Thursday, February 24, 2011

Again, the great value of digital volunteerism

Many kudos to all the people who are giving their time, effort and passion.

Amplify’d from evolvingnewsroom.co.nz

How a three-day-old crowdsourcing site is helping Christchurch residents









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The Christchurch Recovery Map, eq.org.nz, is a great crowd-sourcing site helping people affected by the earthquake in Christchurch find out what’s open, what’s not, and get help with clean-up and getting businesses back up and running.


It’s interesting because it:



  • lets citizens help other citizens

  • is working with other services including Civil Defence, Google’s People Finder, TradeMe’s busy support page.

  • lets people connect with it by text 5627, email eqnzfeb@gmail.com, Twitter hashtag #eqnz and through the site itself

  • was only set up on Tuesday afternoon and is growing in reach and capability by the hour

  • is run entirely by volunteers from seven countries

  • is run on the Ushahidi platform

  • aggregates official news and media streams alongside reports from residents on the ground


It’s truly amazing how quickly all of these online resources have been set up since the earthquake hit on Tuesday Feb 22 and even more amazing how well they are working together – thanks to a bunch of hard-working individuals and a whole lot of emails.


More about that later. In the meantime, lots of people still don’t have phones or the internet in Christchurch so call your local radio station and tell your networks about eq.org.nz.

Read more at evolvingnewsroom.co.nz
 

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