May Day, May Day: Lessons Learned from CrisisCamp

It's time for another installment of NetSquared DC's Third Tuesday events. In May, we're featuring Lessons Learned from CrisisCamp. CrisisCamp began as an idea for an event to bring together people who were interested in leveraging technology and telecommunications systems to assist communities in times of crisis. In June 2009 the first CrisisCamp was held here in Washington DC to explore opportunities to enhance the capabilities of citizens, communities and crisis response organizations capability and capacity to response to, recover from, mitigate against and prepare for crises. When Haiti was struck with a devastating earthquake in January 2010, dozens of camps, beginning with the weekend following the earthquake, supported response efforts for the Haiti and Chilean earthquakes. Since then, the community has rallied and provided support and attracted new volunteers to support response efforts to assist Pakistan, Nashville and Thailand floods and the Gulf Coast Oil Spill.

Crisis Commons builds upon and supports CrisisCamp to advance the inclusion of lessons learned (from volunteer technology communities), dialogue and exercises, collaborative prototypes and toolsets, best practices, data and technical standards development to build a participatory and innovation culture supporting crisis management and global development. Heather Blanchard, Director of Crisis Commons, Dr. Veena Kumar, a physician and CrisisCamp participant, and others involved in CrisisCamp will talk about what has been learned over the last two years in quickly responding to crises, managing large groups of tech and non-tech volunteers, collaborating internationally with relief efforts, and using existing and developing open source technology effectively.

NetSquared DC is a vibrant local community thriving at the intersection of social change and technology. We’re part of a global NetSquared movement that focuses on the exponential impact we can have when we combine our hunger for change with powerful new technologies.

We’re proud to be one of the largest and longest-running NetSquared groups around, and thank our amazing members who come out in force each month to share what they’ve learned and get to know each other better.

You can make sure you’re the first to hear about upcoming events by joining our Meetup. We usually meet at 7pm on the third Tuesday of each month at the Affinity Lab on U Street NW, DC’s greatest entrepreneurial launch space.

A full archive of our past events is available here on our Meetup page at https://www.meetup.com/net2dc .