people together with a desire to help, whether it’s the Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami,” said Andy Carvin, senior strategist at NPR and a CrisisCamp co-organizer. According to Carvin, it helps that the structure of CrisisCommons makes it familiar to the tech community. “Grassroots events like Barcamp and Podcamp have become very popular in the tech community, so when we announced our intention to have our first post-Haiti CrisisCamp, the concept made sense to many of the very people we hoped would participate.”
Within a year, CrisisCommons launched and built a dedicated community spanning 10 countries. Almost all of the original networking began online via social media tools, migrated to CrisisCamps, and eventually the Congress itself. According to Gael Musquet, charge d etudes, Departement Amenagement du Territoire in France, the reason the Camps were able to enjoy so much far-reaching success so quickly was that they were structured in a way where everyone could emulate everyone else, and learn from each other’s successes. “It is based on the power of the Internet to show what we are doing, and how we are doing that,” he said. “That helps people to reproduce the methods of groups who have succeeded, and realize the same things in different cultures with the different languages. For me, things like wikis and Twitter represent the power of the Internet.”
While social media has been instrumental in the success of organizing the camps, social media also plays to the speed necessary to create and deploy applications to the field during a disaster. “Crises and emergencies are incredibly precarious situations,” said Sloane Berrent, author of the Causemopolitan blog. “In New Orleans, we created a CrisisCamp in less than a week. In order to do that, we needed the community to come together. In today’s environment, that community includes online. Social media played a natural role in the recruitment and retainment of volunteers.”
Defining its Mission
The Congress was designed to maximize CrisisCommons’ ability to assist in the event of future disasters or humanitarian issues. Creating applications and tools for unique crises requires more than just getting a room of willing coders and communicators together. It requires government and NGO support, as well. One of the major goals of the Congress was to help the organization better prepare in advance of the next disaster or humanitarian crisis, rather than simple scrambling to react when disaster hits.
“[CrisisCongress] is our first step: Being in a room together talking about what happened and what’s next,” said Heather Leson, CrisisCommons founder, Canada. “[We're] Creating non-crisis events in advance by region, and locally to be ready for the next one. I am choked up by the fact that we are planning preparedness in our regions/countries for the next disaster or crisis. We are building our communities based on experiences from hosting CrisisCamp Chile and Haiti.”
CrisisCommons is also looking to learn from past mistakes and experiences. “In many ways we’re preparing for the next Haiti simply by learning how to organize these events and hosting them again and again,” said Carvin. “Meanwhile, some of our projects have disaster preparedness in mind as well as disaster response. For example, our CrisisWiki.org project is designed so that anyone can add disaster-related resources to the wiki at any time … Then, if there’s a disaster nearby, it’s easy to pull together the resources, because many of them have already been curated there.”
However, the future holds some challenges for CrisisCommons. The hardest part is moving from survival to sustainability, said Berrent: “CrisisCommons will have to look beyond the next crisis and into their own three to five year future. [The] structure around building community chapters, working with international governments, and creating sustainable revenue models are serious endeavors…”
Musquet said that the biggest challenge was still to support younger countries unprepared for major disasters. With a growing organization committed to doing good, the challenge is one of bureaucracy and of scalability. “How do we keep our early starters and manage these diverse voices?” Leson asked. “Diversity in voices is important. I am excited for the journey.”
More Social Good Resources from Mashable:
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- HOW TO: Turn Slacktivists into Activists with Social Media
[img credit: @tdavidson]
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