Went at the SHDH after the hackerdojo job fair. It was an interesting time. Met some cool people and learned a lot of cool stuff.

This was my first time to superhappydevhouse, and it was pretty cool. This one was being held in conjunction with the Crisis Camp Haiti, and effort to get voluteer work done on tech projects to help with providing data, maps and it assistance to people on the ground n Haiti. While I don’t feel like I got to participate in their effort in any meaningful way, I did learn a lot of stuff about how the effort is being organized and all the geo/gis tools that are being harnessed. I had an interesting conversation with Jessica Pfund, who works on GIS, google map maker and mapping in the 3rd world at google. She showed us what’s going on with google map maker, google’s crowd sourcing solution to making and improving their maps. As part of the relief effort this data was made available to download from google.

Also interesting was the ongoing effort to provide ever-better data to relief workers going to Haiti. There’s a pretty cool thing called ushahidi that aggregates and geo-tags text messages. They have a Haiti page here. I hadn’t realized the scope of the effort, and that there’s a UN agency basically dedicated to disaster relief satelite imagery analysis. What a cool job that must be.