Person Finder Sydney team

From Random Hacks of Kindness
Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

[edit] Sydney team

[edit] Saturday

Here is a quick outline of what we did on Saturday:

9h30 - 11h30: brainstorming and discussion on the requirements. We explored the Sahana demo site + the RedCross family links missing persons site.

11h30 - 12h30: having a closer look at the Google Finder website + PFIF data format (the FAQ is here). It looks like some valuable thing to do would be to:

  • interface the Missing persons registry in Sahana with the Googlefinder database
  • interface the RedCross database with the Google finder database

13h00 - 15h00: more digging on the internet. We found out that:

  • This page presents the main initiatives on finding Persons using the Google Person Finder aggregator.
  • There is an ongoing mobile project to be able to update the Person Finder repository with data from a mobile.
  • there is already a project to enhance Sahana with a PFIF module. Here is the list of all standard formats supported by Sahana
  • there is a twitter-pfif project to grab tweets, transform them to PFIF format and submit them to the Google Person Finder website

We're now thinking that, at the moment, the best thing we can accomplish on the week-end is an extension of the Person Finder interface to improve what was done with the twitter-to-pfif project. This Java class does the translation of Twitter messages to PFIF records. We think that we can improve the provided information by creating a service with an API that will:

15h00 - 17h00: More internet digging based on the idea that it should be possible to enhance the PFIF data once given a twitter id for example. It turns out that this is pretty hard to do:

  • there's no site offering a public API for searching all social networks at once
  • we would like to be able to enrich the data with the person address. But there's no worldwide centralized White Pages service providing that data.

Eventually we could try to downsize our goal to a simple thing: add the picture url of the person given its twitter id. The search for possible "social links" could be done by means of the Google Social Graph API.

17h00 - 18h00: Doing more research on:

  • SwiftRiver based on Ushadidi, this platform allows to filter, tag and validate vast sources of information coming-up when there's catastrophic event. We're not sure how this could really be leveraged to help find/declare missing people, unless names are explicitly specified in the streams
  • Salmon protocol, a protocol to have secure blogging conversations across different streams
  • StatusNet, a micro-blogging plateform to share micro-message over the net with your community at large. Again, I don't see really how this could help the Missing Person registries around

[edit] Sunday morning

9h00 - 9h30: Update about other projects status, read the DC page.

Doing some thinking overnight we guess that are 2 objectives worth following today:

  • adding the photo url to the PFIF record created by the twitter-pfif project
  • using the Google Social Graph API to notify relatives that someone is missing

The EPIC website specifies the format of Twitter messages for crisis situations.

9h30 - 12h30:

  • Forked the code from the twitter-to-pfif project here
  • installed the Google Engine Eclipse plugin from the Eclipse update site.
  • created a Google App to deploy it
  • next thing is to find out how to send it relevant data and observe the results to be able to start testing any kind of modification

12h30 - 13h30:

  • Discussed with Alice from the DC team and agreed on the following objectives, by order of priority:
    • Person Finder Dev environment prepare the code and the testing environment so that it's easier for people taking over this project to evolve it
      • how to get the code
      • how to install the development environment
      • how to run a local AppEngine for testing. That instance can run the PersonFinder code to check the creation of PFIF records
    • genericize the twitter-to-pfif service url so that it can make non-haiti related searches for tweets
    • from a twitter message mentioning that someone is missing, giving his name or facebook id:
      • get the Facebook profile of that person and fill out the pfif record with: the photo url and name
      • if the name only is known and there is some ambiguity on the facebook id, send a message to the Twitter user, asking to fill in a record on the PersonFinder site
    • in any case, notify the twitter user that a pfif record exists on the PersonFinder site and that he/she is encouraged to update the informations there
    • store more information about the reporter in the pfif record
      • so that he can be notified on Facebook (for example) when there are updates on the PersonsFinder registry
    • use the Social Graph API to notify the people knowing the missing person that they can help with the search

[edit] Sunday afternoon

13h30 - 17h00:

Started the refactoring and documentation of the twitter-to-pfif project. Interesting Javadoc to have a look at is:

Now the handover is to the DC team. What has been done here in Sydney can be seen as the "twitter scraper" that they want to come up with.

[edit] Video presentation of the project

If you don't mind a bit of French accent :-)

Retrieved from "http://wiki.rhok.org/Person_Finder_Sydney_team"
Personal tools