Luis Capelo (@luiscape) of Digital Humanitarian Network loves volunteers. DH exists to stimulate more interaction between humanitarian volunteers and large humanitarian institutions.

There's information overload in humanitarian responses. How do we collect and make sense of all this information? Luis credits humanitarian orgs with doing the hard work of adapting, but it's a rough sea to navigate. Volunteer & Technical Communities thrive in this environment. They're nimble, lightweight, and advanced, technically. Luis thinks its time to stop questioning whether VT&Cs can help, and begin to dive into how these groups can collaborate.

DH aims to create a consortium of groups that faciliates between the two worlds, and reduces the cost of collaboration
They have a simplified activation process: activate volunteers, triage the volume, and forward them to VT&Cs. They've produced a guide to manage the activation of VT&Cs.

Hi Sasha, Becky, Class, and World,

My name's Arlene Ducao. I'm a second year Media Lab student in the Info Eco (http://eco.media.mit.edu) group. I'm looking forward to participating in the class in some way, particularly in the civic maps session; maps are at the central part of my thesis OpenIR (http://openir.media.mit.edu) and my Brooklyn design studio (http://dukode.com). I will conduct OpenIR user studies in Indonesia in January, and I'm hoping this class will give me a broad understanding of Civic Media in preparation for the study.

This infographic from Floor Gem blasts the Transportation Security Administration's prodigious terribleness (prodigious in the sense that the TSA is a terribleness prodigy, on the level of Bobby Fischer and chess). There's nothing that inherently lends this data to the infographic form. It's flawed. There's nothing that its graphicality adds to its data, except that it's just so good-looking, its imperfections don't matter. It affects you. You remember it. And that's really what counts when it comes to communicating data.

Earlier this week we hosted a Hacks/Hackers meetup where I offered some Data Therapy to attendees. It was a great chance for me to target my efforts to encourage more creative data presentation at a particular audience - journalists and data scientists. We had a engaging workshop with about 100 people in attendance - lots of insightful questions and conversations about how to tell stories better with data.

image by @AlohaKarina

Data Therapy is my ongoing effort to bridge the gap between data presentation tools and folks that aren't data geeks. As more and more tools lower the barrier to entry for creating data presentation, we need to help burgeoning data scientists learn how to pick the appropriate techniques for presenting their data to their audience, based on the data and their goals

In my nearly four years here, I've seen the rise of some great solutions to communications challenges.

MailChimp and other email marketing platforms have made signing up and emailing friends and followers dead simple while avoiding the worst practices that lead to spamhood.

Twitter not only works as a broadcast medium but also makes rebroadcasting more respectable than it had been. (You think I'm kidding, but older professional communications folks still reflexively hesitate, wondering if featuring others' news weakens one's own brand or, worse, constitutes a copyright violation.)

Eventbrite helps manage ticketing and major event promotion without ever having to print out a spreadsheet, set up a cost object, or beg a former cop to help guard a cash box.