The Meta-Brain project aims to collect information about projects that provide digital and hands-on solutions for problems faced by people who are emigrating to or seeking refuge in Germany (Europe) and the volunteers who are helping them get settled. This document describes in more detail why we think this is important, what our goals are, who we are, and the status of our own project.
Many people, on separate occasions (links to resources), have come to the conclusion that there is a massive duplication of effort in particular when it comes to digital solutions for immigration related problems. Even though others have collected such projects (and we are grateful for that), we do not know anyone who has or can provide a thorough overview. We want to provide a manageable overview that can be integrated by anyone.
To be more specific, we collect projects through online research and categorize them according to our hierarchy. We store the data in a database that provides a very liberal and RESTful API mostly via JSON. The API enables specific views on the data. We want all the content to be available in multiple languages.
For the moment, we provide a simple frontend that allows searching, listing, sorting projects. We have further views on the data in mind and our API will evovlve in tune with envisioned frontends. If you want to develop a view on the data get in touch!
With a growing userbase, we want to enable projects to enter and update their information. We also look forward to their input regarding our system of categories. All of our software is developed with liberal open source licenses and so is the collected data.
The Meta-Brain project came into being at the refugee hackathon in Berlin, Oct 2015. From the original group of about a dozen people, four remain active today. The project is continued in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Lab in Berlin. The majority of the work is being done by a group of students from the TU Berlin.
You can find out more about our team and you are absolutely welcome to join us even if you only have a few hours to spare. Do write to us with any criticism, questions, ideas or praise that you might have.
At the moment we are actively researching and categorizing projects, as well as working on the software systems. As soon as we launch our project this documentation will be found online.