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Project 4636: An Info Graphic

Hot on the heals of Brian’s excellent summary of the 4636 Project development efforts, I’d like to join in with a little info-graphic of sorts. My goal in putting this together is to present an easy-to-understand “big-picture” graphic that illustrates how a simple SMS, sent from a Haitian in need, can be transformed into a powerful resource that fuels the crisis response and recovery effort.

A Quick Recap of Project 4636

4636-Graphic-Overview

And here’s the full graphic:

4636-Graphic_thumb

Click the image to see the high-res version.

The thing that impresses me most about the whole project is how it all came together: lots of people working together across lots of different organizations. I really liked what Andrew Turner had to say about the level of collaboration that was going on all fronts, not just Project 4636:

AJT-Tweet

Andrew Turner: "seeing things being created and incorporated in hours what would have taken months. human spirit and camaraderie multiplies capability"

For someone who’s recently come from the competitive creative agency world of non-disclosure and trade secret, it’s a breath of fresh air to see this level of collaboration between individuals across organizations, and to see that collaboration play a direct role in helping those in need.

Please note that this “big-picture” graphic is just that, a “big-picture”. It does not attempt to represent ALL the organizations and people involved with the 4636 Project. There have been lots of folks who have done great work here who we can’t even begin to name.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tagged with , , .

By caleb
February 8, 2010

2 comments

SMS Turks

If you’ve been reading along on the Ushahidi Blog, you will know that the coordination efforts around the Haitian Earthquake have been nothing short of amazing. The students and volunteers at the Fletcher School Situation Room, the translation volunteers on the Mission 4636 project, the teams and staff of Digicel, Comcel, Energy for Opportunity, FrontlineSMS, InSTEDD, Sahana, Cartika Hosting, the US State Department, almost all branches of the US Military providing humanitarian response and a list of individuals and organizations that could honestly go on forever, have come together in an unprecedented way to work together to help solve problems on the ground and to get information out to any and all interested parties.

My role in all of this started shortly after the Ushahidi-Haiti instance was up and running, providing technical support and new, rapid development on the instance as needs arose. Virtually all of the core developers were working around the clock making sure critical bugs and new features were taken care of, as well as making sure the servers were running smoothly.

github - SMS Turks

The home of the future redevlopment of SMS Turks on github.

While everyone was in full gear working on the website, we were able to secure the 4636 short code with the help of Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS, Digicel and Comcel. We just had one problem, the stakeholders who were going to be digesting these messages and passing them along to the appropriate organizations spoke English and some French. Messages being sent from Haitians on the ground would be coming through primarily in Haitian Kreyol, which would have made it nearly impossible to categorize, map and respond. So, my focus shifted towards the short code effort. With the help of InSTEDD donating server space and Robert Munro handling volunteer feedback, I was able to write a system at 4636.ushahidi.com that would allow translation, categorization and basic geocoding of all the messages that came in. I’ve coined this project, “SMS Turks.”

In crisis situations, it’s always better to use systems that have been tested thoroughly that can scale well. Since SMS Turks was literally put into production the day it was built, there were bound to be issues. Also, volunteers can only put in 12 hour days translating text messages for so long. CrowdFlower graciously offered their services to pipe the messages through their system, handling the technical aspects at no cost to Ushahidi. Over time, as volunteers go back to their day jobs, Samasource will be providing Haitian’s paid opportunities to process the messages as they are coming in, allowing us to put money into the Haitian economy.

The SMS Turks system will be entirely rewritten from the ground up as an Ushahidi project. It will be easily pluggable into Ushahidi, as well as produce feeds that should work with virtually any other open system.

Posted in Development. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

By Brian Herbert
February 7, 2010

3 comments

Haiti: Taking Stock of How We Are Doing

Day 25. Volunteers have mapped almost 2,500 reports on Ushahidi-Haiti with about half coming from urgent and actionable text messages. The site was launched just hours after the earthquake. Since then, some 300 volunteers in Boston, DC, Montreal, Geneva, London and Portland have been trained, including some members of the Haitian Diaspora, to continue mapping around the clock. But tracking how responders are using Ushahidi at a tactical level has been a challenge—one that is nicely summarized by Clark Craig with the Marine Corps:

“I cannot overemphasize to you what the work of the Ushahidi/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation is moving too fast. [...] I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kinds of [success] stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most. [...] Keep up the good work! You are making the biggest difference of anything I have seen out there in the open source world.”

Because humanitarian operations are moving so fast it is difficult for even the responders themselves to document each instance in which Ushahidi saved a life or relieved suffering. So if the primary responders can’t keep up, you can imagine just how difficult it is for us to document who is responding to what, where and when.

LtGen Blum, 2nd in Command, NORTHCOM visist Situation Room

LtGen Blum, 2nd in Command, NORTHCOM visits Situation Room

So we’ve done our best to solicit feedback from a number of individuals/organizations. Some of them have asked not to be quoted publicly. So the feedback below may not include the person’s name. Some of the feedback below reached us indirectly via online news or public speeches.

  • Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The technology community has set up interactive maps to help us identify needs and target resources. And on Monday, a seven-year-old girl and two women were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed supermarket by an American search-and-rescue team after they sent a text message calling for help.” Clinton does not actually refer to Ushahidi in her speech but Ushahidi is the only interactive mapping platform that maps incoming text messages that are urgent and actionable in near real-time.
  • Lieutenant General Blum, 2nd in command at NORTHCOM: “You are doing a remarkable job. We all need to learn from you.” LtGen Blum changed his schedule to personally visit the Ushahidi-Haiti Situation Room at Tufts University. He gave “Awarded for Excellence” coins to all present.
  • Craig Fulgate, FEMA Task Force: “[The] Crisis Map of Haiti represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community.”
  • [Name not public], FEMA Task Force: “No matter what anyone else tells you, don’t stop mapping, you are saving lives.” (Conference call to Ushahidi).
  • Daniel Friedman, Office of Coordinator for Reconstruction & Stabilization, US State Department: “Just wanted to thank you guys and let you know I’ve found your mapping to be really helpful to what I’m trying to do here.”
  • [Name not public], Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, (OFDA) at USAID: “Your work has not only been a) inspiring, but also b) incredibly helpful to so many in this relief effort. Incredibly grateful for all you do.”

We have also received official letters of support for our Ushahidi deployment from the World Food Program (WFP), Development Alternatives, Inc (DAI) and InSTEDD. These letters outline how critical the Ushahidi platform has been for the humanitarian operations.

In terms of individual success stories, we got these from the Marine Corps:

“Here is one from the 22 Marine Expeditionary Unit: ‘We had data on an area outside of Grand Goave needing help. Today, we sent an assessment team out there to validate their needs and everything checked out. While the team was out there, they found two old women and a young girl with serious injuries from the earthquake; one of the women had critical respiratory issues. They were evacuated.”

“Based off some information that we received from Ushahidi, we inserted the recon platoon this morning to check out a remote village that was listed in some of the blogs.  We are now in the process of medevacing two local nationals who would not have received medical treatment in time for life or limb had we not found them.”

Sometimes we find success stories in the news, like this one from the Irish Times:

“[Conneally] also quickly recognised the value of another social media tool being deployed in an earthquake zone for the first time. This is www.Ushahidi.com, a website first developed to aggregate violent incidents in Kenya after the last hotly contested elections. Ushahidi is a Swahili word for witness. People throughout Haiti have been able to use e-mail, Twitter or SMS to report food and water shortages, violent incidents and people trapped under the rubble, thus providing a unique community-driven view of the geographical spread of the disaster and where the needs are. Conneally is a big fan, and cites examples of its success in Haiti including the discovery of a hospital that had survived unscathed but was receiving no patients; in another case the Red Cross took just 20 minutes to respond to a post about a need for fuel for a generator at a health clinic.”

Our own volunteers in the Ushahidi-Haiti Situation Room at Tufts have also documented a number of success stories. According to Roz Sewell, head of the SMS Ushahidi Volunteer Team,

“We also know that two days ago the World Food Program delivered food to an informal camp of 2500 people, having yet to receive food or water, in Diquini to a location that Ushahidi had identified for them.” Roz herself wrote this blog post on one of her success stories.

Another Ushahidi volunteer, Anna Schulz, has played an instrumental role in providing the Search and Rescue Teams with critical geo-location support. She has identified GPS coordinates for several dozens locations thought to have people trapped under the rubble. You can read about some of her work in this blog post.

Individual Report on Ushahidi

Individual Report on Ushahidi

In terms of individual reports, we haven’t been able to go through all of them but some of the ones below demonstrate how the “feedback loop” was closed on a number of alerts:

Some of the organizations tracking the Ushahidi map/feed include the following:

  • Red Cross
  • Plan International
  • Charity Water
  • US State Department
  • International Medical Corps
  • AIDG
  • USAID
  • FEMA
  • US Coast Guard Task Force
  • World Food Program
  • SOUTHCOM
  • OFDA
  • UNDP

There is still much to be done. Three of our current priorities are:

  1. Upgrade the “Get Alerts” feature on Ushahidi-Haiti in order to allow users to subscribe to specific indicators or key words in addition to the existing ability to specify the geographic area of interest.
  2. Work with the Crisis Mappers Group to update the categories/indicators being used to map Haiti. As the emergency phase shifts to early recovery and post-disaster reconstruction and development, new categories/indicators will be needed.
  3. Scale up capacity building workshops for members of the Haitian Diaspora in Boston.

Given that Ushahidi-Haiti was launched at The Fletcher School, I wanted to share that one of our Alumnus, Jan Olaf, class of 2001, was killed in the earthquake. He was with the UN and incredibly dedicated to Haiti. One of his close friends wrote me this when we learned the news on January 21st:

“Patrick, I can’t think of a more appropriate way to honor the loss of a fellow Fletcherite who was in Haiti working for the UN, but from the work that you are coordinating with the help of others at Fletcher.”

Posted in Crisis, Deployment, disaster. Tagged with , , , , .

By patrick
February 6, 2010

5 comments

From the Rubble: Emotions of a Haiti Volunteer

Kate Perino is a Sophomore at Tufts University majoring in English. She originates from Maryland and can be reached at k.perin@gmail.com.

During winter break, I happened upon a news site mentioning the Fletcher school. The article was about a group of Tufts grad students who got together with their laptops in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and began sifting through text messages and Twitter feeds directly from Haiti. They were compiling information for relief organizations, to help them save lives and coordinate resource distribution. In some cases, the students were reporting medical emergencies and actually locating people trapped in buildings. The article said they planned to continue as long as they had volunteers.

Picture 18

I was instantly determined to get involved—it sounded like a really innovative, relevant way to help out—so I attended a training session the first weekend of the semester, January 23. I found out that I was becoming a volunteer with a group called Ushahidi. Ushahidi began in Kenya when people posted real-time coverage of post-election violence and unrest on the Internet. It’s about the impact of crowdsourcing, when ordinary people use technology for a common goal.

You can see on www.haiti.ushahidi.com just how much data has been compiled in one place from myriad sources, thousands and thousands of pieces forming a single picture. Even after looking at the report map countless times, I’m still amazed by its sheer scope. I’ve been on the SMS mapping team for one week, now. That means I go through text messages from Haiti, translated into English by Creole-speaking volunteers, and find GPS coordinates that people on the ground can use.

The very first day, I worked on my first SMS-based report for over 45 minutes. Eventually I had to give up. I couldn’t find a location based on the message because there wasn’t enough information. When I asked a more experienced volunteer for help, she said, “It turns out that way sometimes.” She told me not to get discouraged, to focus on the messages that provide enough information to pin down a location.

Even when you get street names and landmarks, though, it’s challenging: many areas in Haiti lack street labels on the maps, and some places are called by more than one name. Some place names are common, so I might end up with looking at fifteen places called Bel Air, scattered across the country. Sometimes, names are misspelled in the text message and I end up having to guess. Is the text message directing me to Rue Dupuy indicating a place called Rue Depuy, Dupuis, or Rue du Pais?

Finding coordinates is like puzzle solving, combining experience, a little creativity and a lot of raw determination. It’s an amazing feeling every time I manage to track down precise coordinates. On a very basic level, it means that one person’s call for help didn’t go unheard. We haven’t let them fall by the wayside. Over and over I get confirmation that our system is working. We really do improve the chances of people trying to stay alive. The messages of gratitude and encouragement help offset the emotional impact of the job.

And there is, unavoidably, an emotional drain. Last weekend, I looked up from my screen to realize it was already Sunday night. I’d gone five hours with one quick break to stretch my legs, and was dizzy with all the data I’d sifted through. I packed up and left, and realized that I was actually shaking. It’s hard to keep some distance and emotional stability when you read message after message saying, “Please, there are children, we need a place to sleep, when is help coming, have we been forgotten? God, there’s no food.”

It’s hard to put Haiti out of my mind when I leave the situation room, hard to focus on other things and balance crisis response with the demands of classes and real life. It’s because of that empathy, because we care about people we’ll never meet, that this effort is taking place at all. It’s because that empathy, too, that I feel almost traumatized by proxy. I’m much less overwhelmed than I was at first, but as I told a friend on the phone the other day, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. I want to use my life for helping people, but I swear I remember every message I’ve read. They’re imprinted on my brain. The Haiti earthquake is not a remote disaster anymore, not just another charity cause I’ll forget in six months or a year. It’s a stream of individual voices. I lie in bed at night wondering if the family that just had a new baby on Wednesday has found anything to eat.

For all the heartache, the past week has been nothing short of inspiring. There’s a strong undercurrent of hope in the Situation Room at The Fletcher School. There’s a sense of purpose and positive energy, even some humor to complement the gravity with which all the volunteers approach the task of saving lives. I never truly understood before just how powerfully disaster does draw people together, from all parts of the globe and all backgrounds. Seeing it here is enough to make me believe that it will get better. Things are bad in Haiti, I know. It won’t get fixed all at once, and not today. But it will, because people are working together. And that’s enough to change the world.

All Tufts volunteers who choose to help are reminded of the counseling services available at Tufts University. The Situation Room also has a dedicated therapist available for group conversations and one-on-one meetings. Volunteers are encouraged to make use of these services and to make sure to take time off on a regular basis.

Posted in Crisis, Deployment. Tagged with , , .

By patrick
January 31, 2010

10 comments

Building Bridges: Ushahidi as a tool for the Haitian Community

Sabina Carleson is a senior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health. She has worked in Southern Sudan and three years ago co-founded RESPE, a community-led research and development project in rural northern Haiti under the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL).

Some 4 years ago, I began an oral history project chronicling the Haitian Diaspora here in the Greater Boston Area, and lines of the powerful stories still linger in my mind: “Haitians have always known hardship, and will always know hardship,” an elderly man told me in our mixed dialogue of French, Creole, and English somewhere in the basement of  a community housing project. “But the Haitians always have been strong, and always will be strong.”

In the 4 years since, those observations have been confirmed, but layers of complexity added to them. In 4 years of working with the Diaspora, I saw a community that had been through hardship in Haiti, faced new hardships in America, and had no illusions that their community would face hardships in the roads ahead. But I also saw a community that in acknowledging the persistent nature of hardship in Haiti had had developed an equally persistent approach to innovation.

Haitian civil society has always been among the most organized and cooperative in the world. On the ground, community cooperatives are the backbone of day to day life, and informal networks of communication stretch across the most remote areas of the countryside. Outside of Haiti, the Diaspora sends the most remittances home per capita of all migrant populations worldwide; however the flood of money is more of a metaphor for the flood of frustrations and dreams and intentions the Diaspora is channeling across the Caribbean.

sabina1

That innovation expresses itself in many ways: in my life, that innovation expressed itself in the Diaspora mentoring a poverty alleviation initiative I was helping to develop between Tufts University and a rural community called Balan in northern Haiti, helping us nurture new models of community-led research, exchanges, and project development.

That experience on the ground allowed me the gift of seeing firsthand the elaborate human infrastructure that is what makes Haiti, contrary to popular portrayal, a strong country.  I passed a baz every day, a brightly-colored gazebo that serves as a community center in good times, centers of community defense in bad times, and centers of community communication across the ages.

The principal way the Diaspora organizes itself here in the United States is different but still impressive: in locally- and regionally-based “Hometown Associations”, which are groups of Haitians who collectively support individual towns in Haiti by pooling remittances for small- to medium-scale development projects.  In recent years, Diaspora groups have accelerated their search for ways to maximize their impact on the development of their country by using the technology that is spreading from Montreal to Miami to Mirebalais.

And this is one of the primary reasons why the Ushahidi-Haiti platform can function as a revolutionary tool for both Haitians on the ground and in the Diaspora to direct the flow of aid and influence the reconstruction of their country.  Ushahidi in the long term can serve as a communication tool to create new links between the Diaspora and the ground that are dynamic and quick and close as word getting passed from baz to baz.

In the current crisis, I have seen the faith of a people tried time and time again by crisis battered in a way I have never seen: even our partners on the ground in Balan in the north by Cap Haitian told us they were safe but “shaken” both literally and figuratively. And I have seen our partners in Boston shaken to their feet at a speed that was remarkable for a community already so quick to stand up for its home country.

And if that flood of frustrations and dreams and intentions was formidable before, it has truly been unleashed now.  But it has been unleashed at a time when the airports are clogged, the ports destroyed, the roads crumbled, and the human infrastructure that is what Haiti was truly built on has been torn asunder.

But at the moment, perhaps one of the best channels for those frustrations and dreams and intentions is the one that was perhaps the least shaken: the technological one. Ushahidi can one day become a long-term platform that Haitians can continue to construct the future of their country on; however at the moment, it is the immediate bridge that is attempting to link the communities in America with the communities in Haiti and communities in the humanitarian sphere.

And hopefully,  if this bridge between these communities holds during the crushing weight of the current crisis, it will prove itself strong enough to stand under the shifting pressures of reconstruction and development. And the more frustrations and dreams and expectations are moved across this bridge between the three communities now in the form of goods and ideas and services, the more solid of a platform Ushahidi will be when the dust settles and it is handed over to an innovating Haitian community.

Posted in Crisis, Deployment, Diaspora. Tagged with , , , .

By patrick
January 30, 2010

6 comments

Haiti: Where We Are & Where We Go From Here

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.

vol3

Our awesome volunteers have since processed and mapped the majority of the 1,800 reports currently published on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform. They have vetted reports to make sure the most specific location information is included. If we receive an address, we find the exact GPS coordinates. If we receive an SMS that is unclear, we text back or even call back to get more information. We also verify as many reports as possible. As one of our volunteers explains,

Usually we only mark a report as verified if we have two text messages from different numbers describing the same incident, or a Twitter report confirmed by another source (i.e. SMS or a different website), or information from the ground.

We are doing this manually right now, but with Swift River in the works, we hope to be able to validate crowdsourced information in near real time using automated systems in the future.

We have also provided direct support to key humanitarian actors on the ground including Search and Rescue teams. Our volunteers are in effect running the first Neogeography Operations Center for Disaster Response. Again, no small task.

vol4

This is why the public and private encouragement we receive go a long way. Our volunteers are full time students or have full time jobs. They are volunteering their time to make a difference in Haiti. The Situation Room often sounds more like a hospital emergency room than anything else. We even have an English/Haitian Creole Medical Dictionary on hand. The work is emotional, difficult and at times very intense. No surprise then that FEMA has kindly offered our Boston-based volunteers with expert counseling whenever needed. I’m personally awed by the resilience that the team has demonstrated. And I know first hand that the encouragement we receive has a lot to do with that.

Source: http://www.marines.mil

Source: http://www.marines.mil

On Wednesday, for example, we received the following kind words from a key contact with the Marine Corps in Haiti:

I cannot overemphasize to you what the work of the Ushahidi/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation is moving too fast.

Here is one from the 22 Marine Expeditionary Unit: “We had data on an area outside of Grand Goave needing help. Today, we sent an assessment team out there to validate their needs and everything checked out. While the team was out there, they found two old women and a young girl with serious injuries from the earthquake; one of the women had critical respiratory issues. They were evacuated.”

Your site saved these people’s lives. I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kind of stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most. [...] Keep up the good work!! You are making the biggest difference of anything I have seen out there in the open source world.

Just after getting this, one of our volunteers relayed the following to us via Skype:

I know everyone is tired, but I’m on the phone with the brother of a victim in Haiti right now who would like to personal thank you for all you do. He can’t fathom that strangers would put aside their own lives to the degree you have to help others. He says you are the reason right now he has faith.

Our volunteers really value this kind of encouragement. We have received similar feedback and encouragement from other responders on the ground and wish we had the permission to make this all public.

Where do we go from here? We’ve already started working closely with the Haitian Diaspora here in Boston. They have provided invaluable support in helping volunteers map Haiti. They are proactive and interested in helping out in any way they can. Our volunteers are thus working with the Diaspora to organize capacity building workshops so they can start taking on the operations of the Situation Room, e.g., processing and mapping incoming SMS’s from Haiti.

In parallel to this, we are also in touch contacts directly connected with the Government of Haiti, which today expressed excitement and interest in the Ushahidi deployment. They are eager to adopt the platform in partnership with the Diaspora and domestic civil society groups but don’t currently have the capacity to do this—as a high-level disaster response government contact told me on the phone this afternoon,

“We don’t even have a building or offices to set this up right now.”

This is why we’re working with the Haitian Diaspora and why we are also sending our first Ushahidi Field Representative to Haiti in partnership with Internews. One of the priorities for our Field Rep is to identify domestic civil society groups to partner with the Diaspora and the Government of Haiti. Our goal is to hand over full ownership of the Ushahidi deployment as soon as our Haitian partners are ready. In the meantime, our volunteers are on hand to continue running the Neogeography Operations Center for Haiti.

Posted in Crisis, Deployment. Tagged with , , , .

By patrick
January 29, 2010

6 comments

We Are The Volunteers of Mission 4636

Francesca Garrett is a Psychology student in New Haven, CT. When she isn’t translating SMS messages (or in the chat room as AnyaPetrova), she writes for Mission 4636, and serves as Resource Coordinator for the Translation Team and Fletcher School Situation Room. She can be reached at francesca.garrett@gmail.com

Valérie-Ann Nathalie Michel was a vibrant 34 year old working in Port au Prince as a Bank Manager. She was known locally for her love of photography, and most days could be found at the National Palace, camera in hand. She held daily prayer groups in her home and sang with her family, joking that the Michels would be the next big music crew. Then the January 12 earthquake struck, and Danielle was buried beneath the rubble.

Daniele One

Your browser may not support display of this image.In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a talented team of programmers, designers, and volunteers launched a free phone number, 4636, allowing Haitian survivors to send requests for aid along with a location, name, and phone number. Ushahidi Inc., an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information, launched http://haiti.ushahidi.com, and began tracking the requests in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, InSTEDD, Thomson-Reuters, Digicel, Voila /Comcel, and countless others. There was just one problem: the messages were in Creole.

Now it’s January 20th, and Nathalie’s brother, Fred Michel, sits at his computer entering GPS coordinates. His shoulders shake a little as he remembers the depth of his loss. On his screen, a chorus on digital voices rush to comfort him. “Respe Nathalie,” “We remember Nathalie.” Fred is logged into the Mission 4636 Translation site, and tonight most of us are working in his sister’s memory.

Mission 4636 is the first stop for the emergency SMS messages from the ground in Haiti. Before they can be sent to Ushahidi teams around the world for triage and dispersal, our translators must first decode the heartbreaking requests, always in the same polite tone despite their desperation.

I first stumbled in the Mission 4636 Chat Room (where translators ask for assistance with slang or landmark identification) a week ago. I’ve hardly logged off since. Like many in the group, my computer follows me into the kitchen while I cook, and stays inches from my head as I nap. We often joke about the addiction, and members typically say goodnight half a dozen times, unwilling to leave the message queue unmanned.

In the early days, we would call the families of missing survivors who had sent us messages, “Mwen vivan!” “I’m alive! Please tell my family.” These days the conversions still move easily from grief to elation (“Mwen pa rive sove lavil”….”I couldn’t save her”…”I just saw my first ultrasound – it’s a girl!”), but are more often focused on improving our geo-mapping skills and on the future.

A constant stream of support runs between friends who have never met. Sarah Bernard (UHSarahB) has translated our instructions page into three different languages, widening our volunteer base. Sebastian (Sea Bass) somehow finds hours each day (despite two young children and a very pregnant wife) to find much needed improvements in our technology. Another user, Sxpert has created a code that automatically pulls the trickier coordinates from our conversations, and logs the locations in a spreadsheet I created. The goal? Accuracy.

And it’s working. Two days ago a young woman in Haiti went into labor. She was bleeding out and her life was in danger. She texted 4636. Across the world, one of our translators pinpointed her location on a map. The US Coast Guard would later tell us that the latitude and longitude provided were accurate to 5 decimal points.

We’re making a difference in Haiti. But sometimes, when morale lags at 3:00am, we need to be reminded that we are making a difference in the lives of the people we work with as well.

    “I just wanted to say,” began a recent email of encouragement from volunteer / survivor Anna F., “that what you’re doing is one of the few bright lights in an otherwise almost unendurable tragedy. If there is any comfort in all of this horror, it is seeing clear evidence that just as people can be utterly corrupt, malign, & self-centered, they can also be extraordinarily smart, inventive, resourceful & generous. Among the ways you’ve helped this week, you’ve also helped by reminding me of this. If I could, I’d work with you all day…it’s the only thing that really makes sense to me right now.
    I’d say ‘God bless you,’ but like everyone else, I’m having a few God-issues right now. If He’s there and paying any attention, I hope He understands what He’s doing better than I can, and I hope He blesses you. Failing that, I just wish you luck.”

We are the volunteer translators of Mission 4636. We span six time zones and seven languages on any given night. We are students, medics, stay at home mothers, archivists, firefighters, and software developers. We are the quiet force behind Ushahidi Haiti & we give a voice to the lost.

Posted in Crisis, Deployment, disaster. Tagged with , , .

By patrick
January 27, 2010

10 comments

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

The purpose of Swift River is to validate crowdsourced information in near real-time. In the past few weeks, Ushahidi has received nearly one hundred thousand reports of incident related to Haiti. The majority of these coming from Twitter. Because crowdsourced information often has varying degrees of accuracy, an application is needed to validate this information in a timely manner, especially for Ushahidi. In order for us to map an incident, we need to know some basic things. Is the information true? Where is it coming from? Has it been submitted before? Has it been verified by someone other than the source itself? Is it actionable (meaning does there need to be follow up response)? Is that response urgent or can it be tempered?

In other words how do we filter the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise, in ways that allows us to respond to emergencies efficiently? This is the problem Swift River will attempt to solve by acting as the stop-gap between the deluge of information created online, and the Ushahidi crisis mapping platform. Many feeds come in, one ’sanitized’ feed goes out. This saves us time and in some cases, saves lives.

There are three components to the first phase of Swift River’s development:

1. Predictive Tagging

The first component focuses on automatically “tagging” text messages and tweets to describe an event using keywords parsed from the content itself. In come cases accompanying meta information will include already tags and location, but for SMS (and often Twitter) this is rarely the case. Thus, if we have other methods of providing additional context, we can at the very least speed up an otherwise tedious process. For instance, with SULSa (our Swift User Location Service) we’ve automated the process of extracting latitude and longitude from IP address.

2. Verification and Taxonomy

The second component crowdsources the veracity of this automatic tagging to ensure that it is correct. Users vote on tags, providing a model of accuracy that can be reapplied to our algorithm. This ‘learning’ is critical to our improvement as it ultimately speeds up the tagging process. Taxonomy simply refers to the sorting of this content based on what we’ve learned thus far. This allows us to begin sorting content based on applied tags, location and relevancy.

3. Filtering by Authority and Trust

The third component is a learned ‘trust’ algorithm that scores content sources based on user behavior. If we aggregate multiple sources, and content from one source is consistently deemed to be more accurate than content coming from other sources, we can begin assigning scores to these sources. We aren’t interested in algorithms that rank individual content (Digg-like voting algorithms) but rather rating the point of origin. Content (good or bad) tells us a great deal about the source itself and trusted sources can be prioritized, even though all content is eventually reviewed.

These are the first milestones for realizing the Swift River platform. The second set of milestones will involve expanding the sources that Swift River parses to include full text articles and sites like Flickr (photos) and Youtube (video). The third milestone (next blog post in the series) will focus on clustering tags and determining implicit relationship between content from different sources. The fourth milestone will apply innovative techniques to visualize clusters and probability scores in compelling ways. And of course the fifth milestone is the incremental improvement of every component of our system.

As we release builds of Swift we’ll update this series accordingly, with the things we’re working on and (once released) what users can expect next. If you’re a developer interested in working with the Swift River team you can reach us here.

Jon Gosier and Patrick Meier

Posted in Development, swift river. Tagged with , , , , , .

By jongos
January 27, 2010

7 comments

From The Fletcher School Situation Room: “Is it Life or Death?”

The Fletcher School Situation Room has played a pivotal role in supporting Ushahidi’s deployment in Haiti. Denise Roz Sewell, one of Fletcher’s core volunteers, has been on the front lines of the disaster response. Roz is a Pickering Fellow and was a Fulbright scholar in Morocco prior to joining Fletcher. She shares a startling experience with us here.

“It is Life or Death?”
Before starting with the Fletcher Situation Room, I can honestly say that I said that phrase without ever actually meaning it. Normally, it was said in mocking because whatever deadline was coming up seemed like the epitome of life or death for me at that moment. However, this Sunday, I turned to a fellow colleague who came up to ask a question and I replied, “Is it life or death?” She blinked and said, “Well, no…” I immediately turned back to my computer and calmly added, “Alright then, I’ll come find you later, because this is.”

Picture 3

I had just received a twitter message on the Haiti Ushahidi website, saying that not only were people still trapped in a building in Port-au-Prince but that one among their party was badly injured. Since this report was from twitter, I turned to one of our Haitian volunteers to confirm the information. Using our SitRoom GoPhone (T-Mobile, of course, for its free calls to Haiti), we called the phone number left on the report, and four very distressed Haitians picked up on the other line. They were on the second floor of a factory, unable to leave and unable to get help for their bleeding friend. I took this information and instantly mapped it. Hypercube and Google Earth are constantly open windows on my desktop, and within 5 minutes at most, I can find coordinates to most locations in Haiti.

Picture 4

This is partially due to the fact that our mapping team has spent 12 days scouring the web for locations in Haiti so that now, there isn’t any part of the country that we have not seen. This is also due to the fact that we now have an ‘Urgent Response Team’ (headed by Jen Ziemke and myself) and our whole job is to respond to these types of messages. That way, when I learn of someone bleeding on the second floor of a Haitian factory, I can confirm it, map it, and send it to our contacts in the United States Coast Guard within 15 minutes via email or Skype:
Roz: So we know we talked to two people that were on the scene, and we asked them if they were ok and she said that three people were ok and one was not. We asked them if that person was bleeding and then they said yes, and then the call was cut off. It sounded like they were inside, not outside, it had a tunnel effect, similar to a factory.
Coast Guard: Is your opinion that they are trapped, crushed, just stuck in a house that they can’t get out of due to other injuries?

Roz: In my opinion, it seems that they are stuck in an unsafe or that the person is too injured to be moved. They were speaking as if the situation was very urgent.

Roz: GPS = 18.528995, -72.406196

Coast Guard: Working on it

After this, the USCG deploys a team and a helicopter to the coordinates that we gave. So yes, it was life or death, but this time our work allowed us to say ‘life.’

Posted in Crisis, Deployment, disaster. Tagged with , , .

By patrick
January 26, 2010

5 comments

Coordinating Software Developer Volunteers

One of the things we know about software developers contributing to open source projects is that they don’t have a lot of time. Everyone has their day jobs, their personal projects, their families…in other words life. We like to support a relaxed, but structured atmosphere where there’s things that need to get done but no pressure on any one volunteer dev.

As a group, they tend to like ’sprints’ where several developers gather to get as much done as possible in only a few hours. Events like Crisis Camps, Where Camps and Dev Camps are really helpful in that they facilitate spaces where developers can come together to brainstorm and get things done.

However, the one barrier to entry many of them find is that they aren’t comfortable with the language that the rest of the community wants to use, or that the platform is built in. For example Ushahidi is built on the Kohana PHP framework, but a lot of developers prefer to work in Ruby or Python these days. In addition, location plays a role too. We have developers volunteering from every continent, across cultures; some languages are more popular than others across the pond. How do we approach solving this challenge to be as inclusive as possible?

Moses Mugisha, Ugandan Volunteer and Developer of SULSa

Moses Mugisha, Ugandan Volunteer and Developer of SULSa

We’re using the modular approach. Various components of our systems are built in various languages. The Swift River system itself is being built in PHP on Kohana, the same framework that Ushahidi uses. But SULSa (Swift User Location Services App) is written in Ruby using the Rails framework. Our taxonomy and natural language parsing program, SiLCC (Swift Language Computation Core), is being developed in Python. Ushahidi itself also has an API that anyone can use to pull or push data, using any programming language they want.

Internally, this modular approach allows us to scale, by distributing server load across many different nodes that each handle vertical tasks on their own. But when it comes to coordinating volunteer developers, it means that there’s always something someone can contribute to, which hopefully makes working with our community that much more inviting.

Interested in volunteering with us as a software developer? Check out the following links…

Posted in Community, Uncategorized, swift river. Tagged with , , , .

By jongos
January 25, 2010

8 comments