Disaster Relief Podcasts
When natural and man-made disasters strike a region, amidst the chaos and pain are tremendous opportunities for social enterprise, philanthropy, and corporate citizenship in administering disaster relief. Storms, earthquakes, wars –– the difficult events can bring out the best in the human spirit. In these Social Innovation Conversations educational podcasts, find out how management principles have been combined with basic human altruism to address some of the worst disasters of our time, such as Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, and the Afghani war. Most important, learn how experts are working to prevent disasters, or mitigate their impact when they happen.
In the face of Hurricane Irene, New York City's website was overwhelmed by residents checking evacuation plans and searching for updates. Fortunately, the data on flood zones were available from other sources on the web. Rachel Sterne heads the City of New York's digital efforts. From providing WiFi in parks and libraries, supporting digital training for the underprivileged, running app competitions, making interagency connections, to setting up FAQs on Facebook and running Twitter hashtags, New York City government is connected.
Dr. Moira Gunn learns about the movement to vaccinate the children of the World against pneumonia and meningitis from the Director of the Johns-Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center, Orin Levine.
Rotating, rolling, turning, moving forward and moving backward are all impressive gates for modular snake robots, but Per Sjoborg says the striking side-winding motion can only be described as beautiful. These complex patterns of locomotion emerge from simple fluctuations in oscillation. Beyond aesthetics and practical applications, one of the most striking features of Juan Gonzalez Gomez's work is his commitment to the free and open-source development model. He believes that the modular robotic community will emerge to solve problems together.
With memories of the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami fresh in our minds, we hear Lisa Katayama deftly present her prediction that the 2011 earthquake will trigger a wave of innovation and reinvention. Katayama explores how the island of Japan and concerned people around the world used the Internet to cope and communicate in the aftermath. Pointing to signs of reinvention that are already noticeable, Lisa proudly declares Japan's willpower to overcome this crisis.
After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever. Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing an unprecedented rapid response that saved lives. Many lessons, technical and operational, are shared on how to build and sustain momentum for rapid, meaningful data sharing that can dramatically impact relief efforts.
Consumer mapping on the web and traditional back-office geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming less distinct. Both are more accessible, standards-based, and flexible. Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, speaks about the creation of a publicly accessible GIS mapping system, ArcGIS.com, a web platform that works with maps from various authoritative sources and provides the public with useful tools to add and use their own crowdsourced, volunteered geographic information (VGI).
Incident responders can use social media as they rush to put aid in place after disasters. Jeannie Stamberger, of the Disaster Management Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, shares her studies of crowd-sourcing. When disasters impact populated areas, social media helps agencies quickly identify the extent of the damage. This audio interview covers utilization of social media for disaster response, planning and risk analysis.
When disaster strikes somewhere in the world, what kind of leadership, nonprofit management, and supply chain expertise are needed? In this university podcast, Stanford professor of surgery, Paul Auerbach, shares lessons learned from the Stanford Emergency Medicine rapid response team's deployment in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake. His experiences provide a glimpse in to how relevant groups may prepare themselves to better assist in future global catastrophes.
Twitter's new Director of Geolocation shows how automatically geo-tagging tweets creates self-generating groups that act in the real-world. Twitter geotaggers help responders with fires in Southern California, earthquakes in China, and elections in Iran. At the where2.0 conference in San Jose, Othman Laraki offers Twitter API developers 'frictionless' ways to express and consume this new class of geodata.
Don't just think about the cloud. Think about where it is taking us. Online collaboration is the first wave of a movement transforming how people network. A healthy commons is the real value of open source, making collaboration easier. This collaboration has assisted response to several recent calamities around the world. Tim O'Reilly believes we will need the communication open source allows in order to overcome a wide array of future challenges.
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