As a way to spend a Sat­ur­day I should really spend with my fam­ily and doing chores, attend­ing the Bridg­ing the Gap Think Tank wasn’t too bad an option. Sure, fam­ily is (almost) always bet­ter, but I’m pas­sion­ate about this stuff.

BGTT crowd

I was sur­prised to find there was a rather heav­ier pres­ence of gov­ern­ment folk in atten­dance — NSW Rural Fire Ser­vice, EMSINA, the ABC, Vic­to­rian Depart­ment of Jus­tice and Emer­gency Ser­vices Com­mis­sioner, NGOs includ­ing local level Red Cross and com­mu­nity folk includ­ing Open­StreetMap, Standby Task Force, EveryMap and Green Cross. There was also a pretty wide mix of devel­oper and user-​​level types in the small crowd (around 20).

The morn­ing ses­sion con­sisted of a num­ber of short talks cov­er­ing var­i­ous fac­tors and actors in cri­sis map­ping includ­ing Cri­sis­Com­mons, Red Cross, Open­StreetMap, Lew Short from NSW RFS, Lisa Wil­helmseder from Green Cross, Mau­rits van der Vlugt from Bush­fire­Con­nect and Monique Potts from the ABC.

I also spoke briefly about gov­ern­ment becom­ing more famil­iar with col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­ni­ties and the work I’m doing with the Asia Pacific Civil-​​Military Cen­tre of Excel­lence.

After lunch, we broke into a num­ber of streams — a Ushahidi 101 ses­sion for those that wanted to learn more about that plat­form and a BarCamp-​​like ses­sion for tech and cod­ing as well as bet­ter pol­icy and busi­ness prac­tice in cri­sis mapping.

I got involved in a deep dis­cus­sion about national resilience and get­ting the com­mu­nity involved in plan­ning around the sub­ject. Pro­posed by Pat McCormick from Vic­to­rian DoJ, we dis­cussed mat­ters of tools, inform­ing and engag­ing the com­mu­nity, spa­tial acti­va­tion on data, con­nect­ing with the dis­con­nected, pol­icy reform, incor­po­rat­ing hyper­con­nec­tiv­ity into activ­i­ties such as FEMA’s National Level Exer­cise and more.

Over­all, a great day spent with moti­vated peo­ple. I’ve embed­ded a track of the day I put together at Storify below.