Help Spread The Word About Ushahidi:Haiti

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2010-01-13 09:54:00 UTC
Topics:

Before you read this go to http://haiti.ushahidi.com

The devastating earthquake to hit Haiti yesterday is all over the news, and while there is better writing and reporting elsewhere about the quake and how you can help, I wanted to call attention to one resource that I've written about here before.

Ushahidi is a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information. The first iteration was built following Kenya's election violence a few years ago and it has subsequently been deployed for a variety of incident reporting cases in places like Afghanistan, Congo, and South Africa.

Haiti.ushahidi.com is up right now creating a living timeline of events, as well as vital mapped information for people on the ground. This is the fastest I've ever seen a deployment and begins to show how vital a resource could be as their capacity to distribute this as a tool grows. Already, there are two pages of updates about places that people can go for emergency care, as well as information about emergencies like people being trapped in buildings.

This is amazing stuff, and an invaluable resource for those trying to respond to the disaster and get the help they need. We should all be asking how we can help make it easier for deployments of Ushahidi to collect and then deliver the information people really need on the ground.

The rest of the web is alive with information aggregation as well. Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman posted a round up of other resources for people as well.

I'm asking readers to retweet this post so that more people discover Haiti.ushahidi.com as a resource and the team there can get more vital information online. Simply press the "Retweet" or "Share on Facebook" buttons above!

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Google Renews "Don't Be Evil" Motto With New China Policy
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (0)

    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.