M4ID » haiti

Online mapping supporting emergency response

m4id — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:05:35 +0000

In any emergency scenario, governments and agencies need good, up-to-date maps in order to respond effectively. While accurate maps exist for bigger cities, such as Conception in Chile, many remote rural areas tend to be poorly mapped out.

Yet thanks to thousands of online volunteers, more complete maps have been built to aid in both the Haiti and Chile response. For example, Crisis commons has a wiki page for the Chile earthquake, with a list of online tasks for volunteer helpers, including the Open street map project. Various online communitites have also been started to support crisis mapping, among others by Google. The maps often contain specific info on the state of hospitals, location of camps, cut off roads and so on, as in the Ushahidi mapping project.

The below animation of the progression of the Openstreetmap coverage in south-western Haïti following the January 2010 earthquake illustrates the rapid global mobilization of volunteer mappers to assist humanitarian operations in the field:

Text message donations – lessons learnt

m4id — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:57:20 +0000

The impressive text message donation response to the deadly Haiti earthquake disaster has resulted in fundraisers throughout the non-profit world analysing relief groups’ experience with mobiles.

To hear a good summary of lessons learnt, listen to the podcast released by The Chronicle of Philanthropy where Wendy Harman, social media manager at the American Red Cross, and Geoff Livingston, chief marketing officer at Zoetica Media, discuss the opportunities and drawbacks associated with this emerging fundraising tool.

Online Search Tools for Missing People in Haiti

m4id — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:22:15 +0000

The Extraordinaries help people complete micro-tasks for organizations, causes or individuals through mobile phones or web browsers. In response to the Haiti earthquake, they have set up an online service where people can upload, search and identify missing people through pictures and tag people in photos to help in the identification of individuals. Images of people have been pouring in, reaching a total of 53.107 today. Integration of this database with Google’s missing person database is also already under way. The Google’s Haiti Person finder app can be embedded on to any website.

Social media support for Haiti forcing shift

m4id — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:09:32 +0000

Donations for Haiti continue to pour in and are, in the US alone, exceeding $ 305 million according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy . Large sums are being donated online and through text messages. By Wednesday, the American Red Cross had received more than $25 million through its campaign to encourage $10 gifts through texts.

In the UK, mobiles and social media have also played a big part in the Disasters Emergency Committee ‘s fundraising efforts, particularly in the 36 hours following the launch of their appeal. After the first DEC announcement on Twitter at 7.41pm on Wednesday, an amazing £8 million was raised online. The tweet simply said: “You’re the first to know – DEC #Haiti Earthquake Appeal now live, UK broadcast appeals to follow”. A mobile text donation system was launched shortly afterwards and by Saturday morning a total of 148,000 people had donated online. Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter also drove the highest number of referrals to the DEC website, after the BBC.

This immense online response to Haiti has forced a shift in approach and we’re seeing organizations who previously haven’t actively employed social media now using these tools for their outreach. This is, we believe, the turning point in non-profit social media adoption: we no longer need to convince agencies about the potential, instead we must help build sustained, long-term engagement so that people are able to continue to support Haiti and other social change/non-profit causes through these effective tools.

Social media provides lifeline in Haiti

m4id — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:56:34 +0000

With conventional communication channels down, social media has played a central role in connecting people and getting information out of earthquake devastated Haiti. In countless instances, the first word from quake-hit areas was a text message, a Facebook post, a tweet, Flickr images or videos uploaded to Youtube. Preliminary research by Nielsen shows that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs and other online boards/forums.

People worldwide are also responding through online media; hundreds of groups have been formed on Facebook and people are actively donating to relief organizations online. The American Red Cross has raised one million dollars through mobile and online tools and has overall been very effective in using social media to reach out and to keep people updated on the situation on the ground. Immediately after the quake they posted this video which now has been viewed by more than a million people :