March Hare Communications Collective

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

An article written for Hack This Zine issue #9 covering the successes and failures of communications systems during large mobilizations. As well as the requirements for successful communication systems that march-hare will be developing and deploying.

A web portal for people, tools, research, and case studies of folk using mobile technology for social impact.

A Newsweek article about a new closed software program called Haystack that seeks to avoid government censors in Iran. Interesting stuff about organic growth and clash of organizational principles

The largest yet deployment of Ushahidi and Swiftriver for the 2010 Pakistan floods. Some interesting new innovations.

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

A detailed case history of using Ushahidi for the first time by a group in Russia dealing with the wild-fires there. It pointed out some of the problems, technical and organizationally with the software in a very simple way.

A short book review of a new book of case studies of SMS activism (broadly defined) in Africa over the past 10 years.

This paper describes cell phone text messaging during the 2004 US Democratic and Republican National Conventionsby protesters using TXTmob – a text-message broadcastsystem developed by the authors. Drawing upon analysis of TXTmob messages, user interviews, self-reporting, and news media accounts, we describe the ways that activists used text messaging to share information and coordinate actions during decentralized protests.

This is a case study of deploying a DIY GSM network at the 2009 Hacking at Random (HAR) conference. It would be interesting to see if this is a financially accessible in regards to the geographic coverage needed for our deployments.

Freedom Phone is a turnkey IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system. This may be a useful tool to have set up to provided up to date info via a phone tree, or to provide call routing for a mobilization.

A video of Johnny Diggz talking about new group called Geeks Without Borders, starting 10/10/2010. The group seeks to provide new communication platforms for grassroots disaster areas.

Mobigater is a hardware GSM interface for astrisk and freeswitch allowing low cost powerful phone systems to have access to SMS.

A web portal for people, tools, research, and case studies of folk using mobile technology for social impact.

Mobilize Us is a low cost (comparatively) 3rd party SMS gateway service. They are small now and seem capable of working on a one on one basis to make available custom SMS solutions.

This is an article about a portable, solar-powered, relatively cheap, open source mobile service. There is also a review for engineers for change that simplifies it a bit.

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

SMS Fu is a ruby library that allows users to send sms messages to users if the phone number and service provider are known. The code is available on github here. There is a file here that has the majority of carrier to email suffix lookups here.

A tool for managing sms distribution from a computer through a tethered cell phone based on the gammu library. It is written in python.

A component of Ushahidi that allows for filtering of information sourced from the "crowd". This becomes especially useful in protest scenarios where thousands of reports are coming in from twitter and you need to answer the questions "Which tweets have usable information"?

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

An open network for individuals/groups interested in:Leveraging mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.

A simpler and easy to use software that uses the same principle as Ushahidi but is web-based. The Beta is now available for free.

A video of Johnny Diggz talking about new group called Geeks Without Borders, starting 10/10/2010. The group seeks to provide new communication platforms for grassroots disaster areas.

Map making software and crowdsourcing to fill it out during disasters.

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

A component of Ushahidi that allows for filtering of information sourced from the "crowd". This becomes especially useful in protest scenarios where thousands of reports are coming in from twitter and you need to answer the questions "Which tweets have usable information"?

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

This web page covers in detail the semiotics of map making. It has good info on how people process map-info. It covers everything from size, colors, placement, font, etc. A bit academic but very complete.

An open network for individuals/groups interested in:Leveraging mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.

A simpler and easy to use software that uses the same principle as Ushahidi but is web-based. The Beta is now available for free.

A TED video by Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Microsoft's work on augmented maps.

Map making software and crowdsourcing to fill it out during disasters.

A PDF book on GIS maps. The chapter on symbols is very good.

The largest yet deployment of Ushahidi and Swiftriver for the 2010 Pakistan floods. Some interesting new innovations.

A detailed case history of using Ushahidi for the first time by a group in Russia dealing with the wild-fires there. It pointed out some of the problems, technical and organizationally with the software in a very simple way.

A component of Ushahidi that allows for filtering of information sourced from the "crowd". This becomes especially useful in protest scenarios where thousands of reports are coming in from twitter and you need to answer the questions "Which tweets have usable information"?

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

A link to a discussion of augmented reality maps on TED. Imagine a icongraphic/symbolic dynamic map that is augmented with day/night interior & exterior photos of specifics gathered ahead of time or even on the fly by photo scouts. This is a possible road the development team could head down.

A video of Johnny Diggz talking about new group called Geeks Without Borders, starting 10/10/2010. The group seeks to provide new communication platforms for grassroots disaster areas.

A collection of blog posts and articles about "politics and sms". It is a bit NGO leaning but some good articles.

This is an article about a portable, solar-powered, relatively cheap, open source mobile service. There is also a review for engineers for change that simplifies it a bit.

A good website of links to police scanners being streamed and radio repeaters.

A detailed case history of using Ushahidi for the first time by a group in Russia dealing with the wild-fires there. It pointed out some of the problems, technical and organizationally with the software in a very simple way.

A TED talk about how to represent data in patterns that are elegant and understandable.

This site has an on-going discussion of legal issues/resources directly related to Twitter.

Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Ushahidi will likely be the development platform for the 3rd release of the tapatio project.

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking) is a routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.

An open network for individuals/groups interested in:Leveraging mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.

A simpler and easy to use software that uses the same principle as Ushahidi but is web-based. The Beta is now available for free.

This is a case study of deploying a DIY GSM network at the 2009 Hacking at Random (HAR) conference. It would be interesting to see if this is a financially accessible in regards to the geographic coverage needed for our deployments.

A TED video of Evan Williams (Twitter creator)talking about twitter being used and innovation.

A Newsweek article about a new closed software program called Haystack that seeks to avoid government censors in Iran. Interesting stuff about organic growth and clash of organizational principles

The largest competition to Twitter. Considered by many social-media mavens as better than twitter.

A tool for managing sms distribution from a computer through a tethered cell phone based on the gammu library. It is written in python.

A component of Ushahidi that allows for filtering of information sourced from the "crowd". This becomes especially useful in protest scenarios where thousands of reports are coming in from twitter and you need to answer the questions "Which tweets have usable information"?

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

An article written for Hack This Zine issue #9 covering the successes and failures of communications systems during large mobilizations. As well as the requirements for successful communication systems that march-hare will be developing and deploying.

A short conference paper that looks at Moldova, Iran and the Pittsburgh G-20 uses of twitter in protest situations.

Mobile Revolutions is a community-based research study conducted in partnership with the social network TakingITGlobal that examines how youth leaders across the globe use mobile communications to create social change within their local communities and internationally. Pretty liberal but some good social research

A Newsweek article about a new closed software program called Haystack that seeks to avoid government censors in Iran. Interesting stuff about organic growth and clash of organizational principles

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

This paper describes cell phone text messaging during the 2004 US Democratic and Republican National Conventionsby protesters using TXTmob – a text-message broadcastsystem developed by the authors. Drawing upon analysis of TXTmob messages, user interviews, self-reporting, and news media accounts, we describe the ways that activists used text messaging to share information and coordinate actions during decentralized protests.

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) is the de-facto worldwide standard for initiating and sustaining communications using High Frequency radio. This network is a system of ALE base stations with internet connectivity.

A good website of links to police scanners being streamed and radio repeaters.

Members of the March Hare Collective, the Aftershock Alliance Collective, and the Hackbloc Collective discussed the history and future of tech in natural disasters and demonstrations for a presentation titled "Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology". Audio of the talk is available in ok and better qualities.

B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking) is a routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.

A simpler and easy to use software that uses the same principle as Ushahidi but is web-based. The Beta is now available for free.

This is a tool that will likely be the back-end for version 2 of the tapatio project and will allow us to get away from using twitter on the backend. This software allows the tethering of a mobile phone to a computer to act as the sms dispatching service. The software also provides and interface for processing incoming messages as well.

A TED video of Evan Williams (Twitter creator)talking about twitter being used and innovation.

Mobigater is a hardware GSM interface for astrisk and freeswitch allowing low cost powerful phone systems to have access to SMS.

A collection of blog posts and articles about "politics and sms". It is a bit NGO leaning but some good articles.

A web portal for people, tools, research, and case studies of folk using mobile technology for social impact.

Mobile Revolutions is a community-based research study conducted in partnership with the social network TakingITGlobal that examines how youth leaders across the globe use mobile communications to create social change within their local communities and internationally. Pretty liberal but some good social research

Mobilize Us is a low cost (comparatively) 3rd party SMS gateway service. They are small now and seem capable of working on a one on one basis to make available custom SMS solutions.

The largest competition to Twitter. Considered by many social-media mavens as better than twitter.

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

SMS Fu is a ruby library that allows users to send sms messages to users if the phone number and service provider are known. The code is available on github here. There is a file here that has the majority of carrier to email suffix lookups here.

A short book review of a new book of case studies of SMS activism (broadly defined) in Africa over the past 10 years.

A tool for managing sms distribution from a computer through a tethered cell phone based on the gammu library. It is written in python.

A component of Ushahidi that allows for filtering of information sourced from the "crowd". This becomes especially useful in protest scenarios where thousands of reports are coming in from twitter and you need to answer the questions "Which tweets have usable information"?

This paper describes cell phone text messaging during the 2004 US Democratic and Republican National Conventionsby protesters using TXTmob – a text-message broadcastsystem developed by the authors. Drawing upon analysis of TXTmob messages, user interviews, self-reporting, and news media accounts, we describe the ways that activists used text messaging to share information and coordinate actions during decentralized protests.

A TED talk introducing Ushahidi use cases and the need for crowd source filtering components like swift river.

Hackbloc.org provides internet services to the March-Hare Communications Collective.

A highly customizeable framework for data collection and distributed communication via SMS. This tool looks very comparable to the Tapatio system, except slightly more tailored to data collection then managing information and dispatching. It is also written in Python with the Django platform as opposed to PHP with the Drupal platform. There seems to be a large community built around it with a decent amount of use case info, deployment documentation, and developer documentation. The deployment documentation has some useful suggestions for planning out a comms deployment for large mobilizations.

SMS Fu is a ruby library that allows users to send sms messages to users if the phone number and service provider are known. The code is available on github here. There is a file here that has the majority of carrier to email suffix lookups here.

This paper describes cell phone text messaging during the 2004 US Democratic and Republican National Conventionsby protesters using TXTmob – a text-message broadcastsystem developed by the authors. Drawing upon analysis of TXTmob messages, user interviews, self-reporting, and news media accounts, we describe the ways that activists used text messaging to share information and coordinate actions during decentralized protests.

A pretty good introduction to digital security (using open source software) for human rights activists.