How to run a CrisisCamp

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[edit] What does a Crisis Camp organizer do?

Crisis Camps are the in-person meetings at any location worldwide that bring together members and volunteers of the Crisis Commons movement. Crisis Camps have been successfully run in cities such as Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Denver - some took advantage of advanced planning, while others were organized within a very short timeframe. Crisis Camps may be run by either one or multiple organizers and can be as large or small as your community wishes. At this point, for simplicity's sake, we are only approving one Crisis Camp per city. If you are interested in organizing a Crisis Camp in a city that already has an upcoming event, please contact the organizer to volunteer.

On the day of your event expect attendees to show up with a wide range of skills and abilities, and that if it is their first time at Crisis Camp they will many different ideas of what to expect. As the organizer(s) it is your job (yes, it's an unpaid job for a day - but for a great cause!) is to help direct and organize human resources and logistics at your camp and explain the CrisisCommons mission and Crisis Commons Charter. Do that on the day of your camp, and it will be a success. Unless you are Superman / Superwoman, on the day of the camp, as the organizer(s) it is very unlikely that you will have much, if any, time to code or work on individual projects. If that is what you want to do on the day of your Crisis Camp, we strongly suggest that you let someone else be an organizer.

To help you understand what a Crisis Camp is, you should get familiar with the Barcamp experienceand read everything on CrisisCommons.org and at least browse through our wiki. At that point, if you would like to proceed with running a Crisis Camp, please fill out this form on CrisisCommons.org to apply for approval to run your Camp.

[edit] Pre-Crisis Camp checklist for organizers

  • Set up a unique Twitter account (such as @CrisisCampLA) and Facebook Page for your Crisis Camp
  • Choose a day and a time for your event, and ideally a location. Location, however, at this point isn't a requirement
  • Create an event sign up page using Eventbrite or a similar tool that can show a public webpage for people to sign up Example from past Crisis Camp Be sure to create tickets so you get a flavor of who is attending (Coders, TechSavvy, Languate/Translation and Geospatial)
  • Promote the CrisisCamp registration URL through your communication channels (email, Twitter, groups, Facebook, etc) you have and ask friends/connections to do the same
  • If you are a sole organizer, once you have a few people signed up, reach out to some of them to see if they are willing to help you organize on some level.
  • Search for and choose a location
    • Location should ideally include:
      • tables / chairs / handicap accessible parking
      • Wi-Fi / sufficient power plugs
      • central location for your city / near public transport
      • an area for food and beverages
  • You may want to read what worked and what didn't at a past event.

[edit] Things to bring

  • Coffee (optional) - Any major coffee place has a "Cambrio" which serves
  • Name tags
  • Poster paper for notes and brainstorming
  • Markers
  • Post It Notes (of different sizes)
  • Power cords
  • Duct Tape (for the cords to prevent tripping)
  • Power Bars

[edit] Food and Beverage

We have no set rules regarding food and drink for your Camp. You may raise funds from sponsors to cover meals, snacks and coffee, or you may ask attendees to chip in to cover costs. You may order pizzas or ask everyone to go out for lunch (although few people in our experience wish to leave the camp), or use any other arrangement that you wish. If you have a good sign up list before the event, we recommend that you send your attendees a pre-event email asking what they want to do regarding food and drink.

Please note that Crisis Commons is not responsible for any costs relating to your Crisis Camp, which includes food and beverage, parking and/or any other related costs.

[edit] Channels for publicity

[edit] Day of the event checklist for organizers

  • Have people sign in with skills, contact info
  • Start on-time.
  • Quickly have everyone in the Camp introduce themselves and their main skills, and then explain to the Camp as a whole what Crisis Commons is why we feel it is important (if you have a lot of Crisis Camp veterans, you may also skip this introduction and hand newcomers off to a veteran for orientation)
  • Have people break into skills groups (generally this has been: programmers, mappers, and non-programmers/mapppers)
  • Ask for a volunteer to handle your Camp's social media for the day, i.e. your Camp's Twitter updates, Facebook Page and blogging on the Crisis Commons Blog (anyone can just hit the login button to create an account)

Everyone at this point should be reviewing the CrisisCommons wiki to see the status of each listed ongoing project. Groups can then decide which ongoing projects to work on or may decide to start a new project of their own. Groups should be between 3-10 persons, with 5-6 usually being ideal. Each group needs to choose 1. a project manager 2. a scribe to record everything the group does (this will later be added to this wiki). At this point, everyone should then start working on their projects.

  • Do a project check-in every few hours, update on status. Encourage the scribes to update the wiki as often as possible. On days when Crisis Camps are happening simultaneously around the country or the globe, this is extremely important as other Crisis Camps will be relying on your status updates.
  • Remind people to eat and drink. Seriously, people often forget at our Camps.
  • Keep moral and energy up by giving the entire Camp updates from other simultaneous Camps as well as key updates from your Camp's project work.
  • At least half and hour before your end time, the main task of your Camp as a whole should turn to updating the wiki and/or GitHub (with code). This is extremely important. If your scribes have been updating the wiki throughout the day, this should not take too long.
  • End your event on time and clean up your space.

Some Camps organize after-party events - this is solely at your discretion.

[edit] How to collaborate on projects and connect to other camps

[edit] Email

There are a number of listserv emails that are circulating around the Haiti crisis. For privacy and spam purposes we are not going to name them here, but we will name the main CrisisCommons Google Group list crisiscommons@googlegroups.com

[edit] CrisisCommons Wiki

The CrisisCommons Wiki should be your default way to collaborate and document.

[edit] Meetspace (In Person)

Have people put a large post it on the back of their laptop screen with their full name and email (and twitter, phone, etc)

[edit] Twitter

Twitter List of all current city organizers

  • Twitter hashtags for Haiti
    • #haiti
    • #cchaiti
  • Twitter hashtags for Chile
    • #chile
    • #ccchile

Overall hashtag #crisiscommons

[edit] IRC

[edit] Phone & Skype

[edit] GitHub

According to GitHub.com, "Git is a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software. GitHub is [a] way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development..." We are urging developers to use GitHub to store and share their code repositories - in English, this means that programmers can keep their software code here for everyone to see, edit and share.

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