When I called David Kobia to launch the Ushahidi platform two hours after the earthquake, our priority was to map all relevant reports in near real-time and to do so around the clock. This meant monitoring Tweets, Facebook groups, list serves, emails, online news media, blogs, radio and television programs, and now incoming SMS. That’s not all, we also needed to turn this information into semi-structured reports and actually geo-tag them. No small task. That is why I immediately set up the Haiti Situation Room at The Fletcher School and why my Fletcher colleagues have since set up similar Situation Rooms in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland. Tufts undergraduate students have also been phenomenal.
Patrick Meier recaps an amazing mapping effort on the Ushahidi blog.
if you need help that I might be able to offer when you do these things, let me know.
Unfortunately I was in Ethiopia and offline when the earthquake hit. I missed all of the good volunteer mapping work. Trying to get up to speed to discuss it in my mapping course at NYU.