Category Archives: Humanitarian Technologies

Towards an SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response

Posted on March 6, 2010 | 21 comments

Picture this: it’s October 7, 2011, and a major hazard hits a highly vulnerable population resulting in a devastating disaster. The entire humanitarian response community mobilizes within 48 hours. Days later, the cell phone network is back up and dozens of SMS systems are activated by large and small organizations. Two or three of these systems use short codes thanks to rapid collaboration with the country’s national telecommunication companies. The other SMS systems all use long codes.

That picture concerns me, a lot. The technology community’s response to Haiti has demonstrated that using SMS to communicate with disaster affected communities can save lives, hundreds of lives. Humanitarian organizations and NGOs have all taken note and nothing will prevent them from setting up their own SMS systems in the near future. This wouldn’t worry me if coordination wasn’t already a major challenge in this space.

Let me elaborate on the above picture.

Picture further that one organization decides to send out regular SMS broadcasts to the disaster affected communities to improve their situational awareness and prevent panic. This is an important service during the first few days of a disaster. But imagine that this organization does not provide a way for users receiving this information to unsubscribe or to specify exactly what type of information they would like and for which locations. Next suppose that three NGOs set up long codes to do the same. Now imagine that two major organizations independently set up an alerts SMS system, asking individuals to text in their location and most urgent needs.

This is an information disaster in the making for communities in crisis.

So what are we going to do to prevent the above picture from turning into reality? The group Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) is probably best placed to support a coordinating role in this space. But before we even get to this, our own community should start drafting an “SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response” for ourselves. I can think of no better way to start the process by using distributed cognition (aka crowdsourcing). This blog post on lessons learned and best practices may be informative as well.

Here are a few ideas to begin with:

  • Set up a complaints mechanism
  • Do not duplicate existing national SMS systems
  • Set up a single clearing house for all outgoing SMS broadcasts
  • Ensure that SMS messages are demand driven in terms of content
  • Enable receivers of Disaster SMS’s to unsubscribe and to specify alert type and location

There are likely dozens more points we could add. So please feel free to do so in the comments section below. I will then create a more structured Google Doc out of your replies and send this out for further peer reviewing.

Patrick Philippe Meier

21 Comments

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Technologies

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Haiti and the Tyranny of Technology

Posted on March 2, 2010 | 10 comments

How quickly we forget what has come before us. Is it because our technologies are so new or different that recommendations in the disaster literature don’t apply to us? The technology community repeatedly emphasized the unprecedented nature of the response in Haiti, particularly with respect to communication with disaster effected populations. Was is it really a complete departure? To a large extent yes, but were there really no guidelines available?

The challenges that materialized in the response to Haiti included:

  • Raising of expectations
  • Lack of formal complaints mechanism
  • Absence of downward accountability
  • Coordination and clarity of messaging

Guidelines to address these challenges do exist. I’ll draw on two documents that are both 4 years old. The first is my colleague Imogen Wall’s study “The Right to Know: The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka”. The second is the Final Report of the Global Symposium+5.

Here are some of the main points to take home from Imogen’s 60-page study:

  • Many organizations are still paying for mistakes made in communicating with communities in the early days of the tsunami recovery effort, resulting in what many call the ‘broken promises’ phenomenon. The inherent problems of managing expectations were exacerbated by a widespread use of translators and jargon and the extreme levels of trauma experienced by beneficiaries.
  • Confusion about policies, an inability to report misuse of aid, ignorance about where to turn for assistance, cynicism and anger stemming from broken promises about aid, and mismanaged expectations were all noted in the 2004 Tsunami. But while cases of actual broken promises undoubtedly occurred, the majority of perceived broken promises actually seem to have resulted from communications problems.
  • Managing communications with communities is key to successful community-driven development. Knowledge is power: without information, communities cannot participate, make choices, or ask questions. Good communication is also about trust and partnership, and is thus at the heart of successful community partnerships.
  • Putting communities at the center of disaster response requires that adequate provision be made for community access to information about projects, channels through which they can ask questions, and mechanisms by which they can register dissatisfaction or complaints. Such efforts both supply information and create space for dialogue between communities and aid agencies, a two way information flow tht is beneficial to both parties. No accountability and transparency system is complete without a strong complaints mechanism. Complaints mechanisms have an important role in conflict mitigation at a community level and in the prevention of violence.
  • Donors must require downward accountability and communications strategies in projects they fund and by exploring ways in which they can receive feedback on projects from beneficiaries.
  • Until information is properly shared with beneficiaries, they will never be equal partners. And until they are provided with a voice and the ability to judge a project’s viability, organizations will never be able to claim that they enabled survivors to rebuild and move on to a as bright a future as possible.
  • Primarily, beneficiaries want practical information that explains what aid is available, what assistance they can expect, how to apply for it, when aid will arrive, why what they have received might differ from their neighbor, and what to do if they are not satisfied. They are not interested in materials that simply promote a particular organization. Secondly, they are very interested in hearing how the aid effort is going, how money is being spent, what problems are being experienced elsewhere, and what solutions are being found.
  • Low-tech solutions are almost invariably better. A simple bulletin board can  do more to enhance transparency and accountability towards beneficiaries than any website. All IDP locations should be required to have a bulletin board, and aid organizations should be required to display basic project information and contact details.
  • Broadly speaking, the aim of public relations (PR) is to promote an organization; the aim of public information (PI) is to channel information to the relevant audiences. But most communications expertise within international aid organizations is geared toward public relations.
  • Aid organizations have a tendency to regard communication with beneficiaries as an optional extra rather than seeing information as a vital commodity and a humanitarian right, the key to empowerment, better relationships with beneficiaries and a more effective recovery effort. There has also been a failure to understand that information deprivation causes stress and exacerbates trauma.
  • Organizations should consider, where appropriate, incorporating some form of community-bsaed monitoring and evaluation systems into their projects.
  • Written community contracts between organizations and beneficiaries should be adopted wherever possible.
  • There will always be questions regarding how much information can or should be shared with beneficiaries. Communities should be the driver of how much information will be shared.
  • Always leave a contact name, number and address, ideally of the liaison person responsible for the community.
  • With text messaging, a simple, short message can be sent to a list of phone numbers simultaneously. And while it is easy to compile a list of phone numbers of key people in beneficiary communities, collating and managing wider lists of numbers and making them available to aid organizations could be undertaken by a body such as OCHA’s Humanitarian Information Centers.
  • SMS is a powerful medium that can be harnessed for otherwise very difficult tasks, such as providing information quickly that is available only at the last minute, such as times for aid deliveries or changes in a medical clinic’s arrival time in a certain area. The list of recipients can be easily tailored to include only those in a certain geographical area, enabling messages to be very precisely targetted.

The Final Report of the 2006 Symposium+5 event that I participated includes a review of lessons learned, best practices and recommendations on the topic of communicating with disaster affected communities. Here are the main points:

  • Programs designed to enhance two-way information-sharing and communication with affected populations are not mainstreamed into all phases of the humanitarian continuum or the UN cluster system. More needs to be done to financially support the establishment of these projects in the preparedness and early response phase.
  • Provide easily understandable information to affected communities to encourage and empower people to take action to build and strengthen their resilience. The information should be developed with affected populations, incorporate relevant traditional and indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage and be tailored to different target audiences through both media and non-media communication channels, taking into account cultural and social factors.
  • Provide funding and support to local media and journalistic organizations that have a role in providing information to affected populations in all phases, from preparedness, during response, and into recovery and reconstruction.

Yes, we have new integrated platforms that allow for 2-way communication with disaster affected populations in near real time. But do these new tools render the above lessons learned and recommendations obsolete? If not, then why did the technology community not draw on them to guide their work in Haiti?

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Humanitarian Technologies

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Ushahidi & The Unprecedented Role of SMS in Disaster Response

Posted on February 20, 2010 | 19 comments

What if we could communicate with disaster affected communities in real-time just days after a major disaster like the quake in Haiti? That is exactly what happened thanks to a partnership between the Emergency Information Service (EIS), InSTEDD, Ushahidi, Haitian Telcos and the US State Department. Just 4 days after the earthquake, Haitians could text their location and urgent needs to “4636” for free.

I will focus primarily on the way that Ushahidi used 4636. Since the majority of incoming text messages were in Creole, we needed a translation service. My colleague Brian Herbert from Ushahidi and Robert Munro of Energy for Opportunity thus built a dedicated interface for crowdsourcing this step and reached out to dozens of Haitian communities groups to aid in the translation, categorization and geo-location of every message, quickly mobilizing 100s of motivated and dedicated volunteers. So not only was Ushahidi crowdsourcing crisis information in near real-time but also crowdsourcing translation in near real-time.

Text messages are translated into English just minutes after they leave a mobile phone in Haiti. The translated messages then appear directly on the Ushahidi platform. The screenshots below (click on graphics to enlarge) illustrates how the process works. The original SMS in Creole (or French) is displayed in the header. In order to view the translation, one simply clicks on “Read More”.

Ushahidi Back End

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Incoming Text Messages

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If further information is required, then one can reply to the sender of the text message directly from the Ushahidi platform. This is an important feature for several reasons. First, this allows for two-way communication with disaster affected communities. Second, an important number of messages we received were not actionable because of insufficient location information. The reply feature allowed us to get more precise information.

The screenshots below show how the “Send Reply” feature works. We weren’t sure if Universite Wayal was the same as Royal University. So we replied and asked for more location information. Note the preset replies in both English and Creole. The presets include thanks & requests for more location information, for example. Of course, one is not limited to these presets. Any text can be typed in and sent back to the sender of the original SMS. This feature has been part of the Ushahidi for almost two years now. We send off the request for more information and receive the following reply within minutes.

Preset Replies

When we receive an urgent and actionable SMS like this one, we can immediately create a report. By actionable, we mean there is sufficient location information and the description of the need is specific enough to respond to, just like the example above.

Creating a Report

First, the GPS coordinates for the location is identified. This can be done directly from the Ushahidi platform by entering the street address or town name. Sometimes a bit of detective work is needed to pinpoint the exact coordinates. Next, a title and description for the report is included–the latter usually comprising the text of the SMS. This is what we mean by structured information. The report is then tagged based on the category framework. Pictures can be uploaded with the report, and links to videos can also be included. Finally the report is saved and then approved for publication.

This is how the Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts team mapped 1,500+ text messages on the Ushahidi platform. We are now working with Samasource and Crowdflower to have the translation work serve as a source of income for Haitians inside Haiti. But how does all this connect to response?

Ushahidi’s “Get Alerts” feature is one of my favorite because it allows responders themselves to customize the specific type of actionable information that is important to them; i.e., demand driven situational awareness in near real-time. Not only can responders elect to receive automated alerts via email, but they can also do so via SMS. Responders can also specify their geographic area of interest.

Subscribe to Alerts

For example, if a relief worker from the Red Cross has a field office in neighborhood of Delmas, they can subscribe to Ushahidi to receive information on all reports originating from their immediate vicinity by specifying a radius, as shown below.

Selecting Area of Interest

The above Alerts feature is now being upgraded to the one depicted below, which was designed by my colleague Caleb Bell from Ushahidi. Not only are responders able to specify their geographic area of interest, but they can also select the type of alert (e.g., collapsed building, food shortage, looting, etc.) they want to receive. They can even add key words of interest to them, such as “water”, “violence” or “UN”. The goal is to provide responders with an unprecedented degree of customization to ensure they receive exactly the kind of alerts that they can respond to.

Highly Customized Alerts

On a more “macro” level, I recently reached out to colleagues at the EC’s Joint Research Center (JRC) to leverage their automated sentiment (“mood”) analysis platform. Sentiment Analysis is a branch of natural language processing (NLP) that seeks to quantify positive vs negative perceptions; akin to “tone” analysis. I suggested that we use their platform on the incoming text messages from Haiti to get a general sense of changing mood on an hourly basis. I’ll blog about the results shortly. In the meantime, here’s a previous blog post on the use of Sentiment Analysis for early warning.

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Early Warning, Humanitarian Technologies

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Location Based Mobile Alerts for Disaster Response in Haiti

Posted on February 6, 2010 | 5 comments

Using demand-side and supply-side economics as an analogy for the use of communication and information technology (ICT) in disaster response may yield some interesting insights. Demand-side economics (a.k.a. Keynesian economics) argues that government policies should seek to “increase aggregate demand, thus increasing economic activity and reducing unemployment.” Supply-side economics, in contrast, argues that “overall economic well-being is maximized by lowering the barriers to producing goods and services.”

I’d like to take this analogy and apply it to the subject of text messaging in Haiti. The 4636 SMS system was set up in Haiti by the Emergency Information Service or EIS (video) with InSTEDD (video), Ushahidi (video) and the US State Department. The system allows for both demand-side and supply-side disaster response. Anyone in the country can text 4636 with their location and needs, i.e., demand-side. The system is also being used to supply some mobile phone users with important information updates, i.e., supply-side.

Both communication features are revolutionizing disaster response. Lets take the supply-side approach first. EIS together with WFP, UNICEF, IOM, the Red Cross and others are using the system to send out SMS to all ~7,500 mobile phones (the number is increasing daily) with important information updates. Here are screen shots of the latest messages sent out from the EIS system:

The supply-side approach is possible thanks to the much lower (technical and financial) barriers to disseminating this information in near real-time. Providing some beneficiaries with this information can serve to reassure them that aid is on the way and to inform them where they can access various services thus maximizing overall economic well-being.

Ushahidi takes both a demand-side and supply-side approach by using the 4636 SMS system. 4636 is used to solicit text messages from individuals in urgent need. These SMS’s are then geo-tagged in near real-time on Ushahidi’s interactive map of Haiti. In addition, Ushahidi provides a feature for users to receive alerts about specific geographic locations. As the screen shot below depicts, users can specify the location and geographical radius they want to receive information on via automated email and/or SMS alerts; i.e., supply-side.

The Ushahidi Tech Team is currently working to allow users to subscribe to specific alert categories/indicators based on the categories/indicators already being used to map the disaster and humanitarian response in Haiti. See the Ushahidi Haiti Map for the list. This will enable subscribers to receive even more targeted location based mobile alerts,  thus further improving their situational awareness, which will enable them to take more informed decisions about their disaster response activities.

Both the demand- and supply-side approaches are important. They comprise an unprecedented ability to provide location-based mobile alerts for disaster response; something not dissimilar to location based mobile advertising, i.e., targeted communication based on personal preferences and location. The next step, therefore, is to make all supply-side text messages location based when necessary. For example, the following SMS broadcast would only go to mobile phone subscribers in Port-au-Prince:

It is important that both demand- and supply-side mobile alerts be location based when needed. Otherwise, we fall prey to Seeing Like a State.

“If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state whose interventions in that society are necessarily crude.”

In “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,” James Scott uses the following elegant analogy to emphasize the importance of locality.

“When a large freighter or passenger liner approaches a major port, the captain typically turns the control of his vessel over to a local pilot, who brings it into the harbor and to its berth. The same procedure is followed when the ship leaves its berth until it is safely out into the sea-lanes. This sensible procedure, designed to avoid accidents, reflects the fact that navigation on the open sea (a more “abstract” space) is the more general skill. While piloting a ship through traffic in a particular port is a highly contextual skill. We might call the art of piloting a “local and situated knowledge.”

An early lesson learned in the SMS deployment in Haiti is that more communication between the demand- and supply-side organizations need to happen. We are sharing the 4636 number,  so we are dependent on each other and need to ensure that changes to the system be up for open discussion. This lack of joint outreach has been the single most important challenge in my opinion. The captains are just not talking to the local pilots.

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Technologies

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Using Mechanical Turk to Crowdsource Humanitarian Response

Posted on February 5, 2010 | 17 comments

I’m increasingly intrigued by the idea of applying Mechanical Turk services to humanitarian response. Mechanical Turk was first developed by Amazon to crowdsource and pay for simple tasks.

An excellent example of a Mechanical Turk service in the field of ICT for Development (ICT4D) is txteagle, a platform that enables mobile phone subscribers in developing countries to earn money and accumulate savings by completing simple SMS-based micro-tasks for large corporate clients. txteagle has been used to translate pieces of text by splitting them into individual words and sending these out by SMS. Subscribers can then reply with the translation and earn some money in the process. This automatic compensation system uses statistical machinery to automatically evaluate the value of submitted work.

In Haiti, Samasource and Crowdflower have partnered with Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS to set up a Mechanical Turk service called “Mission 4636“. The system that Ushahidi and partners originally set up uses the generosity of Haitian volunteers in the US to translate urgent SMS’s from the disaster affected population in near real-time. Mission 4636 will relocate the translation work to Haiti and become an automatic compensation system for Haitian’s in-country.

At Ushahidi, we aggregate and  categorize urgent, actionable information from multiple sources including SMS and geo-tag this information on the Ushahidi’s interactive mapping platform. In the case of Haiti, this work is carried out by volunteers in Boston, Geneva, London and Portland coordinated by the Ushahidi-Haiti Situation Room at Tufts University. Volunteer retention is often a challenge, however. I wonder whether we an automated compensation system could be used to sustain future crisis mapping efforts.

Another challenge of crowdsourcing crisis information is tracking response. We know for a fact that a number of key responders are following our near real-time mapping efforts but knowing which reports they respond to is less than automatic. We have been able to document a number of success stories and continue to receive positive feedback from responders themselves but this information is hard to come by.

In a way, by crisis mapping actionable information in near real-time and in the public domain, we are in effect trying to crowdsource response. This, by nature, is a distributed and decentralized process, hence difficult to track. The tracking challenge is further magnified when the actors in question are relief and aid organizations responding to a large disaster. As anyone who has worked in disaster response knows, communicating who is doing what, where and when is not easy. Responders don’t have the bandwidth to document which reports they’ve responded to on Ushahidi.

This is problematic for several reasons including coordination. Organizations don’t necessarily know who is responding to what and whether this response is efficient. I wonder whether a Mechanical Turk system could be set up to crowdsource discrete response tasks based on individual organizations’ mandates. Sounds a little far out and may not be feasible, but the idea nevertheless intrigues me.

The automatic compensation system could be a public way to compensate response. Incoming SMS’s could be clustered along the UN Cluster system. The Shelter Cluster, for example, would have a dedicated website to which all shelter-related SMS’s would be pushed to. Organizations working in this space would each have access to this password protected website and tag the alerts they can and want to respond to.

In order to “cash in” following a response, a picture (or text based evidence) has to be submitted as proof, by the organization in question e.g., of new shelters being built. The number of completed responses could also be made public and individuals compelled to help, could send donations via SMS to each organization to reward and further fund the responses.

The task of evaluating the evidence of responses can also be crowdsource à la Mechanical Turk and serve as a source of revenue for beneficiaries.

For example, local Haitian subscribers to the system would receive an SMS notifying them that new shelters have been set up near Jacmel. Only subscribers in the Jacmel area would receive the SMS. They would then have a look for themselves to see whether the new shelters were in fact there and text back accordingly. Dozens of individuals could send in SMS’s to describe their observations which would further help triangulate the veracity of the evaluation à la Swift River. Note that the Diaspora could also get involved in this. And like txteagle, statistical machinery could also  be used to automatically evaluate the response and dispense the micro-compensations.

I have no doubt there are a number of other important kinks to be ironed out but I wanted to throw this out there now to get some preliminary feedback. This may ultimately not be feasible or worthwhile. But I do think that a partnership between Ushahidi and Crowdflower makes sense, not only in Haiti but for future deployments as well.

See also:

  • Digital Humanitarian Response: Moving from Crowdsourcing to Microtasking [Link]

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How To Royally Mess Up Disaster Response in Haiti

Posted on February 3, 2010 | 30 comments

I have to find an outlet other than this one to vent my frustrations at this time, which is why I deleted the 5 paragraphs that followed about 3 times. Not to worry, I saved them in a Word document. Good, now that I’ve got the venting part over with, lets play a crowdsourcing game.

I’d love to get your thoughts on the Top 10 ways to mess up disaster response in Haiti using information and communication technology. Suggestions can be completely made up, they can be jokes, serious commentary, witty remarks, predictions, actual observations, and so on, you get the idea. Feel free to post your comments below (anonymously if you wish), but no insults or accusations please, or else I’ll have to delete them.

I’ll keep this game open for 7 days and will post the best results on a new blog post. The person with the best comment will get a free invitation to the:

2nd International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010):
Haiti and Beyond

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Posted in Humanitarian Technologies

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The Role of Live Skype Chats in the Disaster Response to Haiti

Posted on January 31, 2010 | 12 comments

Live Skype chats played an invaluable role in the disaster response to Haiti but this has gone largely unnoticed by both mainstream and citizen media. I have a Word document with over 2,000 pages worth of Skype chat messages exchanged  in various groups during the first 2.5 weeks after the earthquake. I have no doubt that this data will become a source of major interest for scholars seeking to evaluate the disaster response in Haiti.

The Skype chats reveal a minute-by-minute account of the actions and decisions that organizations like Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD, Sahana, Google, Thomson-Reuters and others took following the earthquake. Search and Rescue (SAR) teams in Port-au-Prince also participated in these Skype chats:

For the full story behind the above exchange between Anna, Eric and myself, please see my previous blog post. In addition to SAR staff, the US State Department,  a White House liaison contact, SOUTHCOM, DAI, UN/OCHA, WFP, the US Coast Guard, a Telecom company, and so on were all on live Skype chats at one point or another. It’s actually hard to keep track of everyone who has used the various Skype chats since the earthquake.

The most active and critical Skype Chat Groups were/are:

  • Haiti Tech Ushahidi Situation Room (72 users)
  • GPS Conversations for the SAR Dispatch (21 users)
  • SMS Logistics (37)
  • Ushahidi + US Coast Guard + SOUTHCOM (11 users)
  • Urgent Response Group (13 users)
  • Ushahidi Volunteer Task Force (168)

I would really like to see a discourse analysis and social network analysis of this data. Not to mention different visualizations of the data. In fact, I’d love to partner with anyone who has the time and expertise in these areas to do this. For now, lets take the first Skype chat group above, which was the most critical group during the first week, and just focus on the growth of this group in terms of users during the first week. And then lets create some Wordl visualizations based on data in this chat group.

I started the Haiti Tech Ushahidi Situation Room a couple hours after David Kobia and I launched the Ushahidi-Haiti platform. The second person I called (on my cell) after David was Chris Blow from Meedan. Chris got started on the icons for the platform right away. In the meantime, we used color-coded dots to represent the different categories/indicators.

I checked in with Chris on Skype a couple hours later. Below is the progression of users added to the Skype chat during the first week in case anyone wants to start on some simple social network analysis:

[1/12/10 9:09:55 PM] Patrick Meier: hey Chris, you there?

[1/12/10 10:00:27 PM] Patrick Meier added Brian Herbert to this chat

[1/12/10 10:02:30 PM] Patrick Meier added David Kobia to this chat

[1/12/10 10:10:39 PM] Patrick Meier added Jeffrey Villaveces to this chat

[1/12/10 10:47:41 PM] Jeffrey Villaveces added Luishernando to this chat

[1/12/10 11:42:01 PM] Jeffrey Villaveces added Gabriel Dicelis to this chat

[1/12/10 11:48:49 PM] Brian Herbert added Ory Okolloh to this chat

[1/13/10 2:00:03 AM] Patrick Meier added Kennedy Kasina to this chat

[1/13/10 2:00:11 AM] Patrick Meier: just added Ken to this chat

[1/13/10 2:00:43 AM] Ory Okolloh added Henry Addo to this chat

[1/13/10 2:02:54 AM] Brian Herbert added Henry Addo to this chat

[1/13/10 3:30:13 AM] Patrick Meier added Kaushal Jhalla to this chat

[1/13/10 8:46:07 AM] Patrick Meier added Claire U to this chat

[1/13/10 10:06:59 AM] Brian Herbert added Pablo Destefanis to this chat

[1/13/10 10:09:41 AM] Brian Herbert added Oscar Salazar to this chat

[1/13/10 10:22:02 AM] Patrick Meier added Emily Jacobi to this chat

[1/13/10 10:47:32 AM] Oscar Salazar added Nicolas et Alice BIais- Bonhomme to this chat

[1/13/10 10:51:59 AM] Patrick Meier added Rob Baker to this chat

[1/13/10 11:22:54 AM] Emily Jacobi added Mark Belinsky to this chat

[1/13/10 12:05:59 PM] Patrick Meier added Josh Marcus to this chat

[1/13/10 12:08:10 PM] Patrick Meier added Shoreh Elhami to this chat

[1/13/10 12:11:54 PM] Jeffrey Villaveces added Luke Beckman to this chat

[1/13/10 12:18:52 PM] Luke Beckman added Eduardo Jezierski, Eric Rasmussen to this chat

[1/13/10 12:38:09 PM] Brian Herbert added Erik Hersman to this chat

[1/13/10 1:29:05 PM] Luke Beckman added Brian Steckler to this chat

[1/13/10 1:41:03 PM] Erik Hersman added Caleb Bell to this chat

[1/13/10 2:32:19 PM] Erik Hersman added Jason Mule to this chat

[1/13/10 2:40:31 PM] Luke Beckman added Josh Nesbit to this chat

[1/13/10 5:32:31 PM] Claire U added Fabienne to this chat

[1/13/10 6:13:48 PM] Eduardo Jezierski added Mark Prutsalis to this chat

[1/13/10 7:28:34 PM] David Kobia added Andrew Turner to this chat

[1/13/10 10:59:49 PM] Josh Marcus added Tim Schwartz to this chat

[1/14/10 12:25:58 AM] Tim Schwartz added Ryan Brown to this chat

[1/14/10 4:00:41 AM] Erik Hersman added Meryn Stol to this chat

[1/14/10 4:25:46 AM] Erik Hersman added Victor Miclovich to this chat

[1/14/10 4:29:46 AM] Kennedy Kasina added Charles Kithika to this chat

[1/14/10 5:02:55 AM] Erik Hersman added Brian Joel Conley to this chat

[1/14/10 5:14:35 AM] Kennedy Kasina added lisudza to this chat

[1/14/10 5:21:03 AM] Erik Hersman added aliveinbaghdad to this chat

[1/14/10 1:26:56 PM] Erik Hersman added Dale Zak to this chat

[1/14/10 1:43:43 PM] Dale Zak added benrigby to this chat

[1/14/10 1:51:00 PM] benrigby added Boris Korsunsky to this chat

[1/14/10 2:00:21 PM] Brian Herbert added Abdallah Chamas to this chat

[1/14/10 3:09:37 PM] Josh Nesbit added Paul Goodman to this chat

[1/14/10 3:24:11 PM] Brian Herbert added Satchit Balsari to this chat

[1/14/10 3:37:02 PM] Satchit Balsari added ritwikdey to this chat

[1/14/10 3:50:38 PM] Satchit Balsari added Selvam Velmurugan to this chat

[1/14/10 4:12:47 PM] Josh Marcus added Sharda Sekaran to this chat

[1/14/10 5:53:19 PM] Ory Okolloh added Jonathan Greenblatt to this chat

[1/14/10 7:30:37 PM] Tim Schwartz added wendell_iii to this chat

[1/14/10 10:02:25 PM] Tim Schwartz added Christopher Csikszentmihalyi to this chat

[1/14/10 11:43:09 PM] Josh Nesbit added Robert Munro to this chat

[1/15/10 4:59:07 AM] Brian Steckler added Ryan Burke to this chat

[1/15/10 5:03:45 AM] Kennedy Kasina added joanwmaina to this chat

[1/15/10 5:39:11 AM] David Kobia added Cooper Quintin to this chat

[1/15/10 10:38:10 AM] mark.prutsalis added Chamindra de Silva to chat

[1/15/10 11:24:43 AM] Sharda Sekaran added Amir Reavis-Bey to this chat

[1/15/10 11:27:07 AM] Josh Nesbit added David Wade to this chat

[1/15/10 3:30:51 PM] Paul Goodman added Tapan Parikh to this chat

[1/15/10 7:02:37 PM] Mark Belinsky added Philip Ashlock to this chat

[1/15/10 8:02:39 PM] Brian Steckler added Michael D. McDonald to chat

[1/15/10 10:15:38 PM] mark.prutsalis added David Bitner to this chat

[1/16/10 12:26:11 PM] mark.prutsalis added lifeeth to this chat

[1/16/10 9:23:24 PM] Rob Baker added Rachel Weidinger to this chat

[1/17/10 11:36:20 AM] Josh Nesbit added Lisa Lamanna to this chat

[1/18/10 3:54:06 PM] Luke Beckman added doshi.sd to this chat

[1/18/10 4:18:09 PM] Tim Schwartz added Christina Xu to this chat

[1/19/10 12:10:19 PM] Jeffrey Villaveces added Amaury to this chat

[1/19/10 6:05:19 PM] Ryan Burke added Randy Maule to this chat

[1/19/10 10:24:21 PM] Tapan Parikh added david.notkin to this chat

Here’s the Wordl rendition of the above text:

Below is the Wordl visualization of all the data in the Haiti Chat group, i.e., not only users being added but also the full content of all the chats between 9pm on January 12th through 9pm on January 30th.  This constitutes over 300 pages of content in a Word document. Of course, dates and individual names still come up most frequently.

The Wordl visualization below draws on the first week of data but with all names, dates and times removed. This enables us to focus exclusively on the content or dialogue exchanged between users.

I like the fact that the word “thanks” stands out fairly prominently. Stay tuned for more Wordl visualizations on the other Skype chat groups. In the meantime, if you want to get started on some more statistical discourse analysis or social network analysis, please feel free to get in touch. Thanks!

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Haiti and the Power of Crowdsourcing

Posted on January 26, 2010 | 25 comments

It’s been two weeks since I called David Kobia to launch Ushahidi’s crisis mapping platform in Haiti. I could probably write 100 blog posts on the high’s and low’s of the past 14 days. Perhaps there will more time be next month to recount the first two weeks of the disaster response. For now, I wanted to share an astounding example of crowdsourcing that took place 10 days ago.

Boston, January 17, 8pm

Picture a snowy Boston evening and the following “Situation Room” a.k.a. my living room at Blakeley Hall, part of The Fletcher School.

My fellow PhD colleague Anna Schulz, who has rapidly become an expert in satellite imagery analysis and geolocation, receives an urgent request via Skype from InSTEDD‘s Eric Rasmussen pictured below with Nico di Tada. That tent is pitched right next to the runway of Port-au-Prince’s international airport, some 1,600 miles south of Boston.

The urgent request? GPS coordinates for 7 key locations across Port-au-Prince where many Haitians were known to be trapped under rubble. They needed to communicate this information to the Search and Rescue (SAR) teams before 0600. Anna immediately got to work.

Boston, January 17, 8.30pm

An hour later, Anna had found the GPS coordinates for all but one of the locations for the rescue operations.

Boston, January 17, 9.41pm

Boston, January 17, 10.26pm

Some time later, the same urgent request originally sent by Eric and Nico appears on the CrisisMappers Google Group:

Boston, January 17, ~11.00pm

At Anna’s request, I send out the following Tweet on Ushahidi.

Boston, January 18, ~1.00am

The following report is submitted to the Ushahidi-Haiti platform by someone from the Twittersphere:

Boston, January 18, 1.20am

My colleague Jaroslav in The Fletcher Situation room Skypes back to Anna:

Courtesy of high-resolution satellite imagery on Google Earth:

Boston, January 18, ~2.00am

It’s getting late but the ALL CAPS in this Tweet to Ushahidi catches my eye:

My colleague Jaroslav and I decide to try the number. Low and behold, we get Marc on the phone after just one ring. With a mixture of English and French, we find out that he was indeed a former employee of Au Bon Prix which happens to be a book store just off “Au Champs de Mars” near the Palace. We immediately Skype this information back to Eric and Nico at Port-au-Prince airport.

Boston, January 18, ~2.15am

Boston, January 18, ~4.30am

It’s still snowing in Boston. Time to get a few hours of sleep. We hand over operations to the Ushahidi Team in Africa.

Patrick Philippe Meier

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Diane Coyle Responds to Criticisms of UN/Vodafore Report

Posted on January 7, 2010 | 5 comments

Guest Blogger: Diane Coyle, lead author of UN/Vodafone Report

The tone of some comments about our report has surprised and disappointed me. It should go without saying that a report-as opposed to a catalog-could never include all the technologies and applications available in this exciting field now.

We selected examples that illustrated relevant aspects of the use of communications and information in the context of an emergency or conflict. The selection methodology was that they should be good illustrations of innovative uses, covering a reasonable spread of technologies, users and countries. In addition, we played to our own strengths in terms of the technologies and approaches we know well, meaning that we understood thoroughly the contribution they can make.

What’s more, this is not an academic report, which some of the criticisms ignored. It is meant to be accessible to a general audience, especially practitioners and policy makers. Why on earth would we include a literature review?

Some comments simply seemed to have missed the point, and no doubt I could have spelled some things out more clearly. For example, the point made in the document about Cyclone Nargis is precisely that even in contexts which hold no promise for humanitarian agencies to introduce new information-rich technologies, very simple low-tech information can still help build community resilience.

Having said that, I am really grateful for comments which pointed out a few factual errors and infelicities, and I hope we can correct them soon. I’m confident that the report makes an important contribution in highlighting the potential for the latest technologies in this field, and the obstacles to realization of that potential.

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Responding to Feedback on UN Foundation/Vodafone Report

Posted on January 6, 2010 | 3 comments

Update: I’m in conversation with the UN/Vodafone Foundation about adding a paragraph on case selection, a case study on Sahana and correcting the error on UNOSAT.

The UN/Vodafone Foundation recently published a new Report on New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts. This blog post responds to feedback on this report. Please note that I do so as second-author. My respected colleague Diane Coyle is the report’s lead author and editor so she may have other thoughts on the feedback. Naturally, I will only address the feedback that relates to my input.

  • Intended audience: The report was written for a general (non-technical/expert) audience as a way to showcase technology applications in the humanitarian space.
  • Case selection: The case studies were selected in consultation with the UN/Vodafone Foundation throughout the research period. These consultations included the authors of the report (Diane and myself) and three members of the UN/Vodafone Foundation who served as editors. Some of the case studies were requested by the Foundation. For the other case studies, we strove to highlight some of the most recent initiatives in consultation with the UN/Vodafone Foundation. Of the 19 case studies selected, 13 didn’t exist some 2 years ago. The others comprise major global initiatives, fit well together as examples for a general audience, or were requested case studies. Clearly, the limited space did not allow us include everyone’s favorite project.
  • Length of report: We originally had some 80-or-so draft pages between us and had to reduce the content to about 60 pages. This meant having to decide what to keep and what to put aside. Some of the rewrite was also done to make the report less technical and more widely understandable. This helped to save on space.
  • UNOSAT and Sri Lanka: The reference does not intend to endorse or discount the interpretation of the imagery by the international community. The reference is based on in-person consultations with several well-placed experts. That said, I would agree that some rephrasing is in order this paragraph needs to be reworked.

On a personal note, I have found the tone of some criticisms rather disappointing and old school. There are several ways to give feedback: one is constructive, another is destructive. The former provides incentives to improve and continue an open collaborative conversation as a community. The latter defeats the incentive for growth and leads to a more self-centered community.

Some of the criticisms of this report have been destructive. Why is it that some of us can’t get our points across with more composure? Does bitterness make us feel more important? I expected a lot more from some of my (older, wiser) colleagues. But I haven’t always been good on providing constructive feedback either, so thanks to my “new fan club” I’ve got another New Year’s resolution for 2010: I will do my best to give constructive, supportive feedback.

Patrick Philippe Meier

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