Data | Superstorm Research Lab

Jul 29

Interview with Jessica Lawrence, Executive Director of New York Tech Meetup

"There were three methods of getting information. There was the formal form, which I would say actually was the smallest thing in terms of the way that people got in touch with us. And that was more of the small businesses that had heard about us on the news or, you know, heard about us through the community type of thing. And then there was a lot of social referral in terms of people seeing us say something on Twitter or Facebook, and actually reaching out to those people and saying what could we help you with? And then the third way was just that direct community of me reaching out to someone and starting the conversation with Rachel, the Chief Digital Officer, or someone from our board of directors running across someone while they were out doing volunteer work like helping to clean up, running across someone who was running a volunteer center who needed cell phones, and like referring them back to me. So there was a lot of different sort feedback loops happening."

Jul 24

Interview with Organizer for OccupyData

"The data was not looking good— a lot of it hadn’t been digitized.A lot of the way data was collected, various formats, various granularities, it wasn’t standardized, so even in common boxes you could have somebody putting somebody’s phone number. And, you know, that type of information is sensitive. Maybe it’s not necessarily a security issue, but you know it can certainly be sensitive. We’re actually meeting on Monday to look at some of the data. I think we’re just going to make sure every single record has nothing personally identifiable and then we’ll post it and make it public."

Jul 24

Interview with Occupy Data member working with Occupy Sandy

" I'm trying to remember from social media my perception at the time. The only thing that comes to mind specifically is the sort of the needs hashtag that had come up that I think was effective at both highlighting needs and also getting people to respond to those needs. And I think I was surprised by the effectiveness of the hashtag in doing that because a hashtag can be a pretty blunt tool given that anybody can use it for any purpose that has nothing to do with the hashtag itself. And it's also very limited in terms of how much data it can contain in a tweet, for example. But I was pretty impressed with how that was able to manage so much of the communication load in a very informal way."

Jul 24

Interview with Edward Malave, New Church International, Coney Island

"We have the Verrazano Center Rotary Club is working with us. We have the Red Cross was able to give us a couple -- a truck full of assistants. City Harvest is going to work with us also bringing us material and food, a lot of food for the families. Last -- we have been providing food at an average of 100 families per day. And we do give on a weekend, you know like, on a Saturday easily we could give 250, 300 boxes of food to the people. And interestingly enough people are still learning that we are here so we are still getting a lot of new people that didn’t know that we were here."

Jul 24

Interview with two Occupy Sandy New Jersey organizers

"One of the things we've been starting to explore is helping to develop worker cooperatives because there are so many unemployed people with skills ... I'm really excited about the opportunity to give- to create jobs for people, to create a livelihood that doesn't involve the existing system and doesn't involve people being exploited by people, people making opportunities for themselves."

Jul 24

Interview with Devin Balkind, Sarapis & Occupy Sandy

"And it was pretty frightening, because a disaster takes place and an inevitable outcome is that a lot of organizations that don’t normally communicate with each other are going to communicate with each other, which is abide by the nature of a disaster."

Jul 23

Interview with Andrea Ciannavei, InterOccupy, Occupy Sandy inbox volunteer

"My job specifically was to deal with the email address that everyone emailed for questions. So I was working, like, from seven in the morning--I'm not kidding--seven in the morning to, like, two in the morning every night for two weeks. Like I didn't leave my house. …So the emails that were coming in were like anywhere from “how can I help” to “you guys aren't doing enough,” to [laughter]…to “I have a truck load of shit from Ohio; how can I get it to you?” But also we would get these frantic emails from people, like “my uncle's in a wheelchair on the twenty-fifth floor in Chinatown, and I'm worried about him, and I can't get down there because I have kids.'"