Introduction Thread!

[Mc4llister]

Developers, say hi to Peace Corps!

[Mc4llister]

My name is Matthew McAllister, I'm the Special Assistant in the Office of Innovation at Peace Corps. I'm focused on crowd sourcing mobile applications and building up the GIS and mapping capabilities of our team. Looking forward to meeting folks here!

[gabrielkrieshok]

Hey everyone!

I'm Gabriel Krieshok (@krieshok) - I'm a program specialist at Peace Corps and work primarily on tech-related projects. I'm really interested in bridging the gap between technology and social & economic development - be it through better data, tools, and/or perspectives! I look forward to hearing from all of you!

[Neetuj]

Hi
My name is Neetu Jain and I am a software enginner at IBM(Softlayer) and i resonate with idea of "bridging the gap between technology and social & economic development " completely. I would love to explore how i can help (outreach, organisation, hackathons, indivsudal contributions e.t.c )

[Mc4llister]

Hi @Neetuj, thanks for your introduction! We just started on a web dashboard to measure Peace Corps' contribution to OpenStreetMap. If you, or folks you know, have skills that could advance that project, would love your input. https://github.com/PeaceCorps/OSM-Dashboard/issues

We also just got some recognition for the work happening on the Medlink project. That project has a few open tickets as well, as we look ahead to v2 of that project. https://github.com/PeaceCorps/medlink

More problem statements coming to GitHub soon too! We'd love to take these to hackathons and get prototypes going out of those when they're live here.

Thanks again.

[CindyFowler]

Hi everyone,

I'm Cindy Fowler and I'm a Senior GIS Analyst at NOAA. I am a soon-to-be Peace Corps volunteer going to Mexico on March 2, 2015 as an IT/GIS Specialist. Woohoo! I've been working in the area of GIS capacity building for the the last gazillion years. My current work is focused on marine spatial planning (MarineCadastre.gov).

I saw the latest blog from DigitalGov.gov on Peace Corps Medlink.... very cool and I assume I will be using it next year. I'm new to Github though I have been aware of APIs for some time. We do map services for our project to share geospatial data, but have plans to open up some additional data later next year. Of course I will be with Peace Corps then (Woohoo again) and will admire NOAA work from afar.

Look forward to learning more about GitHub and Peace Corps.

[Mc4llister]

@CindyFowler,

Great to hear from you! Our office is looking at a ton of GIS work right now as well, actually. We'd love to connect with you before you head out and talk about the projects we have underway and the ones we have on the 2015 road map.

Please feel free to shoot me an email to schedule a time to meet/call: [email protected]

Looking forward to connecting.

[cartographiti]

Hi all,

I'm Clay Harris and I'm a GIS Analyst at The College of William and Mary and I'll be serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer and GIS Specialist in Mexico this spring (Hi @CindyFowler, I'm looking forward to meeting you!). Most of my research has focused on globalizing food production economies in Latin America and their impacts on land use/cover change.

I'm looking forward to hearing more about GIS and other tech projects going on at Peace Corps.

[choquette33]

Welcome @cartographiti ! I just emailed you and @CindyFowler yesterday about Duolingo so we are already working together. I want to figure out some creative way to intro GIS to the your group (and ultimately other groups) during the lead-up to staging. If you have any ideas on how to do that.... I'm all ears.

[cartographiti]

Hey @choquette33! Mapschool is a great introduction to GIS and is available in Spanish (among several other languages). Imagine having a Mapschool for every Peace Corps language! A Gentle Introduction to GIS over at QGIS covers a greater number of topics in more detail (also available in Spanish). For our group specifically, maybe we could make a Crowdmap to practice making maps and to share information about ourselves with each other?

[CindyFowler]

Hi guys, looking forward to working together....

just brainstorming ... How about a simple scavenger hunt to find places (could be in teams).... or a map project for points of interest? ( PC office, your house, nearest mercado, measure distance to city center, etc). It's not any high level GIS but maybe a nice way to introduce a little mapping into everyone's skill set?

<Cindy - from my iPad>

On Jan 27, 2015, at 7:22 PM, Clay Harris [email protected] wrote:

Hey @choquette33! Mapschool is a great introduction to GIS and is available in Spanish (among several other languages). Imagine having a Mapschool for every Peace Corps language! A Gentle Introduction to GIS over at QGIS covers a greater number of topics in more detail. For our group specifically, maybe we could make a Crowdmap to practice making maps and to share information about ourselves with each other?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[jhannah]

o/ Howdy. :) I've been coding / databasing for 20 years. My son graduates high school this year, so I'm hoping to shift my full time focus to an international relief agency. (WFP? UNHCR? Supply chain management?) I'm sure somewhere there are rooms of people who could make use of my skill set. I haven't found those specific people yet... :) twitter.com/jayhelping

[choquette33]

Nice to meet you. Welcome to the PC Family

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

[spepoy]

Hi my name is Seth Pepoy. I have an Associates degree in Computer Forensics and a Bachelors degree in IST.

[varshiniramesh]

Hi all, I am learning and working with python/Django for a few months and liked it ever since. Looking for projects that can give me experience, skills and that serves to bring a change in the real world. Ping me or help me get started at [email protected]

[choquette33]

Hello Everyone- We just uploaded a bunch of minor tweaks to our medlink application that might be worth looking at to see if you can help. They are all under the label "easy pickens" https://github.com/PeaceCorps/medlink/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen