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Ushahidi Crowd-Sources Crisis Response
We mentioned late last year how open source software called Ushahidi — which means 'testimony' in Swahili — developed for election monitoring in Kenya was being used to similar effect in Afghanistan. Now reader Peace Corps Online adds a report from the NY Times that Ushahidi's is now becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. "Ushahidi is used to gather distributed data via SMS, email, or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The program was developed after violence erupted during Kenya's disputed election in 2007. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election. After receiving threats about her work, she returned to South Africa where she posted her idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people to report anonymously on violence and other misdeeds. Volunteers built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend, and the site began plotting on a map, using the locations given by informants, user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths. When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went into action receiving thousands of messages reporting trapped victims; the same happened following the Chile earthquake. The Washington Post also used Ushahidi during the recent blizzards to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers. 'Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work,' writes Anand Giridharadas. 'The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity, and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; then journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.'"
That might happen in the developed world but you have to remember these few things.
A) In a lot of natural disasters everyone is the victim, there are few people just surfing the internet who are completely unaffected and can go 2 miles to loot
B) Looting will happen anyways, its generally pretty easy to tell where someone isn't at home and there are valuables left unguarded
C) Power outages plus the fact that most disasters that would require this are in the undeveloped world means that not everyone can easily have access to the information
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Sure, an anonymous system like this can get you lots of statistical data, but it's not verifiable data. In a scenario where there is emotional or ideological conflict, like an election, it would be trivial to abuse the system to corrupt the data, at the very least. It's also open to abuse by individual pranksters.
Everything you've said above can also be said of Wikipedia. These shortcomings are real, but they do little to reduce its overall usefulness.
As long as the volume of data is significant enough and it's mostly honestly derived, the service will work.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I head the digital department at a nonprofit at the heart of the Haiti earthquake relief effort. The moment the earthquake hit I remembered reading about Ushahidi last year on the African tech blog White African written by Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of the crisis-mapping tool. At the time I thought it might be an interesting way to source stories from our many staff on the ground in Africa, South America, and other places where internet coverage might be sparse but where cell coverage was robust. Spoke to them once, but didn't follow up on it further at the time.
The moment the news came out about Port-au-Prince, I called Erik up to ask if they could set up an instance to help coordinate first responders and disaster relief; he and they were, and even had a team of Creole-speaking volunteers to handle incoming reports and translate back and forth from English. Watching reports pop up on the map from people who were texting SOS'es from inside collapsed buildings, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I was seeing something altogether new, different, and important.
Then reports started appearing from friends and relatives abroad, looking for loved ones who had been staying in the Hotel Montana and other major hotels for foreigners, or from expat Haitians desperate for news of their families back home. 5 days out from the event I participated on conference calls with the US State Department, Whitehouse, Red Cross, USAID, and UN Logistics Cluster and realized Ushahidi had the best actionable intelligence, bar none, and that all the other agencies had gravitated toward using it accordingly. They shared stories of the US Marines stationed on the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince begging the Pentagon for more satellite bandwidth so they could load the graphics properly, because they were scrambling missions to dig out people trapped in the rubble.
10 days out the folks at Ushahidi got hold of the owner of Haiti's cellular provider, Digicel, and he gave them the ability to push SMS back out to Haitian subscribers with official, verified locations where people could get medical attention, food, water, shelter, etc. It was incredible.
It's not often you witness something game-changing in action, but this was such a moment, and the tool was saving lives.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.