Sim Day - outstanding teamwork!

The Silicon Valley Sim Day on September 19 was a tremendous success and a stellar example of how volunteers, small nonprofits, business partners, and tech experts can collaborate - not just for a demo or exercise, but in an emergency as well. As at the Portland Sim Day in June, the teamwork was extraordinary, especially given the fact that few of the participants had worked together before.

There are a great many thanks owed to a number of people and organizations, and we recognize them on our Events page. But I want to offer special thanks to:

• Don Bruce and the TechReach team for their hard work on infrastructure and setup
• Telenor Satellite Services for sponsoring the event
• Intuit, for the use of their fine facilities (and the parking lot Sim Day location)
• Stu Gannes of the Stanford Digital Vision program, for an excellent keynote presentation
• Peter Brooks for all his help with publicizing the event
• And of course all of those who exhibited and demoed their technologies, and those who gave presentations.

The Events page lists the participants, and we are loading the Powerpoint presentations as we receive them.

Sim Day received national press, triggered by Mike Langberg's article in the San Jose Mercury News on Sept 20. The Mountain View Village Voice is an example of local coverage - see the article by Alexa Tondreau - and there has been a wave of interest on the Internet and in blogs.

You are welcome to comment on this blog post, and we are especially interested to know (1) if you are interested in Webcast presentations from some of the participants - and which ones; and (2) if you think a Sim Day would be a good idea in a different city, and which organizations would join the bandwagon there.

Sim Day was more than interesting, it was fun. We are looking at ways to bring a "virtual Sim Day" using Web tools that are improving constantly, and which would be helpful (and even essential) in an actual crisis.

SimDay on video!

Well we did not get any of our own video posted but SimDay presenter Seth Mazow posted a great, short interview of Humaninet Director, Gregg Swanson over at his blog.

Check it out - http://ngimagination.blip.tv/file/77107/

Seth Mazow and Interplast

SimDay presenter and attendee Seth Mazow posted a recap of his impressions from SimDay on his blog. Take a read - Non-Governmental Imagination.

Thanks to the wonders of tagging and the built in feed reader in Thunderbird I found his post by reading a post from Beth Kanter on her blog.

SimDay Silicon Valley in the News

Thanks to Kristin at Inveneo we can point you to two articles about Sim Day Silicon Valley.

And the San Jose Mercury News article from September 20th - Calamity Strikes, tech strikes back.

Check out the Tech Chronicles article from September 12th.

Thanks Beth for the blog mention...

Special thanks to Beth Kanter for blogging about the HumaniNet SimDay event on her blog on NetSquared. Click here to check out her entry.

The folks over at NetSquared are working hard to capture success stories and lessons learned by nonprofits about the uses of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, photo sharing systems and social tagging experiments. We plan to share a bit about what it took for HNet to get up and running with a blog and Flickr stream before the SimDay event.

Photos from Silicon Valley Sim Day

Gregg has done a great job of learning to use the HumaniNet Flickr account and is already posting photos from the Sim Day set up on the Intuit Campus in Mountain View, California.

Check out new photos by clicking the link on the right nav bar or by click here - www.flickr.com/photos/humaninetpics

It has been an interesting learning experience setting up the HNet blog and Flickr account to use for the Sim Days. We all are learning how these tools can be put into the hands of staff working in the field. Expect more insights into how these tools can be used as we make more use of them over the coming days.

Volunteer team starts setup

On Monday afternoon, tech volunteers from TechReach International, HumaniNet, Inveneo, Green WiFi, Google, and others - from Seattle to Los Angeles - assembled at the Intuit campus in Mountain View to begin setup for Tuesday's Sim Day events. Although most of the volunteers are meeting each other for the first time, the cooperation couldn't be better.

Jeff Wishnie of Inveneo (see photo) has it right: "This is the best wired parking lot in North America - with wireless networks!

Check our blog on Tuesday for more pictures and on-the-scene updates . . . or if you are in the Bay area, come on over!

Sim Day getting closer!

Don Bruce, Brent Chapman, and the infrastructure team are in the final stages of preparing for Sim Day setup, which will be on Monday afternoon, Sept 18.

Please watch this blog for updates and comments from the setup team on Monday. We expect to post photos from the setup also. (Thanks to Teresa Crawford in Washington DC for designing the blog + Flickr pages.)

Representatives of the following NGOs and nonprofits plan to join us on Tuesday:

World Vision
International Medical Corps
Fritz Institute
Winrock International
Mission Aviation Fellowship (possible)
American Red Cross
ARES (Amateur Radio Disaster Services)
San Jose Office of Emergency Services
SF CARD
Benetech
Building Blocks International
CompuMentor
TechSoup
UC Santa Cruz
Cal State Monterey Bay

We expect a great turnout, including people from tech companies, community nonprofits, and government. Looking forward to seeing you all!

Gregg Swanson

Blog Launch

So this is our first post. We are going to be testing out blogging from the field and events so please be patient. This will not be a regularly updated blog but one we turn to from time to time as we work in the field, attend events and host our own gatherings.