New digital technologies are enabling radical possibilities in catastrophe situations (apart from the fact that they are able to enlist record-high donations via online donations, text-messages etc.) . Take a look at the Haiti Crisis Map from the Ushahidi Situation Room. Just in the last few days, it lists hundreds of messages updated almost in real-time, indicating, for instance the ruins containing trapped victims: “The school behind St. Gerard still has people buried in it. Unclear if alive or dead” and those trying to find missing friends and acquaintances” or “Looking for the entire Bontemps family in Haiti (Father Dr. Sainfard Bontemps).”
They describe concrete assistance from onsite aid organisations: “MSF is starting to truck drinkable water to Choscal hospital for the patients and the people nearby” as well as acute needs and bottlenecks: “St. Marc: We are receiving a lot of surgery cases. We have operating rooms, nurses, equipment but no surgeons.” Visitors to the website have the possibility to verify individual reports.
Ushahidi originated during the crisis following Kenya’s 2008 election and is an open source platform making collective crisis information accessible. On the Haiti Crisis Map, the information comes from diverse channels located onsite—from the people in Haiti who post a report on the Ushahidi website, to those posting over SMS, blogs, emails, radio, twitter, Facebook, television and list-serves.
But Ushahidi doesn’t just leave the crowdsourcing to manage itself. An active team of volunteer workers (including students from Tufts Fletcher School as seen in this video) coordinates and organises the information.
You can find an interesting interview with Patrick Meier from the Ushahidi Team on the TED Blog.