About the SBTF
<p style="text-align: justify;">Live maps are becoming increasingly important to organizations in the humanitarian, human rights, election monitoring and media space. Most of the time, however, these organizations do not have bandwidth to dedicate existing staff and resources to create live maps. Nor do they have access to a skilled volunteer community for support. The purpose of the Standby Volunteer Task Force is therefore to provide dedicated live mapping support to such organizations, particularly local organizations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Task Force, which was launched at the 2010 International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010), currently comprises nearly 700 skilled volunteers with dedicated experience in online Crisis Mapping. Existing Task Force volunteers are from 60 different countries and have been involved in crisis mapping projects for Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, Sudan, Australia, Libya, New Zealand, Syria, the USA and Somalia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Crisis Mapping is composed of four key components: information collection, visualization, analysis and response. This explains why the Task Force takes a modular approach comprising the following Teams, which can be activated in combination or individually: technology, media monitoring, sms, verification, reports, satellite, translation, geo-location, analysis and humanitarian.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Task Force only works with open, non-proprietary data. Note however that all Task Force volunteers are required to sign a code of conduct based on Red Cross principles for data privacy and general conduct. The Task Force also responds to ad hoc mapping requests such as the recent request to map over 3,000 polling stations in the Sudan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Read more about the Standby Taskforce on our <a href="http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/">blog</a>.</p>
