[AgaricShowandTell] Agaric - Show and Tell - April 15th at 11am ET

[Micky Metts]

Agaric - Show and Tell - April 15th at 11am ET (link at bottom)

We have a very focused Show and Tell this time on a project that is
vital to many people struggling to eat, find shelter and stay safe and
alive.

Come see a demo of the CitizenCommandCenter's database tool, designed to
help "democratize" the sharing of supplies/services. Originally built to
serve "natural" disaster zones, it's now used for serve political
disasters such as poverty.

www.citizencommandcenter.org

The demo is part of a campaign to rebuild the app's back end and create
new front end apps to help the public use the data to help themselves.

In the meantime, here's a quick presentation about the tool:
http://www.reliefdatabase.org/uploads/CAT_Power_Point_Full_Version_No_Animation.ppt
The best part starts on slide 7!

Background:

After Hurricane Katrina when we were delivering badly needed supplies to
disaster response sites around the gulf, it was impossible for one
person or even a small team to keep up with the coordination. So we
built an online tool where anyone on the team could enter data, which
would help us coordinate/match needs/availabilities between trucks,
donors, volunteer gathering groups and the sites doing the work on the
ground.

Very quickly, we realized that, powerful people were diverting supplies
to "their people" and the best way to avoid this was to ensure that
people on the ground had the information about where everything was. So
we opened the tool up to the public.

As the life got back to "normal" in the gulf, we also realized how large
that gap was for "normal" supplies/services. And we decided to keep
entering data into the tool to help people find things/services. And we
expanded to the rest of the country and beyond, entering/sharing data
for response to earthquakes in Haiti, fires in California,
poverty...well everywhere.

The focus these days is entering mutual aid / solidarity oriented orgs,
and helping these orgs share resources.

But the tool is old and cumbersome, and few people enter data these
days. That said, even the old data is the best we have for more regions
of the country. A UN response manager once told us that we have the most
comprehensive list of orphanages in the world, even though we haven't
input much for Haiti for years. And we have a few committed volunteers
who enter and share data.

To expand the use, we need a couple of committed techs with Ruby on
Rails experience to help upgrade the backend app and make the data
accessible to developers. And developers who want to create front end
user search/find apps and data entry/rating apps...

Chat link: http://meet.jit.si/showandtell

Current Meeting notes: https://pad.drutopia.org/p/show-tell

Send your friends this link to sign up to get notifications to join us on Wednesdays: https://agaric.coop/show

In Solidarity, 

Micky Metts
Agaric ~ FreeScholar
https://agaric.coop - We are your Cooperative Tech Ally.
Join Agaric on IRC any time - irc.freenode.net in the #devs-r-us channel