The way we see it, Rockaway faces two major post-Sandy issues.

We need an emergency plan in case of another storm and we need an organized way to follow  the rebuilding process.

So, as part of the hackathon festivities, we are going to launch two major design challenges that will focus on these problems. The goal is to come up with a solution in prototype form by the end of the day on June 1, 2013, but we need your help.

For these prototypes to come together, we need the unique expertise of two groups: tech and community geniuses. We need the tech folks to help us figure out how to actually implement these ideas, and we need the community to provide local intel. None of this works without you guys.

On that note, we are posing two challenges unique to post-Sandy Rockaway. Both challenges came out of our community design workshop.

 1. Crowdsourcing Emergency Response

Challenge contributed by: Rockaway Help and Team Rubicon 

One liner: Build a tool that leverages community input to develop an emergency response plan for Rockaway.

This challenge is to develop a community-based tool to assist in the hours right before and after a disaster. (Team Rubicon will be sending someone to help us work on this challenge.)

As you know, major organizational problems arose immediately after the storm in the 72-hour window before official aid groups arrived in force.

We didn’t know if we could drive over the Cross Bay or Marine Park Bridge. We were worried about possible gas explosions. We didn’t know if we should flee before the next high tide or if it was safe to drink the water. We also weren’t positive who stayed in town and we weren’t sure who to check on or who needed medicine, food or other help.

The aim of this challenge is to develop a community-based plan for smarter disaster response so that next time (and we hope there isn’t a next time) we’re ready to launch a response that is led by locals.

Basically this is a plan for storm triage. This may mean organizing a series of “block captains” who get information from a central location and distribute that intel and assistance to people on their block before, during and after a storm. Maybe we can get these block captains access to solar generators or mobile wifi units to help facilitate hyperlocal communication and immediate response.

Too many people were in the dark about resources and information in the immediate aftermath of Sandy and we want to make sure that never happens again.

2. Crowdsourcing Community Rebuilding

Challenge contributed by: Rockaway Help

One liner: Build an online data visualization tool that asks public and private organizations to input information about rebuilding projects throughout the peninsula.

Photo Courtesy of @phrocka

Anyone who has been to a Community Board 14 meeting can tell you the rebuilding process is complicated. Things change constantly and there are a lot of players.

One day we think Hesco barriers are a go, the next day it seems coastal forests are all the rage, then we think it’ll be baffle walls or trapbags or concrete boardwalks. It is confusing and the confusion leads to misinformation which could lead to a very frustrated community.

We go to every meeting and even we can’t keep exact track of all the changing rebuilding plans, costs and timelines. It is also hard to keep track of what has been approved or simply proposed.

The goal of this challenge is to centralize and organize communication around rebuilding to make it a partnership, not something that happens behind closed doors. This challenge focuses on communication, accountability, transparency and community partnerships.

This tool would combine a visualization and a community forum to solicit community input. It also widens participation because it isn’t restricted to those who are able to show up to every meeting. Anyone with an internet connection can access this information so no one gets left in the dark.

This visualization could include:

Information about what hard and soft infrastructure already exists along the shoreline.

Elevation, FEMA flood zone and population data.

Visualizations of which agencies are responsible for particular areas. (For example, sand is Army Corps, street damage is DOT, beach walls is Parks, etc).

Different colors for proposed ideas and approved plans.

An explanation of the project including a timeline, projected completion dates, contact person and costs.

A public forum option for people to comment and engage with each other around each project.

Help us figure out what these prototypes should look like: Join us!

Ultimately, these challenges are blank slates. The above ideas are just that….ideas. They will change as the community provides input and the tech community starts prototyping.

We hope our hack will be one of those amazing NYC experiences where everyone comes together in the full spirit of collaboration. Please join us. We need your help. Learn more and sign up here.

Plans are coming together for the Rockaway Civic Hack Day LEARNING LAB – and we are getting excited. We have a strong line up of workshops specifically crafted to help people in Rockaway get up to speed on web literacy. Here are 5 reasons why YOU should attend:

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10181752@N03/1350042168/

1.  You need to learn how to back up your photos, important papers and documents online so that it’s safe, secure and maintains it’s privacy.  After the hurricane, many of us were left with soaked photo albums, ripped photos, or even lost birth certificates (gulp). Don’t let this happen again. We will have a workshop dedicated to teaching you how to scan, photograph and save your data on to the “cloud”.

2.  You want to become a citizen journalist. Explore using social media tools such as facebook, twitter and instagram to document, advocate and become a resource in Rockaway. We will be having professional journalists teach you techniques and industry tricks to reporting and getting your word out there.

3. Your website and web presence is not what it should be. You know it, but you don’t know how to fix it or what should be fixed. Come to the website clinic to show professional designers your websites and get feedback and concrete actions items for how to improve the web presence of your organization, business or personal site.

4. You just wanna learn how to hack.  We’ve got your back here. We can teach you how to hack a website so that you learn the basics of HTML – the language used to write web pages. We will be using tools such as the Mozilla X-Ray Goggles to help you look under the hood of webpages.

5. Navigating the web is challenging. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is trust-worthy on the web. Join us for an investigation on nonsense detection – so you have the confidence to know when a website is trustworthy.

Learn more about the event and sign up here

During my day job, I am a designer at Mozilla and I advocate for learning how to understand, contribute and code the web so that you can protect it. I often talk about how the web is a hand crafted community that can only represent the world that we live in when individuals build webpages, so that they can make their mark and be part of the conversation. Six months ago, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, it devastated- and in many ways destroyed the community that I grew up in – Rockaway Beach, New York. I went to my neighborhood and saw that people could not communicate with eachother or the world outside Rockaway- no cell phones, no internet, no power. When I returned home I built a small website – rockawayhelp.com just to give people the information they needed and to provide a way for families of locals to feel more connected. It was this act of webmaking that launched my participation in protecting and rebuilding my physical community.

I feel that the work that I do in the open source community and the open educational resource community prepared me to take on this small bit of leadership. Rockawayhelp.com to date has a minimum of 6,000 hits a day. Our facebook account has over 10,500 users and our twitter account has over 1200 users- not ground breaking, but it’s something. We put up a small volunteer form and in the first day got 600 volunteers. We put up a help request form and got 150 requests. We have active conversations on our social media channels and have a real active presence on the physical streets of our community- going into houses, cleaning out basements, connecting people who don’t know where their family members are and working with the vets at Team Rubicon and the software developers at Palantir.  Here are 5 lessons that I learned as a designer – that helped translate into community engagement and activism:

Lesson 1: Working in the Open- Creates Community

When I was sitting at home worrying if my parents survived the hurricane – I went online and connected with friends and other Rockaway residents who were watching the local news and having panic attacks about their homes and families. We shared information, brainstormed ideas and gave each other the confidence to venture back into our community when the storm ended. I was scared, but knew that I had an online community. This is something that I learned while working at Mozilla – if you work in the open, you can share information and connect to a like- minded community. We do this daily with our Webmaker activities, starting with Hackasaurus two years ago- at first it was just some geeky librarians, Atul and myself – but then it expanded into this massive OER that people immediately responded to because we blogged, shared free resources and created content as a group – failing publicly and then iterating and improving publicly.

Lesson 2:  Leverage the Expertise of Others

So this one was a no  brainer, but in a disaster like this a lot of things needed to be done – and quickly I saw that I was not good at everything. Just for the website effort- we leveraged Blue State Digital who kindly volunteered with us and helped us to set up a database – an effort lead by Matt Kelley. Additionally, we had some who were good at blogging and others who were on the ground and could give us up to the minute info to communicate out. And when we got those volunteers — and saw we couldn’t figure out how to efficiently organize 1000 + people in one day – we partnered with Team Rubicon who had systems in place and a plan. This is commonplace in tech, you can start a project on git, and then get a collaborator to take on parts and be your wing-man.

Lesson 3: Put out Rough Prototypes- and Iterate

Doing software design – I usually throw out an idea that is crap,  then user test it- figure out what part of it works, and then build on that idea to make a new prototype. It’s messy – but it works because you get your concept out there in the hands of real users. We are constantly doing this at Rockawayhelp. We really have never dealt with any of this before- so we have to be alright with trying things out, failing a little, and building a more efficient way of doing things. A simple example of this was that we first were standing in front of the local church and collecting addresses for people who needed help and then assigned them to crews of volunteers. We quickly learned that this wasn’t the best way to go about things because we were too few people to get everything done – so we streamlined the system by creating forms.

Lesson 4: Peer Mentoring =  Best way to Learn a new skill

After the storm, I worked with Palantir on mapping needs and getting help out to the community. I learned their system pretty fast by getting mentoring from Alec and Dave, who are experts in the software. There are also a ton of things that I had no clue how to do – like how to break up concrete or the best way to lift heavy furniture – that we have to do over and over and over  – so I ask people who look like they know what they are doing to teach me and then I try it out myself. It’s just like a hackjam – where I am learning how to code something by sitting near a code ninja.


Lesson 5: Show Up, Be Present- Get Social Karma

Every good hacker knows that they need street cred – whether that is just being at conferences or making yourself known through some form of social currency (like badges) and that holds true for community activism. You need to walk the walk- pick up a shovel, be authentic and ultimately make an effort to proactively rebuild and empower your community.

Just like the web and open source world, your community and neighborhood is hand crafted and it can only be protected if you learn the inner-workings of it and geek out a little by making it all that it could be.

How can YOU get involved?

On June 1, we at Rockaway Help will be hosting a hackathon in conjunction with the National Day of Civic Hacking. You can read about the event here This is an extension of the work that we have been doing throughout the past 6 months to create pathways for locals to have access to transparent, hyperlocal information and resources. Please consider thinking global and hacking local with us in June.

RSVP  here.

More Hackathon details here.

Transportation from Brooklyn and/or Manhattan and plenty of food will be provided. We also hope you’ll join us for an after-party for the full Rockaway experience.  Details TBA.

The event was sponsored by Mozilla and The New York Community Trust.

Our goal was simple: Engage the community in thinking about web apps and tools that could have helped before, during and after Sandy. We’ve spent a lot of time going over what went wrong — in meetings, at home, in bars, at parties — but we hoped to really work towards solutions inside the sunny dome.

And despite the beautiful weather, we were surrounded by reminders of what we went through six months before. The boardwalk, ripped apart, was still under construction. Sand swirled around. The ocean seemed closer than ever.

This was the point — not to forget what happened, but to grow from it. We learned so many lessons from the storm, and we hope to turn those lessons into solid tools that can be used not just in our community, but in any community changed forever by a natural disaster.

Photo credit: Damian Ewens, Go Codery

After a short introduction, we began the brainstorming session. We all gathered around two black poster boards on a table and, using bright sticky notes, wrote down all the issues and problems faced after Sandy.

The responses varied from no central hub for relief to no working phone lines; from “fix Beach 116th Street” to “too many basements.”

We then categorized the responses into four main categories: Emergency preparedness, open news and communication, disaster response and maintaining community integrity. We broke off into groups, and the real problem-solving began.

I worked with “maintaining community integrity,” which sounds more vague than it is. There were issues in Rockaway long before the hurricane hit us, and these problems still exist. What we were left with after October 29 was more of the same, with new things to worry about — insurance rates going up, a stronger case for coastal protection, the threat of it happening again and again.

But we’re also a more unified community than ever before, with renewed interest in making things work on the peninsula, and we can use that to our advantage. After laying out all our ideas, we came up with a cool crowd-sourced guide to Rockaway that would be a mobile app as well as a website. Want to know if the A train is running? Want some local advice on best slice of pizza? It would all be in the app.

We sketched out our design ideas on mocked-up iPhones and browsers, having fun with where we’d put the surf cam and how our logo would look.

We then presented in front of the dome, starting with our process and ending with our product. Other tables presented, and we heard about an open source database of homeowners that can be accessed by a number of volunteer groups, and an idea for “block captains” in case of another emergency.

From here, we’re going to continue the conversation online before our big hackjam in June. People can still submit their issues and thoughts on our Facebook page, and we’ll host a few Google+ hangouts with residents and tech experts to see what we can mash up.

On June 1, in conjunction with the National Day of Civic Hacking,  we will then get to work, and hopefully get to unveil some of these apps and sites throughout the summer.