Some Ideas from Just Concluded Kenyan Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK3)

These are some ideas from the just concluded RHoK3 Kenya.

OneCrisis will be a non-profit, non-governmental portal for those who want to assist in humanitarian emergencies. The RHOK OneCrisis task is to develop a website for those who want to help and those who need help.  Lay responders will enter in basic information about their location, skills, and general availability. They will also say whether they can be a local coordinator for OneCrisis.  They will be able to integrate this with existing social media platforms (e.g. facebook).  Management functions will also be needed, including the ability to get aggregated statistics on volunteers by location, skill category, availability, event and other variables.  Those who are affected can post specific problems by event which responders can then sign up for.  Overall, think of an ongoing RHOK type system.

Populations Center Query tool: Population query is a query that extracts a list of locations (town, county, district) from data set and shows their population counts and GPS coordinates and other key information that helps us assess the situation.

Drought Monitoring: Drought originates from a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time, resulting in a water shortage for some activity, group, or environmental sector. Whatever the definition, it is clear that drought cannot be viewed solely as a physical phenomenon. 

Mapping needs and responses to a crisis: Current technologies allow damage or incident reports to be mapped, providing a clearer picture of the overall situation.Since crisis response usually involves a multitude of stakeholders, COORDINATION of the response is very important to avoid duplication of efforts and ensuring that (ideally) all needs are met. Current technologies don’t seem to go beyond the mapping of reports however.I believe that it would be of great use to the stakeholders involved in the response to be able to also map the NEEDED responses (e.g. in terms of number of items and their specifications required, possibly linked to a group of received reports), as well as the ACTUAL responses (by donors making funds available or local businessmen contributing some of the needed materials or even diaspora clicking on a “donate” button to contribute to the response in their community). This combined information would allow us to clearly show the gaps.A public and open source platform seems the perfect solution for this but to date I have not been able to find a solution that brings these elements together.