Crisis Mapping: A New Field?

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-08-09 11:02:00 UTC
Topics:

In the last two years, few new organizations have have the sort of buzz or excitement of Ushahidi, the platform for crowd-sourcing crisis information. Today, Fletcher School PhD candidate Patrick Meier lays out crisis mapping as a comprehensive field. This may be a little bit more academic than some posts I link to, but I think it's fascinating to see how this vital subfield of humanitarian engagement is evolving.

As anyone who has read our Humanitarian Relief blog knows, humanitarianism is a fickle, confusing, frustrating field, in which people with the best of intentions are forced to make decisions with inadequate information, and without the ability to know what the long-term ramifications of their actions are. These decisions have very real consequences for people's lives.

Crisis mapping as a field has some fascinating opportunities to at least close the gap in information that can be known. Taking the example of Ushahidi, their software enables users to submit real time information, which is plotted on maps in terms of time and location. This living record of a crisis is useful not only for posterity, but could eventually change the way interventions are designed.

Patrick has a lot more to say on this than I can summarize, so check out his post "Proposing the Field of Crisis Mapping."

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Twitter, Facebook Shut Down in Attempt to Silence Activist
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (1)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.