Tag Archives: sparkrelief

Tery Spataro Resigned from Sparkrelief Board

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For more than a year I provided advise to Sparkrelief on a regular basis, I donated thousands of dollars so that people who were victimized by disaster could easily find what they needed and those that wanted to help had a place to go to provide help.

This was a tough decision for me to make considering the amount of investment I made in time, energy and money that I put into Sparkrelief and the leadership. As of August 1, 2011 I have not been involved with Sparkrelief, I can not validate the direction the organization is going.

Currently my names is associated with Sparkrelief, I asked that my name be removed from Sparkrelief, business and marketing documents, and not used in conversations.

If you need more details on why I have resigned please feel free to contact me directly.

Disaster Relief Takes on a New Meaning

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Since the Boulder Fire (Four Mile Fire), I’ve been seeing an increase the use of community to help during disaster. Boulder Fire presented an opportunity for citizens to help by organizing around social media. In my research report, “Community During Crisis“, there is apparent useful factors to social media during crisis and behavior of community. Fragmentation occurs making it difficult to aggregate resources using social media. I got fascinated by the idea of community disaster relief and aggregating needs and help. I looked at a number of different platforms, all of these organizations provide good intentions, but do not solve the fragmentation issue.

  • Crisis Commons provides acceptable form of communication using wiki
  • Ushahidi has a crisis platform that incorporates crowdsourcing
  • Google has person finder and crisis response page
  • Several others individually providing crisis mapping and information

Crowdsourcing community during a disaster is a pragmatic direction for gathering help but it must be done in a uniformed, trackable way, so that information can be found by those who need it and by those providing it. There were several platforms, that grew from a simple bulletin board system to providing the means for housing during crisis. I believe Ushahidi will continue to provide the means for people in need.

Ushahidi is an nonprofit, that provides a means for community driven disaster relief and is working to create a platform that can be easily deployed for any natural disaster. Ushahidi will probably be the standard for community driven disaster relief.