TSSG attends Irish Crisiscamp Ireland Event
Mark Roddy, a researcher at the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) attended the first Irish Crisiscamp Ireland event, which was organised by CrisisCommons and took place in NUI Galway on the 26th February.
The full day event was attended by both private and public organisations including technology departments, the Civil Defence, Cisco, GIS/database experts and app-developers. The event included several presentations on using technology in disaster situations as well as a discussion on a variety of technological solutions that could be used in disaster and/or emergency situations.
CrisisCommons is a global community of volunteers from technology, crisis response organizations, government agencies, and citizens that are working together to build and use technology tools to help respond to disasters and improve resilience and response before a crisis. They seek to advance and support the use of open data and volunteer technology communities to catalyze innovation in crisis management and global development. CrisisCommons has coordinated crisis event responses such at the Haiti, Chile and Japan Earthquakes and the floods in Thailand, Nashville and Pakistan. Over 3,000 people have participated worldwide in over 30 cities across 10 countries.
This event was very relevant to the on-going SOCIETIES project being carried out at TSSG which is researching and investigating how a CSS can support communities with intelligent, adaptive and collaborative features while providing mechanisms for managing multiple communities including community hierarchies and networks of communities. SOCIETIES hopes to identify the functionality necessary to support collaborative communities and support the dynamic creation and membership of a community from users’ CSSs (including their services, devices and resources). The development of the CSS concept provides an ideal basis for the deployment of autonomous context aware self-evolving communities to support collaboration in a variety of fields including that of disaster and emergency situations.
CrisisCommons actively supports CrisisCamp, a barcamp event set up in 2009, which seeks to connect a global network of volunteers who use creative problem solving and open technologies to help people and communities in times and places of crisis.
Mark Roddy, who attended the event from SOCIETIES, said that the event was very informative, “In the FP7 Societies project, TSSG are investigating how pervasive and social computing technologies can be used to leverage cognitive surplus techniques in disaster management scenarios, so it was very encouraging to see some of these techniques in action in the real world.” he said.
For more information:
Visit: Societies http://www.ict-societies.eu/
Visit: Crisis Commons: http://crisiscommons.org/
Visit: Crisis Camp: http://crisiscampireland.com/
Contact: mroddy@tssg.org
