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Recent Articles by Nate Ritter
Community, Entrepreneurship, Business
In This Issue…
A Request for Help for our Team
October 17, 2008
Hi everyone,
Please listen for a second. I’ll try to keep this short, but if you don’t want to read anymore, please do me this one favor.
Click this link, register, and vote for our team and our idea:
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-
Now, for those of you who are a little hesitant, here’s why I want you to click, register and vote.
See, I’ve been a little busy these last few years down here in San Diego. Of course, I’ve always been busy, but this is different. A few years ago I started searching for something more than money. I’ve always been committed to my faith, but I’ve also been a pretty decent business-minded guy too. Even now I consult other small businesses and non-profits on revenue strategies. I know how to do that pretty well.
There’s something else I’ve been looking for. I’ve been looking for a team and an opportunity. A group of leaders who are self-sacrificing, looking for the betterment of others and willing to do what it takes to give a pure gift.
In 2003, San Diego went through some pretty ferocious fires. I heard about them and watched a little on CNN while I was at Western in Bellingham. But, I didn’t pay much attention, as most of didn’t who weren’t in the middle of the crisis.
But, then there were the floods in Centralia and Chehalis two different years that destroyed homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Now those, we paid attention to. We were in the middle of them. We had 18 inches in our home and it ruined everything.
Then there was Katrina, Hurricane Ike, the California Firestorm of 2007. It’s in everyone’s back yard now. It’s everyone’s problem at some point.
Here’s the problem we’re living with today.
The same problems exist today that have existed for a hundred years. We still aren’t able to communicate to the people we need to most in times of emergency.
When the phone lines are down, how do you call 911? When the internet is down, how do you find a map out of your area or the next shelter? When the radio stations and tv stations are retelling the same stories every 20 minutes, but not talking about your area and whether the fire is over that hill behind your house, how do you find out?
That’s the problem.
But now we’re living in a world of opportunity.
The world is crazy and always has been. But what’s changed in the last few years is the maturing of one of the worlds I’ve been living and working in for the past 15. The internet has become a big and awesome place. We’re now all publishing massive amounts of things. Text, videos, audio, location-aware devices like GPS is able to all be published. Real-time. Like our own TV broadcasts but more than just TV. It’s all possible today. Not only possible, but actually happening. And by more than just internet geeks like me.
Some people find all that scary. Those people are right about the possible threats of publishing so much info about ourselves. But there’s also a whole world of possibility that we haven’t tapped yet.
So here’s the point. With all this information being published by people in real-time, we have a chance to fix the problem. We have the opportunity to make sure the officials and groups who can help us in times of disasters have all the information possible. Every bit of it.
We need them to know when we’re out of water, food, shelter. We need them to know when fires cross the roads.
That’s why the team I mentioned earlier exists.
Together, we’re creating the world’s first service which will take all the things that we are publishing and turn it into something useful.
We’re already talking to official public information officers in San Diego and Houston, government officials, traditional media outlets, publicly funded media outlets, citizen journalists and so many more stakeholders. But this isn’t a company. It’s a project. This project should have existed years ago, but it doesn’t.
Soon it will.
We’re building it. For free.
I believe in this team. I believe they’ve sacrificed time, effort, and skills to help save their fellow neighbors during an emergency. This is a noble cause. They deserve this.
Please, go to this link. Register. Vote for our cause. We’re in the running right now for a $10,000 prize which will be split between 15 people. It’s worth about 1/100th of the amount of time they’re putting into it. It’s a drop in the bucket to them, but it would mean so much to validate their work.
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-
Please, take the time for us. I would really appreciate it.
And feel free to encourage your friends and family as well to do the same if you feel led.
Sincerely,
Nate Ritter
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The Peg is In: CrisisWire.com
October 16, 2008
I wrote before about the power of the project and what it means to be able to spend time where we think it’s important. You might have guessed that article was a precursor - that I was hinting at something bigger and more specific. You were right.
The point is there’s a tribe of people who want change. It’s not a group of people. It’s not a crowd of people. Crowds are faceless and groups are leaderless. We’ve got both faces and leaders. Every one of the individuals who are helping to make CrisisWire a success are leaders. These people knew change was needed and stepped up to the plate.
What is CrisisWire?
Let’s start with the real issue. What’s the problem? Why all the passion?
The problem is that in an emergency people can’t find their way. We’ve been given massive power to publish anything we please. We, the public, used our ability to publish our concerns and troubles during all the natural and unnatural disasters that have taken place over the past few years. But it’s not always helping. That’s one problem.
The other problem is on the other side of this situation. In an emergency, the people who can help don’t know about our problems in the midst of it all.
But, people know that this is a problem. And our group (thanks to Refresh San Diego) has stood up to answer the call.
We’re building a media aggregator of emergency/disaster information from every source possible including tv, radio, blogs, micro-publishing, governmental sources, traditional media, publicly funded media, and more. Published on one page per disaster and then separated into neighborhoods where possible, this application could put the info into the hands of the people who need it most.
Tribe Highlight
Peggy Gartin
One of the crazy-awesome people on our team is Peggy Gartin. She’s the one with the awesome shoes and jokes being muttered under her breath to people sitting next to her in a serious meeting.
Peggy is a fantastic leader. She’s a fanatic about eliminating AIDS and supporting those who live with it. She has a craving to “use [her] superpowers for good”.
Peggy is like many of us. We all have our “zombie fiction” (that thing we geek out about in private). Peggy and her husband collect Simpson action figures and host the Simpsons Collector Sector BBQ every Comic-Con here in San Diego. See, she’s normal too.
She’s also a hard core public news geek too. She ran a corporate intranet for a Fortune 15 company for years. She became a news junkie while doing this to keep up on the goings on. Her thirst for well timed, well written, well read pieces makes her an advocate for the people in these emergencies who are searching anywhere and everywhere for important up to date news on their area and situation. It’s good to have her on our side.
The reason I’m telling you all of this about her is because Peggy is one of the many leaders we have on our CrisisWire project team. This isn’t a company. It’s a project. Projects require leaders. Projects that have more than one person in them require many leaders. Peggy is a perfect example of the kind of leadership mentality we’re blessed to have on this project.
Everyone has a different role to play. Everyone on our team is a leader. And we’re thankful for that. That’s what makes this a tribe. Not a group, not a crowd. A tribe.
Peggy joined CrisisWire to have a hand in creating a good, useful web app that spreads “like wildfire (bad pun fully intended)”.
We’re with her.
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