Tag Archives: SBTF

Lessons learned from USAID’s first crowdsourced project

[Guest post by Timo Luege - I’m passionate about information, communication and how they can be used to make the world a better place. My two main areas of expertise are: • Communication through digital media • Media relations during disasters Over the last thirteen years I have worked for the Red Cross Red Crescent [...]
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SBTF/USAID - A Partnership - The Future of Digital Volunteers?

Kirk Morris, Melissa Elliott, Jeannine Lemaire - SBTF “On Friday, June 1st, USAID’s GeoCenter and Development Credit Authority (DCA) launched the Agency’s first-ever crowdsourcing initiative to pinpoint the location of USAID DCA loan data. Forty people came to USAID’s Innovation Lab throughout the day to crowdsource live. Online volunteers, working from Canada to the United [...]
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On Standby Doesn’t Mean Always-On: An Update on the SBTF

We’re continuing to learn a lot at the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), and yes, that’s an understatement. While we only launched this initiative less than a year and a half ago, we’ve been involved in some 20 deployments since. The combined learning from all of these deployments has been tremendous and we’ve done our [...]
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Standby Human Resources

SBTF volunteers have consistently demonstrated they are a reliable, hard working and creative bunch. On little notice, they are willing to put in hours of their free time, all the while holding a job / writing a PhD / entertaining three toddlers. Their encouragement and interaction with similar volunteers comes through a computer screen - [...]
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A Review of SBTF Deployments

It’s a new year and the Core SBTF Team is busy developing its roadmap for. We have recently expanded the Core Team with experienced volunteers who have done phenomenal work on previous SBTF deployments. We are also updating our Ning platform, blog, Facebook page, etc. For example, we recently added a Coordinators Page and Deployments Page [...]
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Who are we really? Stats on the SBTF Membership

The SBTF Membership currently comprises 700+ volunteers from 70+ countries around the world. But who are we really? I finally made some time to find out by reading through every single bio on our Ning platform—a total of 720 when this blog post went to press. Volunteers are invited to write whatever they’d like in [...]
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Beyond Brute Force: Unexpected Lessons from Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery Analysis for UNHCR in Somalia

The recent SBTF effort to identify IDP shelters in Somalia for the UNHCR has been notable for several reasons beyond the fantastic work by our very, very hard working volunteers; some of whom may now need an eye exam and glasses… And I feel that what I’m seeing is an inflection point in the development [...]
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SBTF for ICCM

This year’s International Conference of Crisis Mappers in Geneva just finished. The creation of the SBTF was announced at last year’s ICCM. Many SBTF volunteers were not able to make the conference and we wanted everyone to be present in a small way… so we set up this map:   Over the past two days, volunteers have been reporting on what [...]
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Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery Analysis for UNHCR-Somalia: Latest Results

253,711 That is the total number of tags created by 168 volunteers after processing 3,909 satellite images in just five days. A quarter of a million tags in 120 hours; that’s more than 2,000 tags per hour. Wow. As mentioned in this earlier blog post, volunteers specifically tagged three different types of informal shelters to provide [...]
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Libya Crisis Map Deployment Report

We have just completed the after action review of the SBTF deployment of the Libya Crisis Map. You can view the report as a Google Doc here. Please feel free to add comments and questions as this is an open and editable document. The entire point of this report is to catalyze conversation and learning. This is [...]
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