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A website for Haiti Red Cross

Timo — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:42:35 +0000

I’ve recently come back from Haiti where I trained the Haiti Red Cross webmaster on WordPress, the CMS which we had agreed on. I was there for one week and Haiti Red Cross now finally has its own website (www.croixrouge.ht) and email.

If you want to know how the website was set-up, please click here for the configuration. In addition, I had some customization done on the theme and had an additional language, Haiti Creole, added to the front end. That version is not live yet, but it’s getting there.

The brand new Haiti Red Cross website

Screencast and on-site training

In order to make the most of my time in Haiti I prepared a few short instructional videos. And while my French is terrible, I found a good, free screen capture service: Jing.

Jing is a free software that let’s you capture up to five minutes of video and sound and share it online. It works really smoothly. And while the 5 minute limit might sound very short, I found that it is enough for most steps, as long as you do one video for each action. What I find strange is that the “Pro” version doesn’t let you capture longer videos.

I hope that those videos will also help the webmaster to train staff and volunteers outside Port-au-Prince.

Email with Google Apps

The Haitian Red Cross webmaster Charlot and I.

I hadn’t been aware that I would also be expected to set up the Haitian Red Cross’ email service, but I suppose I should have expected it. And while activating email through Plesk on the server was no big deal, in the end we decided to go with Google Apps.

Email security, backups and all these things are simply such a massive headache that I counselled against putting that burden on the webmaster. In my opinion a webmaster should worry about the site and not about whether email is backed up. I had never used Google Apps before, but it’s great! Once, you have managed to configure a server to work with Google Apps (and unfortunately the instructions are terrible) it works like a dream and of course you also have immediate access to Google docs, calendar etc.. I wish we could get rid of our exchange server at the IFRC and migrate!

Real life – outside base camp

On a more somber note: I have to admit I felt a bit inadequate in the middle of all these people who are providing water, shelter or basic health care. I mean, how does the need for a website rank in comparison to these needs?

On the last day I had the chance to leave base camp for a couple of hours so that I could get an idea of what life is like outside base camp and indeed for many of the staff and volunteers I was working with every day. It’s easy to forget when you are inside a compound and well cared for, but many of the people I was working with might not have a home to return to after work.

To cut a long story short: the needs are basically – everything. I mean, you name it, they don’t have it. We were walking through one of the camps where the Red Cross is working and even though you could see that a lot had already been done to improve the situation, what had been achieved seems like very little compared to what still needs to be done. Don’t get me wrong: I have seen everyone in base camp work every day from 6 am to well after dark. It’s not because people don’t work hard, that things take a long time. It’s because it’s such an enormous job.

The “land issue”

For me, the biggest revelation was to see the “land issue” first hand. I have to admit that I always found it hard to understand why we don’t just erect a couple of thousand tents and instead decided to distribute tarps and tool kits. I always found it difficult to accept that no land is available to set up those tents. But once you are there, you realize that it’s really true: there is no literally no space to put tents up! Every little bit of space is already taken up! I saw people living on the bit of green between the lane’s on Port-au-Prince’s main street.

And you can’t simply replace the rickety shelters that people have built themselves with “proper” tents either. Because those tents are bigger than the existing emergency shelters, less people would be able to stay in any one location. Which means that you first need a place where the rest of the people could go. And for that you need land.

There is a much better and far more coherent summary of the issue on the “tales from the hood” blog titled “Sorry, I’m just an aid worker“. I highly recommend that you read this post if you are interested in the Haiti response.

Anyhow: Haiti Red Cross has email and a website now. It’s not much, but it’ll help Haiti Red Cross talk to the world about their work and what the reality is on the ground. And maybe that will help a little bit.

Are Tweets records? Thoughts on Twitter and record keeping

Timo — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:10:41 +0000

I recently read a post on Janet Fouts blog about a service that offers to backup your “lifestream” (I hate that term). This is a service that offers to backup your Flickr-photos, your Google documents, your Gmail messages etc. and even your Tweets. I can see why having backups of some of these types of data can be useful – but Tweets? Who would want to pay money to have their Tweets preserved for eternity?

What is “official” communication?

Then I suddenly realized that doing this might actually be really important: the rules of my organization state that we have to record and store all official communication for a certain number of years. Once a year all our press releases, appeals documents etc. get printed and burned on a CD before being sent to the archives.

A legal obligation to preserve Tweets?

Do you need to archive your Tweets? (Photo: ed ludwick)

But what about Tweets, Facebook updates and similar forms of communication? Considering they are written by someone from the communications department – does that make them official records as well? If they are, then we should have a mechanism to preserve and archive them as well. I’m sure this will become an issue – and probably sooner rather than later. However, I expect that the first time that this will become a legal issue will not be in a non-profit context but with a big cooperation where a Tweet has influenced the stock price.

But if your legal status as a non-profit (the rules differ from country to country) requires you to have copies of all your official communication, or if your internal policies say you have to do it, then it might indeed be a good idea to start backing them up.

Recommended reading:

Charles Stross wrote a long but excellent post about the possibilities and dangers of recoding every aspect of our lives.

Essential tool for disaster response: The new Emergency Items Catalogue

Timo — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:15:56 +0000

Emergency Items Catalogue

One of the things I love about my job is that I constantly find out about incredibly useful or smart things that people have come up with. Right now I’m in awe of the the new Emergency Items Catalogue (www.ifrc.org/emergency-items) that was just released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Metric? Imperial? Who cares?

Imagine you show up at a disaster and you’ve brought a few pumps and hoses. What are the odds of you being able to connect you stuff to that of everyone else? If you used the specifications from the Emergency Items Catalogue to purchase your equipment, then the odds are quite high. Because of the size of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement it can set standards.

2,000 items you need in an emergency

Essentially a group of dedicated people with a very high threshold for boredom got together and specified the details of 2,000 items that are commonly used in an emergency. From adhesive tape to scalpels to generators to … hoses. It’s a job I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but for which I have the uttermost respect.

Standardization is you friend

Even if you don’t need to connect your stuff with that of anyone else, standardization is your friend. For one thing you can be sure what the industry standard is. But more importantly you can tell a manufacturer what you want in a way that makes sense to the manufacturer. If for example, instead of saying “I need 500 blankets” you can say “I need 500 blankets that follow these exact technical specifications” you are far more likely to get what you expect.

Google Books and DocStoc

The Emergency Items Catalogue has been available online for years. But in my opinion not enough people know about it or are using it outside the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. To change that, the logistics department has given it’s go-ahead to add the PDF-version to Google Books and Docstoc once they have been finalized (in about two weeks). It’ll be interesting to see what people do with these documents once they are out there.