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18 Jan 09:16: Please can someone find some help for my friend 2 children that are alive under their house at 4813 Ruelle Chretien Lalu et Poupla Haiti.

After the earthquake, the text messages came streaming in to 4636. Reports of trapped people, fires, polluted water sources, and requests for food, water and medical supplies. Hundreds of volunteers translated them from Creole and French into English, tagged them with a location and passed them on to aid agencies on the ground. Yet not one of the volunteers was anywhere near Haiti.

The 4636 texting service is part of a new generation of web-based efforts to help disaster relief that has emerged from the revolution in texting, social networking and crowdsourcing. Its impact on the ground is tangible. For example, a Haitian clinic texted 4636 that it was running low on fuel for its generator. Within 20 minutes the Red Cross said it would resupply.

A Haitian clinic texted that it needed fuel for its generator. The Red Cross responded in 20 minutes

4636 is run by a small organisation called Ushahidi.com, originally set up in Kenya to gather reports of violence after the 2008 election. Within days of the earthquake on 12 January that flattened Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince and numerous surrounding towns, it had set up a Haitian operation and recruited hundreds of volunteers to help translate messages, many of them Haitians living in the US. The service is free, courtesy of Digicell, Haiti’s largest mobile network operator, which had 70 per cent of its network running within 24 hours of the quake.

Nicolas di Tada, arrived in Haiti soon after the disaster working for Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD), a nonprofit organisation which looks for ways that technology can help in this kind of scenario. He helped set up 4636 but says that was the easy part. “The challenge was making responders on the ground aware of us.” A stroke of luck made a big difference. One of the first texts was from a hospital which had 200 beds, and doctors, nurses and medical supplies on standby, but no patients, because hardly any relief agencies knew they were there. Forwarding that message on told a large number of organisations about 4636. Now, radio stations help spread the word.

As people generally don’t send messages to say their request has been fulfilled, Ushahidi has no way of knowing how successful it has been. Still, “the system is unprecedented”, says Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Other initiatives have harnessed the power and multitude of web users. CrisisCommons has organised thousands of volunteers to improve the map of Haiti available on the open-source site OpenStreetMap. When the disaster struck, the map showed little more than three main roads and a small network of smaller roads. The volunteers used a host of sources, such as satellite images and information from people on the ground, and ended up constructing the most detailed map available, showing the position of hospitals, triage centres and displacement camps.

Government agencies are printing the maps to hand out in the field, and uploading them to mobile GPS units. “The OpenStreetMaps have been our most important resource,” says Robert Munro, a 4636 volunteer and a linguist at Stanford University, California, who analyses the role that text messages play in the developing world. Ushahidi volunteers use them to pinpoint with an accuracy of a few metres the location of 4636 texters.

Specialist volunteers have also been recruited to analyse satellite pictures. ImageCat, a company based in Los Angeles, is being funded by the World Bank to assess the damage – a job that usually takes weeks or months. The firm divided before and after images released by remote-sensing satellite operators into 500-square-metre areas and distributed them to dozens of specialists at universities in the UK, US and Europe. Within a few days, they had identified every collapsed building in Port-au-Prince, around 5000 in total.

The World Bank is using the information to assess the cost of rebuilding in the region. The volunteers are now working on a higher resolution aerial survey carried out last week to categorise the scale of damage to each building.

CrisisCommons is behind many other projects, including one to build a Craig’s List-style “we need, we have” website to link people offering resources to those that need them, and an online database to monitor the capacity of hospitals in real time.

One project has built an online database to monitor the capacity of hospitals in real time

Most impressive of all is that the projects are the result of requests from responders on the ground. That’s crucial, says Vinay Gupta, an energy policy analyst and CrisisCommons volunteer in London. CrisisCommons operates around a wiki page where people and organisations in Haiti post their needs. Requests are picked up by volunteers who answer them according to their skills.

A number of factors have come together to make this a defining moment for the web. One of the most important, says Munro, is the spread of mobile communications infrastructure to the developing world, reflected in the fact that much communication in poorer countries is now by text. New tools for using data transmitted in text messages have emerged in developing countries, run by relatively small companies like Ushahidi. These organisations are able to work quickly using limited resources in difficult conditions, making them well-placed to assist in disaster relief.

Then there’s the social media revolution that allows crowdsourcing to take place. The translators on 4636, most of whom have never met, are continually asking each other’s advice in a chatroom. Twitter has played a big role in relaying news, and many aid agencies log their activities on Facebook. But most of all, it is the knowledge that large-scale activities can be coordinated through online networks that has given individuals and organisations the confidence to collaborate in this way.

None of this is to say that online collaboration has solved the problems of disaster relief. Aid agencies still have a hugely difficult job to do on the ground. Web-based networks cannot fly in food, medicine, fuel and trucks, or drive the supplies around Haiti. What they can provide is a new layer of support. “The truth is that it’s not possible to know how effective we’ve been,” says di Tada. “That’s something we’ll have to work out later.”

(Source:  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527453.600-how-crowdsourcing-is-helping-in-haiti.html?full=true    27 January 2010 by Justin Mullins)