mission 4636
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Mission 4636 | Samasource
By Christine Marie Shepherd When I left HEC Paris ( HEC Full-Time MBA Profile ) at the end of May, I looked toward my summer in Haiti with a sense of openness. I was ready for anything. I closed my MBA studies quickly, finishing the three-day Social and Sustainable Business Conference that I had spent the majority of my free time planning and hopped a flight to the U.S. With a week stateside for transition, I snagged moments with friends and family and prepared for my coming summer internship with Samasource , a San Francisco-based social business that brings paying, Internet-based work to disadvantaged economic areas across the globe. On June 7, I departed Atlanta for Port au Prince, stopping for an overnight layover in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Haiti’s earthquake devastated not only lives. It destroyed whatever emergency services the barely functioning government had to offer. But in less than five days, a makeshift version of 911 sprung to life . It’s a striking story of how a few tech-savvy social entrepreneurs, receptive ears in the U.S. government and hundreds of Haitian Creole-speaking strangers crowdsourced from around the world were able to help people on the ground get food or medical attention. Hours after the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, 23-year-old Josh Nesbit (pictured right), who heads a non-profit delivering health care in Sub-Saharan Africa through mobile phones, thought that an SMS gateway would be critical in Haiti. He sent a tweet out asking for help .
How a tweet brought makeshift 911 services to life in Haiti | Ve
Inception FrontlineSMS:Medic was preceded by two independent projects, Mobiles in Malawi and MobilizeMRS. Josh Nesbit initiated Mobiles in Malawi in the summer of 2007, working at a rural Malawian hospital that serves 250,000 patients spread 100 miles in every direction.
FrontlineSMS:Medic | Text Messages Save Lives
A lack of communication can be a major barrier for grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in developing countries.
FrontlineSMS: A free, large scale text messaging solution for NG
HopePhones.org | Old phones save lives. Donate yours to a medica
ABC News recently profiled Hope Phones founder, Josh Nesbit, and we were overwhelmed with the positive response.
Mechanical Turk to Crowdsource Humanitarian Response « iRe
In Haiti, Samasource and Crowdflower have partnered with Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS to set up a Mechanical Turk service called “ Mission 4636 “. The system that Ushahidi and partners originally set up uses the generosity of Haitian volunteers in the US to translate urgent SMS’s from the disaster affected population in near real-time. Mission 4636 will relocate the translation work to Haiti and become an automatic compensation system for Haitian’s in-country. At Ushahidi, we aggregate and categorize urgent, actionable information from multiple sources including SMS and geo-tag this information on the Ushahidi’s interactive mapping platform. In the case of Haiti, this work is carried out by volunteers in Boston, Geneva, London and Portland coordinated by the Ushahidi-Haiti Situation Room at Tufts University. Volunteer retention is often a challenge, however.Project 4636 InfoGraphic Ushahidi Blog
Hot on the heals of Brian’s excellent summary of the 4636 Project development efforts , I’d like to join in with a little info-graphic of sorts. My goal in putting this together is to present an easy-to-understand “big-picture” graphic that illustrates how a simple SMS, sent from a Haitian in need, can be transformed into a powerful resource that fuels the crisis response and recovery effort. Click the image to see the high-res version.
Update on May 10, 2010: “SMS shortcode 177 is now being used instead of shortcode 4636. #haititech”
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