Tech Community Retrofits Haiti Tools For Chile's Earthquake

An 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile early on Saturday morning, putting natural disaster back in the headlines less than a month after a quake devastated Haiti. And while the Chile quake has not claimed as many lives as the tremor in Haiti, it has already displaced 2 million people and devastated the nation.

But the tech community who worked so diligently to build the infrastructure for a digital response in Haiti a month ago is now whipping back into action. In fact, it's already customized a number of tools for the new disaster.

For starters, Google quickly reconfigured the person finder tool it had been using in Haiti. With it, people can make reports about a person they're trying to find, or alternatively share information about someone. Right now, the tool is tracking almost 23,000 entries in its database.

The Ushahidi team also sprang into motion. Their actions are particularly exciting to me because over the course of the Haiti response, Ushahidi seemed like it was ready to move beyond its previous existence as a single organization, and instead became a platform at the center of a crisismapping community that's coalescing like never before.

In response to the Chile quake, Ushahidi has already launched a customized deployment of their platform. More than that, though, they've begun to also engage the volunteer networks that rallied after the Haiti crisis.

If this all shows a maturity of crisis mapping, response tools and community, however, there's still a major problem of distribution that all of these platforms face. Put simply, how do people on the ground who are actually affected by these crisis' learn about and access these resources?

Here again, the response to Haiti's earthquake contains seeds of good possibilities for how to address this problem. In Haiti, for example, local cell provider Digicell created a short code -- 4636 -- that enabled people on the ground to report emergencies easily and for free. There were also efforts to get messages out over the radio -- still the best way to reach masses of people.

I would love to see some sort of ideas competition -- maybe hosted by NetSquared? the World Bank? -- to get people thinking creatively about ways to solve emergency relief responses' distribution problem. What these technologists have been able to do -- first in Haiti, and now in Chile -- suggests that our capacity for response has turned a corner. Now we just need to figure out how to make the most of it.

Photo Credit: chile.ushahidi.com