I'm in Reston Teaching a seminar for API called Re-mix culture.
Oz Blog Full Post View | List View
Daily dose from the land of Osder...
- Entry for December 04, 2005
-
I arrived in Hong Kong last night to start a two week teaching trip in China. So far so good, I'm still waiting for the haze to clear (literally and figurativley) so I can see where I am. I'm staying at the guest house at Hong Kong University and meeting with faculty today. I'm being hosted by a powerhouse of a journalist Ying and also seing a colleague from my days teaching at Columbia University Andrew . They have a beautiful multimedia training facility here at the journalism school.
I'm sitting in a presentation of an open source developement cms system that has been funded by the Media Development Loan Fund . Media Development Loan Fund gives out loans for independent media in democratizing countries.
Mitch from Berlin is presenting the project and provides technical assistance to the Chinese Media Project run by the HK University. Mitch is here this week to provide technical support to the project and address the tactical issues that are coming up running the Media Project site. The fund smartly provides funds for support of the tools as well as strategy and content development.
The suite of software that MDF has developed is called Campsite, Campware is used for online newspapers. Campsite provides professional tools for local and independent media in developing democracies and includes tools for Radio called CREAM, Customer Relationship Management, CRM and circulation tracking DREAM.
Campsite "free and open mulitlingual publishing tools for news sites." Here are some of teh sites using Campsite. MDF found that they needed to offer a "free and open" tool kit for publishers to ensure that they are "protected to publish." Often online publishign operations have been shut down by officials claiming that online publishing operations are "pirating IP." Campsite houses content on servers outside regions and protects it from such violations. The software also has to support hard to support local character sets (chinese, cyrillic, etc) and bi-lingual communciations.
Like any good cms the system allows the content database seperate from the presentation and design.
1. Content Database
2. Design and templating of content
3. Editorial Interface (admin interface)
4. Public User (sees dynamic content)
The editing layer is well thought out and pretty nimble.
It's used in a german youth politics site and includes open source tools for discussions, polling and rich media. www.fluter.de
Ok, well I am off to lunch now with the faculty.
Sunday December 4, 2005 - 07:47pm (PST) Permanent Link | 0 Comments - Walmart, a good example
-
Getting it right
Walmart has a nice form posted, thanks Walmart, you've provided an essential and set an example: https://ecs.wal-mart.com/CrisisComm/ . There's a great deal of utility here, a bit more useful than trying to browse the growing number of lists. Yahoo has a good round up but, it doesn't really raise the bar, do we really have time for browsing all of these? How can we be more helpful? Can we step up and aggregate? Could we share data more easily if we all adopted the Walmart form? http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Earth_Sciences/Meteorology/Weather_Phenomena/Hurricanes__Typhoons__and_Tropical_Cyclones/Current_Information/Hurricane_Katrina/Missing_Person_and_Survivor_Lists/
Friday September 2, 2005 - 05:47pm (PDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments - Entry for September 02, 2005
-
Building an Authoratative Missing Persons Database?Colleagues and Friends:I've been thinking about what we can do that's different and valuable to the world in a time of national crisis -- "live reporting" is a commodity, good stories are few and far between and it will take some time for "missing tags" and other social media tools to bubble critical information to the surface.
So many of our brothers and sisters face days and months of uncertainty and so many of us across the globe have only one simple question -- has anyone seen my friend, brother, mother?"Getting to Scale - Building a Single DatabaseThere will be plenty of time for opinion, analysis, criticisms and accountability, but right now I'd like to see us use the power of the network to help organize and structure the most critical information into a searchable, scalable database available on the web that could become an information hub for folks reporting people missing and also providing essential information for identificationSo could we use the scale of portals and major site homepage, to not only raise money but build a database of missing names and critical data to be shared and matched against shelter, hospital and "refugee-camp" rosters as they become available. We could go back to the existing boards, scrape and aggregate and complete disparate reports feeding them all into one more authoritative/accountable database. As things get up an running we could begin to re-direct missing forums, boards and blogs to one single destination.Large sites like those run by search, news and information companies could provide links into a comprehensive database. Tonight CNN will host a three hour special and the missing will be a major topic, they've also done a great job on their site, but it's not alphabetical and it can never be comprehensive. Think about how powerful it would be if all missing sites, shared a format, or better yet one server, to drive data into a single repository. ANy site could provide links directly into to a structured form for submitting info and also accessing a search. The hosting entity could provide updates to listings as names became available and individuals who are ok could post their information saying that they are ok and what they need.How do we get there?Are there folks out there that could help "open source" the database development and those of us with access to traffic could try to get essential links? Are there portals or media sites with resources to host and build the form?Our colleagues are all doing amazing work, bloggers, broadcasters, small and large news and media companies, etc. Everyone is hosting and collecting critical information, but it's unstructured and it will be difficult to aggregate them into a repository that has the ultimate utility as time goes on a more postings are going to different sites..Is it possible?So friends, could we help with the process of matching critical information to people in need? Could we collaborate with other and create a tool that makes a difference?What it could include:Katrina "Missing" Database Fields (searchable by any field and sortable alphabetically)Logon - Registration - Policy to SubmitCheck Boxes:Report a Missing Person (proceed to 1)Report a Found Person (proceed to 2)Submitted by: (must be verifiable - match info will be emailed to person who submits)- Name
- Phone Number
- Contact notes:
1. File a Missing Person Report:- Name
- Address
- Phone Number (for id purposes)
- Social Security Number
- Last Known Location
- Physical description
- Other Information you would like to share about this person
- Services you can provide this person (hosing, work, etc)
2. File a Found Person Report- Name
- Address (pre-disaster)
- Phone Number (pre-disaster)
- Social Security Number
- Location
- Contact Details
- Services that person needs
- Other critical information
Thanks for listeningI would love to see if this is feasible, and get involved in making it happen ASAP.cheers,Elizabeth OsderFriday September 2, 2005 - 01:49pm (PDT) Permanent Link | 2 Comments
