FortiusOne at International Conference on Crisis Mapping 2010

This week is the second annual International Conference on Crisis Mapping. It is a conference to bring together various practitioners in utilizing mapping and location with regards to crisis response. The event starts Thursday with workshops in OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, Sahana and Frontline SMS. Friday is Ignite Talks, the Keynote and the Tech Fair.

Ignite talks are five minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Each slide lasts 15 seconds and they keep going. They are a great way to get an overview of different projects, because of the brevity of the format one is forced to be straight and to the point. The keynote is by Kurt Jean-Charlies from Solutions, Solutions built Noula which as the platform that Ushahidi Haiti handed off to a couple months ago. It is built for Haitians by Haitians and meant to be used long-term in Haiti as an SMS alerting and reporting platform. FortiusOne is participating in the Tech Fair. We’ll be demonstrating the work we’ve done with crisis events in the past year as well as some of the information sharing technology we’ve developed to help with collaboration in on going crisis events. With our simplified APIs released this week it is going to be even easier to continue collaborating with others quickly when the need occurs.

Saturday and Sunday is the annual meeting of CrisisMappers. Most of the year CrisisMappers is mainly a Google Group where people coordinate information sharing and techniques. The annual meeting serves to bring those that collaborate remotely all year together to discuss issues and advances in crisis response. There are roundtable discussions schedules as well as self organized sessions these days. I hope to discuss improving information sharing further. So often sharing continues to be sneakernet of information on the ground. I’m interested in techniques to improve this so that sharing is seamless and not a burden to responders.

If you are interested in talking about creating systems around collaboration both online and offline find me and we’ll chat.