Update #4 on Refugees in the Balkans deployment – IMPORTANT

This is the fourth update on the deployment for refugees on the Balkan route.

Standby Task force has agreed to support Internews in investigating services and information flows for refugees traveling along the Turkey – Balkans – Germany route.

Internews will use the data that you are collecting to inform refugees arriving in Europe of where they can get services. They are also planning to set up information centres all along the route.

We are looking for information and data sources like the Instragram account of Eleanor Beardslay. She’s a reporter who took some powerful pictures of the human faces of this crisis, many of which are from the train stations of Budapest and Vienna, Austria.

Take two minutes of your time to have a look at her Instagram account. And keep in mind that you can help those people. Have a look, for instance,  at this picture, and read her description. These are the kind of information that need to be added to our 3W document.

Join our deployment

We need more volunteers. We need people who speak Arabic. We need people with media monitoring skills. Even if it’s just for an hour, please join us.

To sign up, you will need to complete the Google form located at the bottom of the page on the Ning:

http://standbytaskforce.ning.com/xn/detail/6313985:Event:41633?xg_source=activity

You will receive an invitation via email to join our Slack channel within 12 hours of signing up on the Google form.

In case you have problems accessing Slack, please get in touch with Helena (), Per () or Stuart ()

If you have joined the deployment but haven’t completed the Google form, please do, it helps us know who is working on the deployment.

An easier workflow

We’ve created more clear instructions. We’ve made a list of relevant sources that you can monitor in order to better understand the situation and use as a starting point for your online research. We’ve added an unfinished entry tab, with links that should be regularly checked in order to feed the Google spreadsheet. We also wrote a  “Search Help” section, with some useful tips for your online search.

Moreover, Helena will contact her colleagues from Internews in the field and will tell us if priorities shift or if we need to focus on other countries.

We would love to hear from you as well

Your thoughts will help us improve this deployment. You don’t have to come up with a solution, but it is important that we are aware of problems. Every feedback that contains a suggestion or a complaint is important to us.

Depending on your time zone, please feel free to contact:

Joyce Skype: joyce.monsees  Slack: joycemonsees-sbtf (UTC -7)

or

Stuart Skype: stuart.costello5  Slack: stuart_sbtf (UTC + 1)

Leads

Leads for this deployment are:

Per Aarvik () skype:per_aarvik
Helena Puig Larrauri ()

Keep in touch

If you’ve got any questions, comments, suggestions then drop me or anyone in the core team an email or ask in the SBTF general chat room on Skype.

[email protected] or [email protected]