Mapmakers Help Haitian Rescue Efforts. Minutes after the earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday night, a project called Ushahidi set to work. Ushahidi adds points of information to a map of Haiti: makeshift hospitals, locations of survivors and people still trapped and reports of unstable bridges. Following a tragedy like this, map making becomes an important part of the rescue effort. The landscape can look unrecognizable, and existing roads and bridges may be blocked or unstable. Mapping also helps rescue workers keep track of where survivors are. “Right now it’s about getting information out as much as possible,” says Patrick Meier, the humanitarian response and crisis mapping specialist in Ushahidi’s 10-person team and a PhD student at Tufts University, where Ushahidi’s situation room for the Haiti earthquake aftermath is based.
In this situation room, 10-20 volunteers work around the clock to find, evaluate and post relevant information. Ushahidi has also created a social network called Crisis Mappers Net. Google.org. Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources | Dan. During a large-scale humanitarian crisis, information is key. Coordination among relief agencies is essential, so that efforts are not duplicated and resources go where they are most needed.
With collaborative tools, disaster-response teams and relief workers can identify risk zones and emerging threats more rapidly. Courtesy of a tech community “SitRep” (situational report) created and shared by Luke Beckman of the nonprofit group InSTEDD, we have some insight into how humanitarian organizations, aid groups and the military can tap information to help in the relief effort. For instance, OpenStreetMap, a free wiki world map, offers an excellent depiction of the situation on the ground, as volunteers mark the locations of aid stations, tent camps and working hospitals.
The data is available as web maps, as well as Garmin images for use in handheld GPS devices. As we noted here before, U.S. InSTEDD was one of the first projects of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google. Photo: U.S. InSTEDD. InSTEDD has created an evolving platform of technology tools and services based on years of collaboration with our partners around the world. Our systems conform to a set of architectural principles that allow them to be used either as-is or as building blocks for larger solutions.
All of our tools meet or exceed the relevant standards for their domain and allow the sharing of data with other systems in a reliable and secure way. These tools are completely free and open source, and available for anyone wanting to use them to improve the social impact and scale of their work. All our tools can be tailored to individual needs and integrated with other existing tools. Verboice lets you create and run applications via voice, thereby overcoming literacy and geographical barriers. Watchfire is a recruitment and management software application that uses GPS, voice, and text messages improve rapid team coordination.
Seentags is a service that helps extract accurate information from text reports. Sms2geo project in Haiti. There have been a number of impressive technical mini-projects and platforms arising out of the Haiti response effort by the technology community around the world. One of these projects has been the new sms2geo service created by the InSTEDD team. sms2geo was created to parse location, using people and machines, out of text messages. Right now, anyone in Haiti can text a message to +46-737-494-537 text like ‘ we need the location of Ecole professional casini ave maglanbloise a carrefour feuilles’ From this you get the reply. The reply is first based on queries to the constantly updated Nominatim and OpenStreetMap tool, and also to Google’s nameservers. On the web side, this looks very simple, and it works brilliantly: If you know Haiti, you can help by processing SMS messages that need geolocation through the web queue interface. Emergency Information Services.