#crisismapping

When disaster hits: fires, floods, earthquakes - it’s not just roads and homes that collapse. It’s comms, too. The irony? That’s exactly when we need information most. Enter: the people-powered internet. Crowdsourcing, baby. 💻🤝

In places where official communication lines break (or straight-up vanish), everyday folks have stepped up with tools, tweets, and real-time updates. Think: live Google Maps edits during the Haiti earthquake, community Facebook groups coordinating rescues in the Queensland floods, or even volunteer hackers building crisis dashboards after the Japan tsunami. This isn’t just digital noise, it’s networked survival. 🔥🌍

Ushahidi, for example, turned chaos into clarity during the Kenyan crisis and beyond. Their open-source platform lets people on the ground report directly, map danger zones, and flag where help’s needed. It’s giving: “we are the media now.” According to Riccardi (2016), crowdsourced info isn't just fast, it’s often more accurate and human-centered than traditional top-down systems.

This is where the idea of the “networked public” hits hard. Crisis transforms social media from scroll culture into survival infrastructure. Communities and strangers become instant responders, and platforms like Twitter or YouTube turn into lifelines, literally.

But it’s not all sunshine and crowds. Challenges exist: misinformation spreads fast, data can get messy, and not everyone’s online. Still, the shift is real. Crises now birth digital communities: fluid, temporary, but powerful AF.

So next time systems break, remember: crowds don’t just panic, they organize. And sometimes, the people with the least signal have the loudest impact.

References:

Ushahidi's crowdsourcing software gives people a voice in times of crisis 26 January 2018 Ushahidi's crowdsourcing software gives people a voice in times of crisis

ACLED 2018: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a disaggregated conflict collection, analysis and crisis mapping project.

Executive Summary

“Disorder is spreading. While the overall scale of political violence slightly decreased in 2018, the scope expanded. Political violence and protest surged in more countries than they declined, and the total number of conflict-affected areas rose sharply around the world. Close-proximity violence against civilians escalated, and half the countries across Africa, South & Southeast Asia, and the Middle East witnessed an increase in reported violent deaths.”

“A review of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) 2018 dataset demonstrates that the global political violence landscape has substantially shifted over the past year, registering distinct threat patterns across each region of ACLED coverage. The number and type of organized violence and protest events; the volume of reported fatalities; the proliferation of armed actors; and the geographic footprint of violence – all vary markedly across time and location.”

ACLED 2018: The Year in Review surveys and contextualizes these trends, providing a comprehensive look back at a year of evolving disorder.

2018: Children pay the heaviest price in conflict

“Children continue to pay a high price in today’s global conflicts. The recruitment and use of children remains a hallmark of war and the UN Secretary-General’s 2018 annual report, released in June, listed 56 non-state armed groups and seven state armed forces for recruiting and using child soldiers in 2017.”

The power of mindfulness in a war zone

“After more than a year conducting mindfulness workshops in South Sudan, Paula Ramirez is struck by how emotionally shut off many aid workers in the country have become. Ramirez is the co-founder of Swiss-based NGO Breathe International, which promotes mindfulness for peacebuilding in conflict-affected areas, and has spent 13 years working around the world. She has helped survivors of torture, sexual assault, and landmines, as well as school teachers and those who have been internally displaced, affected by conflict in countries such as India, Thailand, Nepal, and Colombia.”

(CORI 2017) Modern technologies have lowered geographical barriers and amplified our ability to create and share content. This digital community of networked information producers, is leading to action in solving real-world problems in the form of crowdsourced crisis mapping. Which is where crowd-generated communication - e.g., social media feeds - are captured and combined with geographic data to provide response and relief organisations with near-real-time information during disasters (Poblet & Casanovas 2012). Platforms such as, OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi (among others) are more frequently being used to communicate and provide a level of transparency amid a crisis; events including the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 (Wendlin, Radisch & Jacobzone 2013, p.10). During such circumstances, prompt aid coordination and distribution are critical. Response teams need to know which areas have been impacted the most and how to best to deliver disaster relief. Watch Juliana Rotich, co-founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi explain the effectiveness of crowd-sourced information during a crisis: Watch Juliana Rotich, co-founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi, explain the effectiveness of crowd-sourced information during a crisis:

Mapping disaster-hit areas The use of crowdsourcing platforms can change the tempo of an event by creating crisis maps of disaster stricken areas. This aids both emergency services and the publi to organise and coordinate quicker and much more efficiently (Ford 2012, p.33). One example of its effectiveness, was during the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, one of the most powerful storms on record, leaving thousands dead and millions without homes. In response to this catastrophe, online volunteers gathered on OpenStreetMap to create “detailed post-disaster maps of typhoon-affected areas” (Guo 2014). The contributors generated millions of map updates, which helped the Red Cross decided where and how to send supplies to the survivors (Stanton-Geddes 2013).

Noodle map square

Team members: Slayer Kuo-Yu Chuang, Heather Leson, Francesco

Ciriaci, Fahed Alhaj Mohamed, Stephen Mather

On Saturday afternoon, Union Square, 5 crisismappers conducted a participatory mapping project to capture stories about the potentially affected community. Who are these humans of New York? What are their roles and activities in this beautiful space? We determined our best mapping tool and data collection tool to be our phones, specifically the Geo Things app.  Our adventure started with a preliminary site walk through to quietly observe with no data collection. This time was used to provide full context into our plan. All our efforts to stay together was thwarted by a busy crowd. Distracted by a hovering helicopter the team got separated. We realized that we did not create a team emergency contact plan and almost had to default to twitter as a communications channel.

Once we reconnected, it was time for a lunch planning session over noodles. 

Before approaching the week 8 readings on crowd sourcing in times of crisis, I was largely unaware of how effectively people used social media during disasters. I was unaware of the concept of a crowd map. My knowledge of crowdsourcing went about as far as crowd funding, such as Kickstarter, and crowd knowledge, like Wikipedia. I personally find this notion incredible. It’s this fascinating, organic construction of human interaction which flows together so beautifully. It’s a reminder that humans are survivalists and will naturally manipulate the resources at hand to further their existence; in this case, the need for assistance in hard times.

However, verification was a term passed around quite a bit when I explored the concepts – crowd sourced information can quickly turn into a game of Chinese whispers if there is no one around to mediate the content. And relying again on the crowd itself to verify information, like what is seen in Wikipedia, is far too risky in a crisis situation. Placing crowd mapping at the forefront of a disaster scenario can place large amounts of risk on emergency responders if the balance between traditionally sourced information and crowd sourced information is skewed to heavily towards the latter. Adding panic and confusion to the mix makes matters worse, particularly if you’re trying to prioritise emergency situations and all of your sources are from frightened and muddled citizens.

It’s the affordances of each platform which begin to play major roles in these events. Twitter, for example, relies on the ability to group together content based on tags, a particularly useful quality as seen in the Queensland flooding disaster where users would use the tags #qldfloods and @QPSMedia as identifiers for their alerts. It’s the additional affordances within platforms like Twitter, such as the ability to post a photo, which would further assist in these situations and greatly increase the validity of information due to real-time photographic documentation.

source:http://vimeo.com/21190136

It seems so sensible: Add voice to text messages. A smart phone is still a phone, designed to transmit sound. Which is why I found myself completely entranced by utellit, a small Chicago startup, at a recent “pitch” evening sponsored local website Technori. 

Founder Rishi Khullar’s epiphany? Profound annoyance at the rote Facebook response to the news of a friend’s birthday, i.e. “Happy Birthday!” scrawled endlessly on the celebrant’s wall. “Lame,” thought Khullar. Wouldn’t it be nicer to leave an old-fashioned voice message, but in new-fangled way? 

Wouldn’t it be in nicer still, thought I, to use the tech for humanitarian work or disaster response? Imagine emergency workers surveying a neighborhood leveled by an earthquake, recording detailed messages of the scene, then tucking them into geocoded text messages as shortened urls? This could take crisismapping to a whole new level. 

So exciting were the the possibilities, I whipped out an email to some of the best and brightest I know working in the humanitarian space. “Am I having a morning coffee moment, or is this really a good idea?”

It turns out it’s a really good idea. 

So much so, that many have been working on it, using open source tools. Eduardo Jezierski, CTO of InSTEDD* wrote:

…As ICT4D (ed. note: internet and communication technology for development) / social media / apps reach lower and lower swaths of the “pyramid,” voice becomes an increased need. Maternal child health services are not for doctors anymore: They involve mothers. The best, most valuable information post crisis is generated by—and curated by—the affected populations themselves, in their own language. 

Except from some privileged areas where text-based systems don’t run into the literacy, scripting, and dialect issues; voice is the key to involving a broader set of the population.

But what was fairly easy for the utellit team to set up here in the U.S. is much trickier elsewhere in the world, where smart phones are rare, telco infrastructure spotty and API’s come with lots of strings attached. 

All of this leaves a huge empowerment gap—communities can’t invent and deploy their own voice-like systems…

At InSTEDD our interest is in enabling a hundred apps like these bloom (without a dependency on iPhones, at least until they are common in rural india), invented by those that are part of, or close to, the communities with the needs; and (designed to be) integrated into the likes of Medic Mobile and Ushahidi.

We want any developer (wherever… in Nigeria…) that comes up with an idea like utellit to be able to implement it in days.

Working with Google.org and USAID, Ed’s team has been busy simplifying the creation of voice services to make them easier to build.  

We are building on top of open source switches (Asterisk/FreeSWITCH) direct VoIP integration and in some cases hardware integration to help folks build voice apps. 

These apps can span DIY-level for a few users; to national scale services by taking an approach similar to what we did with Nuntium. 

We are providing a simple HTTP API anyone can code to from any programming language to build almost any app they imagine; and then below that API  we allow a mix of rapid-deployment or operator-class “gateways” for the calls. 

Nicolas di Tada, InSTEDD’s Director or Platform Engineering provides more background and detail: Verboice - Listen and respond to the voice of your community.

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When Steve Jobs died, Wired writer Tim Carmody wrote eloquently about the profound impact of the iPod in the life of his young autistic son: 

…It may be a stretch to say Steve Jobs invented the iPod Touch or most of the technologies contained in it. But Steve Jobs certainly put it in my son’s hands, both by making it a sub-$200 device (and in our case, giving it away free with a laptop) and by helping to create an ecosystem of software applications for people with disabilities — perhaps especially communication disabilities…

The iPod wasn’t invented for people with disabilities, but nonetheless proved an answer to many prayers. That led to an interesting feedback look. The demo video for Siri, the new voice-command assistant, ends with a blind woman using her iPod to confirm a dinner date. 

Too often, startup tech pitches focus on a single, narrowly defined “haiku” problem: 

Hate waiting in line? / Pre-order equals happy / Download app today

Yet true breakthrough innovation demands taking the blinders off and noticing other possibilities (think Robin Williams pondering the potential of a pink scarf). A single brilliant insight can address many needs and trigger cascades of additional insights.

To think bigger, first you must begin to see bigger.

—  J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews