Posted 02/02/2010 - 17:41 by jess
We've all been fixated on the devastating Haiti earthquake that recently shattered tens of thousands of lives throughout the Haitian nation. Over the past 2 weeks each one of us has been called on to do our part, whether you texted for Haiti, packed care packages at your local church or volunteered to help prepare for a rescue mission, together we’ve done our part to help a broken nation of people. Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting one of our fellow MDC members who has done much more than just his part to help in this tragedy. Dan Hudson is a local Washington DC community volunteer, a razor sharp developer, an avid fan of the Mashup Developer Community and recently in his free time created a ‘Haiti Crisis Communication Dashboard’.
Dan told me, “the disaster in Haiti drove me to create Mashups and Mashlets related to real-time information about the crisis directly from Haiti.” Dan and his local church have spent many hours packing health kits for Haiti and by tracking the remarkable survivor stories and reactions from people on the ground, he could get people to see how important this help effort is for us and all Haitian people.
Dan built 5 mashups to track the crisis and he details all 5 in functionality and meaning, take a read:
- HaitiNews: “Creating a quick mashup of RSS news feeds saves me time by putting important news articles about Haiti in a single view. This mashup is available as a Mashlet, so other people can embed this customized news feed into their wikis, blogs, web site, & various applications. By making this mashlet available as RSS people can easily access the information on their mobile devices or smart phones.”
- HaitiFlickerPhotoMashup: “This Mashup and Mashlet are images from the web that contain geocodes for the area of Haiti. This is a combination of technologies that combine YQL & Maps to display a map with pin points of where the image was taken according to the lat & long. This mashup can shed some additional light on what the area is like right now.”
- HaitionTwitter: “The Twitter Mashup and Mashlet gather data from people according to their location in Haiti. I simply pass lat, long, & radius parameters to display messages from targeted locations. This allows us to track what type of help people still need in designated Haitian areas.”
- Top20EarthquakesbyUSGS: “By tracking the last 20 earthquakes within the last week, we can analyze potential areas that could also be hit be these devastating disasters.”
- HaitiWeather: “From the earthquake, most of the Haitian infrastructure has been destroyed and many people are living in tent cities. I think it would be relevant and important for people to view the upcoming weather forecast to better prepare for potential storms or droughts.”
There is no end to how you can get involved. Dan chose volunteering and mashup technology, what’s your contribution? How have you helped Haiti?
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The Haiti earthquake left countless people homeless, more than half of the country's buildings had been destroyed, what Haitian people really need is housing help. I don't know how the situation have changed since the earthquake, probable things are less chaotic now, but building homes for so many people takes time so i am sure there is still a huge houses there.
I have done habitat for humanity here before and there is also a similar organization in haiti! check it out: http://www.habitat.org/disaster/essay/active_programs/haiti_earthquake.aspx
donate what you can and help however you can!
sounds very interesting accomplishment.
will comment more once I get some hang of this technology.
There are many interesting things you can do with Presto in the Cloud. I learned a few new things today! There are many Mashup Developer Community members that are willing to help too.
Please let know how I can help.
Daniel Hudson
@WebTechMan
For those of you that want to do more, the American Red Cross is still accepting donations for Haiti Relief. Or, if you prefer, you can text “HAITI” to 90999 from any mobile phone to donate $10 immediately to ARC relief efforts.
Chris,
Thanks for the reminder about helping Haiti by texting "Haiti" to 990999. This is a super easy way to donate $10.00 to Haiti through the American Red Cross relief efforts. I have done this a few times and I am still amazed at how simple and fast this small action can help so many.
I am in New Orleans right now and have seen the damage still here in the surrounding areas as a result of the Katrina hurricane about 5 years ago. Many people here have expressed their heartfelt concerns about the people in Haiti. I heard some unbelievable stories about people losing everything, but they are doing what they can to help Haiti. I am disturbed that I'm not doing more.
Daniel Hudson
@WebTechMan
Dan,
what an awesome example of how to pull together multiple datasources and put them up in a single view. This really does show how mashups can be constructed "on the fly" to create something of significantly greater value than the individual components.
Love it ... keep on mashing!
Cheers, Innes
Thanks for checking out the Haiti Mashboard!
You make a great point about how mashups can be constructed "on the fly" to create something of significantly greater value than the individual components. I believe it was Aristotle that said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." I feel the same way about communities. People can do some amazing things, but when people gather for a common goal, we can expect miracles. This is very obvious in recent relief efforts during these horrible events: The 911 Terrorist Attacks, Hurricane Katrina, & Earthquakes in Haiti. I still get emotional when visiting "Ground Zero" in New York, especially when looking at the mountain of pictures, notes, & artwork packed in that little church. I will be in New Orleans Friday, it will be good to see all the great work there and eat some incredible food. I wanted to go to Haiti, but I already have a trip planned to Uganda, to help expand a school. The children I met from Uganda are so smart and creative. I have also seen people going the extra mile in local events. During my volunteer work in the Washington DC MS Walk, I saw a ton of people bring us one step closer to a cure. This had to be one of the most organized events on the planet. I hope more people join us this year. There are countless people supporting endless needs around the world. Indeed, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Our community packed over 500 Haiti Health Kits in a couple hours and they were on a plane to Haiti in 48 hours.
Thanks to all volunteers around the world!
Thanks to people using technology to help change their community and the world.
Daniel Hudson
@WebTechMan
Thanks for the post Jess!
I put these Mashups and Mashlets together as a demonstration of how fast and easy we can share "Linked Data". The Haiti Crisis Communication Dashboard on Presto's Mashboard gives us a flexible view of our Linked Data. I hope this Mashboard, along with these sharable Mashlets and reusable Mashups help bring awareness to specific needs in Haiti.
You can learn more about "Linked Data" in this video presentation from Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
I spent a few minutes working with community members here on creating a few Haiti Mashlets to share. Thanks to our great community, the Haiti Mashboard demo is now available. This is a very simple dashboard that demonstrates how multiple data sources can be mashed up into a custom view. These data sources include Google, Twitter, Flickr, U. S. Government, Yahoo, and information from people around the world. I am very interested in what's going on in Haiti, so this view is displays information related to the Haiti earthquakes and current needs. The same techniques can be used in business to help monitor and manage brands within Social Media Channels. You can take a look at "SEVEN DIMENSIONS OF CRISIS COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT" to learn more about Crisis Communication for Business. I hope this simple demo helps create more thinking and conversations about Linked Data and Mashups.
What is Mashboard? This is where users can create custom information dashboards by simply dragging and dropping information blocks. This is similar to building with Lego blocks. Older applications are like welded Lego blocks. Presto puts YOU in control, now you can use your information how you want, when you want, and where you want. Your information blocks (Mashlets) can be shared in blogs, wikis, web sites, SharePoint, iGoogle,...
I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts about Linked Data and Mashups!
Daniel Hudson
@WebTechMan
Daniel,
Great work and an area of interest for all of us now.
Wanted to mention a few things as well about Mashboard, as I lead this effort from the Engineering side. Mashboard started out as a sample application and has been so well received by our customers and community that we're elevating it to a first class part of the product in our next release. So there will be additional features, including better integration with the overall product, more customizations options, including the ability to hide/show decorations, such as the toolbar, sharing capability, including the ability to share Mashboard pages with other presto users or to publish pages to your portal, including Microsoft SharePoint.
Additionally, users will have the capability to create entire workspaces that can be shared with other users.
There will also be support for creating simple applications via Mashboard by using inter mashlet communication and there will be extensibility mechanisms so that developers can create their own look and feel and custom layouts within Mashboard.
Many of the above features can be enabled and limited via attribute based policies, so that administrators, developers, power users, and end users all have the appropriate level of control and access to the appropriate features.
Again, thanks Dan for the great work and just wanted to take a few minutes to let folks know about some of the exciting features of the current Mashboard as well as a bit of insight into our roadmap.
Dan Malks
VP App Platform Eng, JackBe dan@jackbe.com