Avian Influenza Capacity Map
Blimey, look what InterAction have gone and done – a GoogleMaps mash-up showing member agency capacity to respond to avian flu!
Check out the Avian Influenza Capacity Map – it’s nicely done, focused on a small number of pilot countries. One question I do have is: how can we use encourage the member agencies to use this as a planning tool, and not just as visibility for their projects? I’d be interested to hear thoughts about how useful it could be to prepare for the coming flupocalypse.
Hat tip to Mark Hammersley. Plus, I wish I hadn’t made up the word flupocalypse.
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That is awesome do you know if there is an Avain Flu outbreak RSS feed?
James
27 Oct 06 at 16:03
Nice, but I echo your comment: what does it help me do better? I would love to hear the developers perspective on it, but it seems Sanjana (ict4peace.wordpress.com) has the current monopoly on writing about humanitarian mashups. I would like to see the Aid Workers Network (www.aidworkers.net) membership mappified as well, but have not seen the case for it coherently presented… any takers?
Tom L
27 Oct 06 at 19:31
James – a bunch of different websites are providing RSS feeds, although I cannot vouch for any of them. Fluwikie (http://www.fluwikie.com) does a good job of feeding a lot of info, but I think it demonstrates the problem of filtering information. RSS does not actually solve information overload, of course.
Tom – in this case I think InterAction are trying to present their membership for the benefit of a general audience. I think this is worth exploring in the context of ECB (http://www.ecbproject.org) disaster preparedness; potential uses would be looking at resources available for deployment in a response, or mapping whether agencies have contingency plans and so forth. Both of these would be to help us visualise gaps and weaknesses – the usual co-ordination nonsense.
And it turns our somebody already made up the word flupocalypse.
Paul Currion
30 Oct 06 at 15:37
One of the nice things that the Drupal content management system can do pretty much out of the box is attach latitude/longtitude or geocoded information to any piece on content within its system. This can be mapped onto Google Maps, and its display interactively filtered by any other attributes you give the content eg. date, incident type, distance from etc. I’m sure in the right hands this has a lot of potential to help cut through the information overload, keep info easily updated and uncluttered, and am willing to put up some sandboxes for testing the idea out.
Tom L
30 Oct 06 at 17:31
Tom, that’s a great offer. You could start with the security incident reports from Sudan…
We should also bring in the BrightEarthProject (which bizarrely I am also involved in) who are looking at similar functions. If we can put something together, I can present it to the ECB agencies and see if it flies. Like R Kelly.
Paul Currion
31 Oct 06 at 15:14
We know that in Egypt now many cases infected by Avian Influenza, so ,how can use remote sensing and Gis to predict, monitoring and control Avian Influenza.
sowilem
13 Feb 07 at 22:46
Hi Sowilem
INSTEDD, the new project that the Google Foundation has started up, is looking at just that. They’ve floated the idea of an integrated online collaboration platform leveraging Google’s existing resources, including Google Earth. No concrete announcements yet, but they will surely come up with some interesting proposals.
You might also want to check out Declan Butler’s work with avian flu maps – it’s not quite what you’re looking for, but it gives an idea of what can be done quite simply.
Paul Currion
15 Feb 07 at 10:47