The earthquake wreaked havoc on Haiti on Jan 12. I was in the air flying from Boston to San Fran. I didn’t hear Haitian news until I arrived in Saigon which was two days later. Needless to say, the support gang and OLPC/Sugar community reacted to the news in Haiti much quicker. As I was going through my email box, there was a flood of emails about initiatives trying to help Haiti in all possible ways:
“Hey All, The haitianquake.com site, now 30 hours old with zero sleep, is looking for help developing an API for getting input into their site, basically a POST. They have an add page (http://www.haitianquake.com/add_record.html) but want to be able to add using a POST. Anyone who might be able to help, or who has insomnia, should write to Tim Schwartz. C.”
“Adam is correct—we’re absolutely swamped at the moment. Lots of simultaneous efforts—both stateside and in Haiti—going on all at once. We’re preparing to deploy to Haiti early on Sunday and intend to bring three XOs with us. ..”
“Please now begin drafting a similar/careful public appeal for Haiti Relief Contributors who can _genuinely_ use XO’s for (post)disaster response, to be broadcast after midnight tonight. “
“Hi Adam, Given the much limited power and connectivity options in Haiti, I think a deployment of Sahana on the OLPCs would be valuable…. If we can get a team from OLPC to work on integrating Sahana on a LAMP stack on the new 1.5 version that would be great. The sahana project is actively responding and you can find details (including the custom code for Haiti) here: http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start#sahana_resources.
Join us on Freenode IRC at #sahana where we are gathering to respond to this.”
Adam summarized on-going efforts in a blog post http://blog.laptop.org/2010/01/15/mobilizing-haiti/
On Jan 15 several Contributor projects were presented during Friday meeting, two of them were created for Haiti:
1. XO Mobile and Lending Library for Haitians – Delray Beach, Florida
Requests 3 XOs over 24 months
Project Objectives:
Immediate/Short term objective: help Haitian children in Delray Beach help
their families make contact with people in Haiti due to the 2010 earth quake.
Plan and Procedure for Achieving the Stated Objectives:
Connect with the Haitian community here is Delray Beach thru organizations
such as the Catholic church and schedule locations where the XOs can be taken
and made available for use primarily as a means of finding friends and family
via established web sites such as http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/haiti/people.
Once people are found the XOs can be used to communicate with those in Haiti.
2. Apex Communication aid for the earthquake victims of Haiti – Miami, Florida
Requests 10 XOs over 2 months
Project Objectives:
We plan to provide a means of communication to the victims of the
earthquake in Haiti. With their homes destroyed, we want to provide access
to the internet so that they can give their loved ones abroad a sign of life.