For more details see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Cambridge

CrisisCamp is a movement of volunteers, many are technologists and IT professionals, that have come together in a number of cities around the world in support of relief efforts around the world. The initial CrisisCamps were in response to the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. Since then over 2000 volunteers in nearly 20 cities have come together to volunteer their time and skills.  Aptivate is continuing its support for CrisisCamps by hosting the next camp, on 14th August 2010, in our offices in Cambridge, supported by the Humanitarian Centre.  The focus of this camp will be to support the start up of a CrisisCamp in Pakistan in response to the recent floods.

For more details and to register for one of the limited, free tickets see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Cambridge

Video of lopad team at #crisiscampLDN

Note: lopad is still a work in progress. The #crisiscampLDN team have made good progress, there will be a first cut up in the next few days. Getting it to the optimised, low bandwidth tool it needs to be is a project for the next few weeks.

I’m in “the ball room” (the other one’s called “the tree room” in case you’re wondering where the heck we are) at #crisiscampLDN and I’m thoroughly impressed by the efforts of @nickstreet and @mrchrisadams from Headshift.

What are they doing? Something really cool – making the first release of lopad. Check out the intro on blip.tv from @leashless above.

What is lopad?

Aptivate makes a service called loband – it takes high-bandwidth webpages and makes them work quickly on slow connections.

There’s a demand (e.g. from staff at UNFAO and users in Rwanda) for a related service, tuned for low bandwidth environments, that lets users easily collaborate over a text file.

This is the first addition to the lo* (pronounced lo-star) family of products: lopad.

Think of it as a super-lightweight Google Docs with no registration, instant visibilty of other user’s changes and fast performane on all internet connections.

There’s already a product called Etherpad which has been open-sourced since Google bought the company (to absorb the team into Google Wave). They plan to discontinue the public service in a few months time. In response to this, there are already some other public instances of Etherpad (e.g. PiratePad) as well as many private ones, but the immediate goal of the lopad project is to:

• Create lopad.org – a free public instance of etherpad, promoted for use in the relief and development sectors but open to anyone
• Optimise lopad.org to perform well on low bandwidth and/or high latency connections

Some of the things we’re going to be doing along the way will be getting a production server up and running, getting a copy of etherpad on there, rebranding it to “lopad”, analysing the opportunities for improving the bandwidth performance of the system and then implementing them.

In true meta-style, there’s more info and developer notes online at: http://etherpad.com/crisiscampLDN

Some highlights from the above:

• Nick forked etherpad to make lopad on github
• Pingdom tools is a good way to see how bandwidth is being used.
• How to (potentially) rebrand etherpad to lopad.
• How to set up an Etherpad server on CentOS minimal (where we’ll be hosting it)
• Simulating low bandwidths, how to make sure your apps work in the field.

I also think this will be a valuable tool for use by people in the Crisis Camp effort.

So: friends, coders, countrymen, come and join in!

Crisis Camp London

We’re getting ready for the second Crisis Camp London day, this Saturday, at the London Knowledge Lab.

Considering how quickly last Saturday was put together we had a great turn out. We’re hoping for, and expecting, an even larger turn out this time.

We’re getting out all the laptops, network gear, and spare projectors we can find. We’ve got enough flip-charts to paper the Albert Hall. I even heard that Domino’s were considering sponsoring the pizza again – and with added vegan options too. Many thanks to them!

We’re on conference calls to the US Crisis Camps and projects. We’re part of a strong team looking after the organisation, infrastructure and facilitation of the London event.

It really is quite something the speed with which this is coming together and the level of interest and motivation. This looks set to become an important movement.

If you are technical (eg. an IT project manager, a coder, a user experience person) or have relief experience and want to help Crisis Camp London support Haiti, then please come along.

• find out more
• register

You can also help by printing out and displaying the Crisis Camp London Poster

#CrisisCampLDN

#crisiscampLDN team at work

On Saturday 23rd of January, Aptivate were out in force at Crisis Camp London which was kindly hosted by the London Knowledge Lab.

Björn had a chance to grab some footage on the day and put together a short video explaining what Crisis Camp is all about, what it’s like in London and what you might expect if you come along.

Crisis Camp London will be a regular event for the next few weeks, one which is going to grow in size and impact.

If you’d like to follow what’s going here are the links:

Ning: http://crisiscampldn.ning.com/

Twitter hashtag: #crisiscampldn
Twitter account: @crisiscampLDN

Crisis Camp London wiki: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Crisis_Camp_London

You can also click on the image above for a link you the video on YouTube.

The first “work day” will be Saturday 23rd January… that’s tomorrow.

10am at the London Knowledge Lab.

It’s going to be a cross between a BarCamp and a HackDay. The purpose is to allow volunteers to contribute to technical projects that will help the relief efforts in Haiti. In the first instance these projects will be largely IT related.

Aptivate are supporting Crisis Camp. They’ve let me (Alan) help organise and facilitate the event on work time (thanks guys!!!). And Martin, one of our great software engineers will be coming along tomorrow to get involved… and bring projectors, laptops and networking gear. He’s got a big rucksack and is strong. (But if anyone is coming down from Cambridge and wants to help him carry some equipment, please get in touch).

Aptivate have also bought a heap of stationery for the project teams – flip charts, pens, index cards – we’re showing our Agile roots. Low-bandwidth High-value facilitation tools.

If you’d like to follow what’s going here are the links:

Twitter “hashtag”: #crisiscampldn
Twitter account: @crisiscampLDN

Crisis Camp London wiki: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Crisis_Camp_London

And if you would like to come along and help out – which I hope you do – you can register here:

http://crisiscamphaiti-london.eventbrite.com/

Crisis Camp Haiti – London is one of the international Crisis Camps organized in support of Haiti.

The day is dedicated to working on Crisis Commons projects, hoping to make life easier for people on the ground by doing what we can do from here. Common tasks are programming, working on maps, and helping to gather information from around the web into usable forms.

Please come if you think you can help in any way, even simple things like helping peoplewho are not at the camp keep in touch with what is going on, or keeping the hackers fed-and-watered. There are plenty of tasks anybody can do.

We are actively looking for people to help resource and organize Crisis Camp London. There is a lot to do!

Please bring a laptop if you have one. 3G dongles/Mefi may be very useful as venue wifi often has problems with the large load. Pens, pencils, paper, anything you need to be productive.

This is a day at the office, saving the world.

London Knowledge Lab are hosting the event. Vinay Gupta (Hexayurt Shelter Project) (hexayurt+ccl@gmail.com, @leashless) will be lead on the day, with Barry Sage(@OBazaS) leading overall.