Description

As the Community Service Liaison for the Graduate Urban Affairs and Planning Association, I realized it was going to be logistically impossible to get a group of students from the Urban Affairs and Planning Department together to do a group volunteer event after Hurricane Sandy. The city was logistically tricky to navigate because we all live in different boroughs of NYC, as well as, in NJ and north of the City. So to help students find their way to volunteer opportunities around NYC, Long Island and NJ, I made a publicly accessible Google map to help students interested in volunteering with the recovery effort find opportunities close to where they live. I just kept updating it as students shared opportunities and as I searched for more events using social media, local blogs and news outlets. I shared the map with the alumni and student for the Urban Affairs and Planning (UAP) Department and posted on Facebook and Twitter. The students and alumni of the department spread the info far and wide and friends shared it via Facebook. Also, several local news blogs and other users on Twitter picked up the link through the #VolunteerSandy and #SandyVolunteer hash tags and started sharing the map.

Shortly after I send the map out, the map had over 50,000 people viewing it each day during the weekend after the hurricane. The next week I had several people at work and school tell me that they used it to volunteer over the weekend or were planning to stop by a volunteer or donation site near their home. The high number of site visits on the map and the fact that I updated it nearly every few hours the first few days was a cue that the map was kept current and a useful tool. Because of the high viewership of the map, Google software engineers contacted me directly asking if she and her team could add the map as a layer on the Google.org Crisis Map for Superstorm Sandy. I gave them permission to add it as a layer and they worked with me to develop a series of forms for the general public to enter volunteer opportunities, donation sites and clean up events directly to the map. We spent the weekend after the storm transferring the original Google Map from the My Maps feature into a spreadsheet database and coding the latitude and longitude for the sites, as well as developing the online forms to continue crowd sourcing the volunteer opportunities data.

Currently, the volunteer opportunities on the Sandy NYC Crisis Map is now being maintained and entered by OccupySandy and InterOccupy activists. The crowd sourced forms have been removed. The Occupy movement in New York City has significantly more people on hand to assist in data entry and updates than myself and my time is limited so Google.org staff felt their data was more up-to-date, which is completely reasonable. It's been a great and humbling experience to realize how much impact one map can make.

Features