First for the fun: a new machinima and live mixed video by Drax that features the TechSoup Community team behind the scenes working on the Nonprofit Commons in Second Life! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwAZ1-BstjE

And for the how and why of what we're doing in this community:
The people of TechSoup have been deeply saddened by the recent devastation in Haiti. We have been so inspired and impressed with the many ways folks are using mobile and other technologies to help with disaster relief. Together we have blogged about some of these relief efforts from the great folks at Ushahidi and the Extraordinaries as well as those of our donor partners.

The team at Ushahidi have adapted their mobile platform for crisit reporting and mapping for use in the situation following the devastating earthquake in Haiti:

http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

We encourage you to spread the word about this tool: Anyone in or outside of Haiti can use this tool via the web or on a mobile phone to make reports with voice, text or video; the reports will then be mapped and sources verified.  Ushahidi are hoping this adapted version of the tool, that's been used successfully in the recent Kenyan election crisis and the DRC war crisis, to help shepard people donation to relief efforts and mapping services to people urgently in need. 

The Red Cross Red Crescent and Reuters have launched a multimedia web documentary - that marks the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The centre-piece of "Surviving the Tsunami: Stories of Hope" are four very moving interviews with people who have survived this disaster which killed 230,000 people across 14 countries. The Indian Ocean Tsunami is the largest natural disaster in living history: http://tsunami.trust.org

I.  What does Cell Alert/FrontlineSMS offer?

Cell Alert/FrontlineSMS empowers people in poor areas by providing alerts on anything they want to track. Whenever our online searches find useful information, we forward alerts alerts through cell phone or email that lets users act in response to humanitarian crises, genocide, economic aid, medical supplies, loans, and agricultural market trends.

II.  Our origins and development

Cell Alertâ„¢ was launched as a non-profit service as a response to difficulties encountered by refugees coming to the Washington D.C. area from many different African countries.

This is the story of a 1 year 2 month old boy born to an 18 year old mother on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. This report/plea for assistance came in recently from a Philippine Physician at one of the remote rural clinics HELP visited during "Needs Assessment" operations recently.

Learn how you can help at the end of this story.

Camron Assadi, Deputy Internet Director of Mercy Corps talks to us about why email still works, the awesomeness of Google Grants, and how Gmail makes it easy to check your email in Tajikistan.

Could assetmap.org/uganda be used as a transition tool for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs? 

While the United Nations is routinely assailed for bureaucratic clunkiness, inefficiency, or even corruption, its important to recognize the absolutely vital role that its offices play in "complex man-made emergencies" (also known as "wars") and natural disaster relief.

Payson, AZ 12/10/07 - HELP (www.disasterlogistics.org) is pleased to announce that it is a recipient of a 2007 Award of Excellence in the mobile media ca

Last month's Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Ephrat Bitton of iCare and Jonathan Thompson of Humanlink talking about how to use the Web for disaster relief.

You can hear recordings of their presentations and their interviews with our Net Tuesday Podcaster, David Collin of FI Space, on the NetSquared Podcast.

"What we have done is we've deployed and completed the first of what we're calling a "doc in a box". It's a 20 foot cargo container, shipping container, like you see on ships going overseas. On the outside, it looks pretty much like any other container. On the inside is a complete medical clinic, complete with a lot of different telemedicine equipment and satellite uplink gear that enables us to bring a patient wherever this is dropped off, anywhere in the world."