Yeah a change of thread topic seems appropriate for the liaison discussion. This was all going to be discussed in more detail over the next couple days but now is fine too (it is still being worked out in detail but the basic framework has been figured out).
The idea of the liaisons is similar to the existing system, but slightly different. In this way it is really an evolution of existing procedures, rather than a radical restructuring of existing policy. The two key differences with existing policy are thus: 1) the liaison teams will be publicly listed on some kind of a page that says something like "person/people X are the liasons for NGO/Group Y" so that when the community wants to talk to Y they can easily look up who the appropriate liaisons are. The liasons will be long term with a specific NGO and so will develop an expertise in dealing with them. Their relationship will last longer than an individual activation and probably across many activations. 2) the liaisons will be much more engaged with the community and will try to "close the loop" on communication to make communications easier and faster. So rather than just having informal discussions on an ad-hoc basis, they will have regular meetings as both a liaison team (meeting with itself to keep everyone on the team current) as well as holding regular meetings with their NGO, and with the community (even when disasters aren't happening). This will keep the relationships active, keep everyone on the same page, and when a disaster does occur, the communication channels will be primed and ready to go, and everyone will know what the procedures are to communicate with our NGO partners. We also plan to set up liaison teams to facilitate communication with our own ground teams as well, to make these integrate more tightly into the wider community. This will give the ground teams more support from our volunteer base, as well as make the volunteers feel more valued, because they will see how their contributions help the ground teams on a regular basis. As for the issues surrounding activation, I totally agree, as does the Activation Working Group. In our last meeting we discussed both the notion of better relationships with our NGO partners as well as defined activation coordinators being designated as key elements in taking a run of the mill mapping project (which we are calling an HMP, humanitarian mapping project) to the status of formal activation. Our chatlog is available from the last meeting and is quite lengthy, but it is summarized in a list of 11 "bullet points" at the top of the IRC log page. Both the activation issues you describe, as well as the liaison system are outlined in these bullet points and more fully developed in the full IRC log. Link below: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Working_groups/Activation/meeting_2013-06-26 -AndrewBuck
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