Press
April 5, 2010
Tufts map steered action amid chaos
James F. Smith, The Boston Globe
Almost from the moment the Jan. 12 earthquake rocked Haiti, Tufts University graduate student Patrick Meier knew what he had to do to help: Make a map.
Aid workers quickly saw the value of Meier’s creation. “This really helped us get the aid exactly where it was needed,” said Craig Clarke, a civilian intelligence analyst for the Marine Corps. “What they did was beyond valuable. It was gold.” Clarke, who helped the Marines deploy and operate in Haiti from his intelligence base at Quantico, Va., said he had no doubt that the crisis-mapping operation helped to save lives and get crucial aid to thousands of Haitians in the weeks after the quake.
March 12, 2010
Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd
Anand Giridharadas, New York Times
When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number, 4636, was advertised over the country’s radio waves. Ushahidi received thousands of text messages reporting the location of trapped bodies. The messages were translated by a diffuse army of Haitian-Americans in the United States and each was plotted on a “crisis map”.
Ushahidi volunteers at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, ran a situation room from which they instant-messaged with the U.S. Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search for lives. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi redeployed again. Read More …
March 11, 2010
How crowdsourcing helped Haiti’s relief efforts
Lukas Biewald, O’Reilly Radar
Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company — crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower — repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636.
Before January 12, I knew little to nothing about Haiti or the role of crowdsourcing in disaster relief. My company, CrowdFlower, offers a crowdsourced labor platform to clients who are mostly Silicon Valley tech companies. The January earthquakes in Haiti ignited a completely new type of emergency response that involved the contributions of individuals, companies, NGOs, and staffed by thousands of volunteers around the world. On a more personal level, it led to the discovery of a very surprising application of our product. Read More …
March 10, 2010
Microwork is the new, new buzzword in global outsourcing
Tavia Grant, Globe and Mail
An hour’s drive from Haiti’s earthquake-ravaged capital of Port-au-Prince hums a cyber café, decked with dozens of new netbooks, intermittent Internet connectivity and hope.
Within these lemon-painted walls, 47 young workers are learning to translate emergency text messages in Creole, French and English – requests for medical care, food, water and shelter – to help improve response times by aid workers on the ground. Their messages are collected on an SMS feed and distributed to agencies such as the International Red Cross and the United Nations. Read More …
February 20, 2010
Cries for Help via Text Messages Are Used to Direct Aid to Haiti
Carmen Gentile, New York Times
Even the least sophisticated of cellphones has a text-messaging option, noted Josh Nesbit co-founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic, an aid group that provides free open-source software communication for medical workers in developing countries. He helped set up the Haiti emergency program.
Since its conception just hours after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the joint program has expanded to include regular news and information updates to those who have reached out through the emergency line, telling them where to find food relief and seek medical attention. Read More …
February 10, 2010
Interview: Ushahidi, Samasource, CrowdFlower, & FrontlineSMS | Mission 4636: Helping People in Haiti Via Tech, Mobile, Crowdsourcing, & Social Media
Katrina Heppler, EnvisionGood TV
First: bravo to the thousands of volunteers worldwide who have dedicated themselves to assisting with this amazing endeavor of translating Creole mobile text messages to help people in Haiti following the devastating 7.0M earthquake that struck the nation on January 12. 2010. A huge “Hats Off” to the incredible organizations: Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower, and Samasource. Read more / see video …
February 1, 2010
Kitchener volunteer part of online network translating Haitian pleas
Brent Davis, The Record
People in the stricken country can send messages for free to the number 4636, a code that’s being advertised on Haitian radio. The messages end up in an online queue. That’s where volunteers like Sooley-Peralta come in, tasked with translating the messages into English before they’re sent out to organizations participating in the relief effort like the Red Cross or the United States Coast Guard.
“It’s probably one of the hardest-working and most dedicated groups of volunteers I’ve ever seen,” says Sooley-Peralta, a 34-year-old senior project manager at Accu Translation Services. She signed on to the effort after hearing about it through Twitter. Read more …
January 30, 2010
How crowdsourcing is helping in Haiti
Justin Mullins, New Scientist
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. Read more …
January 28, 2010
How a tweet brought makeshift 911 services to life in Haiti
Kim-Mai Cutler, Venture Beat
Two San Francisco-based startups, Crowdflower and Samasource, came on-board to help find volunteers to translate and categorize the messages. Both are in the “ Mechanical Turk” space — they farm out simple, rote tasks that computing can’t solve to thousands of people at a time. (Crowdflower is a venture-backed startup, while Samasource is a non-profit that gives this work to refugees and people in the poorest parts of the world, including Haiti.) Read more …
January 27, 2010
Translating Text Messages for Haiti
Andrew Price, GOOD Blog
Leila Chirayath Janah explains how her organization is helping to translate text messages from earthquake victims in Haiti so relief workers can better understand the conditions there. Her aim is to eventually give this translation work to Haitians, so they can jumpstart their recovery with jobs. Read more …
January 19, 2010
Ushahidi: Citizen Reporting and the Haitian Relief Effort
Clark Boyd, Discovery News
With local cell service down and little chance of getting text messages out of Haiti, the Ushahidi team started by taking mapping information coming in from mainstream media outlets, and via Twitter (see hashtags #haiti and #haitiquake). They also created an email address where citizens could submit reports, or news of missing persons (haiti@ushahidi.com). Finally, and most critically, they reached out to Haiti’s largest cell provider, DigiCel, to create a text message short code where citizens in Haiti could send an SMS about their location, and their needs. DigiCel allowed Ushahidi to use the short code 4636 (INFO). Read more …
January 26, 2010
Texts, Tweets Saving Haitians From the Rubble
Nathan Hodge, Wired
Relief workers in Haiti received an emergency text message Tuesday about a collapsed school, with children still alive in the rubble. A search-and-rescue team on the scene, however, couldn’t find the right location.
Then a group of volunteers pinpointed the origin of the message from the address in the 4636 message
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/texts-tweets-saving-haitians-from-the-rubble/
Read more …
January 17, 2010
Samasource and CrowdFlower in Haiti: Rebuilding After a Crisis
Leila Janah, Samasource
Together with the all-star team at Inveneo, we hope to work with 1,000 Jobs to maintain internet connectivity in Mirebalais and provide microwork opportunities to people who have lost their livelihoods. For more on what Samasource is doing in response to the crisis, please visit our blog, or follow us on Twitter @samasource. Please donate to support this effort. Read more …