This past weekend we had the opportunity to gather people working directly, supporting and/or interested in crisis management and prevention in the first ever Crisis Camp DC. The idea was formed during earlier DC unconferences this year, and Heather Blanchard, Noel Dickover, AJ Turner and Pete O’Dell rallied the troops to make the event a reality.

This camp was a bit smaller than previous local camps I’ve attended, e.g. Transparency Camp or Gov 2.0 Camp, but the smaller crowd made the conversations a lot more manageable and allowed for more focused discussions.

The first session was an ad-hoc panel session led by Greg Elin with Jeremy Stone from Yahoo, Phil Dixon and Jeff Martin from Google, and myself representing Microsoft (which apparently did receive a bit of twitter traffic). The key take-away for me from that session was the fact that the “Big 3” internet companies really agree on a lot of what needs to be done from a technology viewpoint and that it would really benefit all involved stakeholders if we worked together to focus on openness, interoperability and repeatable solutions. Other interesting sessions that day focused on the use of mobile technologies for emergency communication, crowd-sourcing situational awareness etc.

Photo by Erik Endress

Another great aspect of Crisis Camp DC was global dimension. Emergencies are most often fairly local events, however Crisis management and communication is definitely a problems that knows no borders and best practices and solutions must be leveraged both nationally as well as internationally. To that end, we have very involved participations from The World Bank, USAID, and Red Cross.

As always, the value of the barcamp lays in the people you meet and the ideas that you form.  I walked out of there with a slew of action items that I’m really excited about, some of them captured here on the Crisis Camp DC’s Crisis Commons blog post.

Get and stay involved by:

http://crisiscampdc.ning.com/
Crisis Commons wiki
http://twitter.com/crisiscamp
CrisisCamp on Facebook

Other blog posts from/about the event:
Silona http://silona.org/crisiscamp/2009/06/15/
John Solomon In case of emergency blog