January 26, 2010 | Read Time: 3 minutes
As relief work in Haiti continues, a wave of volunteer technology efforts have sprouted up using social media and mobile phones to help the earthquake victims.
Some predict the impromptu projects will change how charities respond to future humanitarian emergencies.
The most prominent group has been Ushahidi, a volunteer network that was started to track incidents of political violence in Kenya after that country’s disputed election in 2008.
After this month’s earthquake, Patrick Meier, of Ushahidi, quickly began coordinating people to provide information online about where the needs were.
“When I saw this in Haiti, I knew it was going to be worse than we possibly could imagine by 10 times given the infrastructure and so on,” he says.
Map of Needs
On its Web site, the group created a map of Haiti‘s capital, Port-au-Prince, that shows where there are medical emergencies, food shortages, and other urgent problems. Haitians and other people on the ground provided the information in the country via text message, e-mail, Twitter, or other electronic communication.
The American Red Cross, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other relief groups are using the information, says Mr. Meier
Text messages have proven to be the most efficient way for Ushahidi to learn about new incidents. Once Haiti’s mobile-phone network was reestablished after the disaster, Ushahidi along with other charities worked with telecommunications companies to offer Haitians a free number they could use to send emergency information.
Local radio stations have been advertising the number, and so far more than 1,000 messages have been sent. Since many of them are in Creole, Ushahidi has recruited hundreds of Haitian interpreters who can translate the messages in a matter of minutes.
Mr. Meier says the two-way communication between relief groups and disaster victims is “unprecedented” and can help make sure that Haitians have a say in how aid is being distributed.
For example, he would like charities to tell Ushahidi whether they have responded to a specific crisis once it has been mapped.
“The biggest challenge now is getting humanitarians on the ground to let us know when they are reacting or have reacted to one of the reports,” he says. “Clearly they’re in a disaster response mode. They don’t necessarily have time to get back to us.”
Not Yet ‘Evaluated’
Established nonprofit groups praise such projects, but say it’s unclear how well they can work together.
The “ad-hoc support is good,” says Bill Brindley
chief executive officer of NetHope, an organization that helps 28 large international-aid groups collaborate on technology issues. But given the chaos of working in a disaster zone, he says aid groups will prefer to use technology they have used before to avoid untimely glitches.
A new technology idea may have a greater benefit on future humanitarian emergencies, he says.
“It may be a tremendous technological advancement and it may be useful more in future crises once it’s been evaluated and set up,” he says.
Other volunteer technology projects include:
- The Extraordinaries, a charity that promotes micro-volunteering, quick technological tasks people can do for a nonprofit group on their mobile phone, helped track missing people in Haiti. Its project has ended, but it says it helped 24 families potentially connect with relatives. The group says language and technological barriers limited its work.
- Students at the University of Colorado helped develop Twitter as a tool for victims and volunteers to communicate problems in Haiti.
- Crisis Commons, a network of volunteer computer developers, has set up Crisis Camps, all-day events in which people help build a variety of online tools to help disaster response in Haiti. The projects include collecting data about the capacity of Haitian hospitals, creating a time line of events since the earthquake hit, and mapping what aid groups are doing and where they are operating in the country.
