UP headquarters in Paynesville burned

In the last week, the Ushahidi elections instance has also been updated with new features.  As of last Friday, the instance has been upgraded with latest version of the Ushahidi platform, version 2.1 (Tunis). One of the most exciting features of 2.1 is the Powerful Reports Filter that allows users to quickly sort through reports according to certain dates and categories, verification, media, location and more.

The new Density Map Plugin

Another new feature on the instance is Ushahidi’s first Density Map plugin by John Etherton. Located on the right side of the homepage, just above the categories, the Density Map option makes it easier to separate reports by geographic region – in this case, by county. All reports that have been associated with a particular county will show up using the Density Map. This feature was requested by UN OCHA as well as other local partners, and serves as a small step towards making the Ushahidi platform a data analysis tool.

ECC data operators at iLab

The Elections Coordinating Committee, based at iLab Liberia during the last week, has been compiling detailed reports from monitors at each of the country’s nearly 4,500 polling places; these are being uploaded to the elections instance and can currently be found under the category, “ECC polling place reports”.  The National Elections Commission (NEC) has released preliminary results during the last week that can now be found as layers on the elections instance (go to “other layers” section under the categories listing).

The Ushahidi Liberia team was curious about who was looking at the elections instance, how they got there, and where in the world they were sitting when they looked at it.  After studying our instance’s Google Analytics, we found that in the last week the map has received 3,533 unique visitors that spend an average of 3 ½ minutes perusing its contents. Interestingly, more than half of this traffic is routed via the Liberian Observer, a national newspaper popular on the ground and online. The majority of the traffic came from the United States (not surprising considering low Internet penetration in Liberia), but what peaked our interest was where in the States: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Georgia – states with the large Liberian Diaspora communities.

Elections instance viewers in the US (graphic via Google Analytics)

This was our team’s first indication of the Diaspora’s engagement with the electoral process from abroad (not to say there haven’t been many), and it widened our perspective on the instance’s audience. Perhaps, in a country without much local Internet access, it cannot be simply stated that a tool like Ushahidi is irrelevant. In today’s world, a country’s borders extend far beyond political boundaries, and interactive mapping tools such as the Ushahidi platform start to reveal the interconnected webs that criss-cross our globe.

This evening, the NEC announced that 99.9% of the presidential votes have been collected; with no clear winner, Liberia faces a run-off election on November 8^th.  The first round saw an impressive voter turnout rate of more than 70% (of registered voters), making many hopeful that Liberians will come out in full-force next month. The Ushahidi elections instance will continue to track the electoral process for Liberians at home and abroad, and for all of us who care deeply about the outcome of this country’s first self-run democratic election.

Liberians waiting to vote on election day

This report is not a replacement for a real statistical analysis but it is remarkably revealing. For instance, one researcher found that the Who-Sha-Shi-Shi pronunciation was less common than a You-Sha-Di-Di pronunciation.

When asked about the findings of the report, one researcher simply offered, “People should say this name with caution because it remains to be proven whether or not correct pronunciation of ‘Ushahidi’ is even useful during disasters.”

You can download this 94 page guide here.

Liberia 2011 is an Ushahidi instance dedicated to tracking the country's presidential election

January 6^th marked the beginning of voter registration in Liberia, as well as the nationwide deployment of civic voter education activities, registration monitors, and widespread reports of registrant bribing and illegal registration.  Our team realized that, in order for an Ushahidi instance to be useful in this setting, the instance must catch the attention of many different election-related actors with a variety of roles and interests regarding the election process.  And once we have the attention of these actors, the instance must be accessible and manageable by these multiple users.  Hence, the “Simple Groups” plugin. **Note: in the initial months of the election process, we are not yet targeting ‘the crowd’ but rather organizations that serve an advocacy or monitoring role for the election.

Some of the groups contributing reports to the election instance

With Simple Groups, multiple organizations composed of several unique users can now have private admin access to the same Ushahidi instance. Each group has a private admin page that contains their own messages, reports, and admin map.  This setup keeps data centralized on the instance’s homepage while allowing groups to keep their reports and messages private until they are ok’d for the public map. In short, a plugin for data privacy with a collaborative twist – shared hompeage, private back doors.

An example of a group's private admin page for the election instance. The above page, created on our Demo site for testing purposes, shows the basics of a group page: access to messages, approved and unapproved reports, as well as the Admin Map (found under the Map tab)

Here are some features we’ve created for groups:

• Whitelisted phone numbers – managers of the shared instance (currently limited to our consulting team) have the ability to link trusted sources’ phone numbers to particular groups.  When a message is received from that number, it is automatically forwarded to that group’s private admin page.  Each message from a whitelisted number appears on the group’s messages page with the name, organization and number of the sender listed.  To date, over 135 phone numbers belonging to 30 different reporting organizations have been whitelisted as trusted election reporters.

Whitelisting feature for groups' vetted sources

• Tagged reports – each group’s report is tagged with the organization’s logo so other groups and all viewers can quickly identify the source that has approved and determined the verification status of the report

A report on the election instance tagged by a participating group

• Admin Map plugin– we anticipated that many groups will want to keep certain reports private, if only temporarily, due to their sensitive content. While these unapproved reports are accessible in list form on a group’s admin page, there used to be no way to visualize these unapproved reports on the map. We created the Admin Map on each group’s admin page that shows all unapproved reports as black. This Admin Map provides each group with a view of their reports and their reports only; this way, groups can choose to view their reports exclusively, or to see them with all groups’ reports on the shared homepage

The Admin Map allows each group to privately visualize all its reports, approved and unapproved

• A few more features of the Admin Map:
  • Multiple categories can be compared at once using the Boolean functions OR and AND.  Users can see all the reports that were categorized as A or B, as well as those reports that were categorized as A and B. In addition, when categories A and B are selected using AND, the colors of the two categories blend to uniquely represent those reports. These logical operators give groups a new way to look for trends in their data
  • Many of our partners feel confined by the 4×4” size of the homepage map and spend long minutes with the slow Internet connection zooming in to get a closer look. The Admin Map uses more of the screen and makes the Liberia map easier to navigate
  • The user interface has been modified to make categories easier to explore. Each category with subcategories now has a “+” sign next to it so users do not have to spend valuable Internet time clicking each category to see if it has further divisions. The timeline and category filters may now be positioned on the screen according to the user’s liking
  • All of these features have also been added to the instance’s homepage (all except groups’ unapproved reports).  Click on the “Big Map” button at the top of the election homepage or the “view full map” button just above the map; both will open a map with nearly all the same features as Admin Map

• Location Highlighter – When our partners are turning messages into reports, it can sometimes be difficult to find the message’s location on the map.  To expedite this process, the Location Highlighter tool outlines Liberia’s counties and districts on the map to narrow the scope of the search. This way, when users are looking for a town they can’t find with a quick map scan, but they know the appropriate county and district, they can turn on the Highlighter and zero in on a specific county, district, and even clan. Because most of our groups work with low bandwidth, the Highlighter’s clear parameters allow admin users to spend less time clicking and dragging across the map and more time searching a clearly defined area.  This addition has been especially helpful since Google Maps does not show the districts of Liberia and the counties are not labeled

The highlighting tool identifies the boundaries for a location down to the county, district, and even clan level

Just below the Highlighter tool is the “Find Location” feature.  This has long been a part of the Ushahidi platform, however we’ve found in Liberia that our first search results often landed in India and Ohio rather than Liberia’s interior.  With a few tweaks, the Find Location feature now searches both Google and GeoNames for the town or city listed.  We have also added the ability to set a bounding box so that only results from inside that box (in this case, Liberia) will appear

Group users also found that it took some time, due again to low bandwidth, to get the results of a town search; to expedite this process, results are now set to cache locally so that after the first few searches the data will be stored on the site for faster load time.  We’ve also set the results to show all matches, not just the first, so the user is ultimately the one who chooses the appropriate match.  These changes have also been made to the public reporting form on the homepage’s “Submit a Report”. The Highlighter is a plugin and Find Location is 95% plugin – the only thing that’s different is that Find Location has to operate with the Liberia theme and the Highlighter plugin installed. You can play with these latest location features on our Demo site without worrying about submitting a real report

The "Find Location" section of the plugin provides several options for locating a town or village by its name alone

• End-time plugin – many messages from the field are reports of voter education activities that span several hours and sometimes days.  In order to capture the full length of the reported event, we have added an end-time option for users so the end date and time of day can be listed in the report
• Forwarding messages - if a message comes in from a non-whitelisted number, it is still possible for the instance’s managers to assign it to a particular group.  If the message’s contents indicate the affiliation of the reporter (his/her organization), the message can be forwarded to the appropriate group.  On that group’s private backend, it appears as if it was sent directly to them and not forwarded on from an intermediary

• Reminder cards – while this is not an online feature, it has significantly improved the quality of the messages received.  Each group that requests participation in the election instance receives trainings from our team for office staff (in how to turn messages into reports) and another for field staff and affiliated reporters (in how to report to the election instance).  During the training, a small reminder card is given to each field reporter (the size of a business card) that summarizes the basic steps of reporting as well as what bases to cover in each message. Because texting is still quite new to many of our partners’ staff, especially reporting information via text, we found that training in how to report via text was a must. Presently, more than 60 field reporters have received direct training in using this card, and we anticipate another 60-70 will be trained in the next few months

The front and back of the election reporting card: the size of a business card, this is handed out to field reporters as a reminder of what to include in a message

SMSsync - The election instance has a dedicated shortcode, 2011, that is free with 3 of Liberia’s 5 operators. Our team previously used FrontlineSMS as our SMS gateway; however, because we have a shortcode SIM from each operator and only one extra computer available, we had to run multiple FrontlineSMS instances on that computer – something the program was not designed to support.  We started to consider other options, particularly ones that would not require that a computer be on 24/7 (given the erratic nature of the country’s electricity).  In cooperation with Ushahidi’s talented Henry Addo, we tested downgraded versions of SMSsync to work with android phones available in Liberia.  After just one week, we made the switch: now our SMS gateway operation has downsized and simplified to a mere 3 androids, each with a dedicated 2011 SIM, using GPRS Internet connection to sync messages to the election instance, and only needing a power source for a few hours every other day.

With all of these additions and new technologies, we have kept our user audience small to start.  Voter registration, which officially ended February 12th, was a great testing ground for the new and improving election instance.  We trained a handful of election-focused organizations and so far we have received 325 texts and 150 approved reports on the shared homepage.  The majority of our current reports document voter education activities more than illegal happenings at registration sites or citizens’ feedback about the process; and of those latter reports that do exist, many are privatized by groups because they are still determining what they want to share via this platform.

Our team would love to see a greater variety of messages coming in, reporting on not just organizational activities but also on the many successes and challenges citizens experience around registration.  But we have to think in baby steps.  After several months in-country, I am starting to feel that any info sharing is good info sharing in Liberia.  With each stage of the election process we plan to take another step – spreading the word about the shortcode to the public, bringing on more groups that collect a variety of information, establishing a tech center with reliable power and Internet so groups have a mapping hub at their disposal.  Step by step, it will certainly be a very interesting year.

P.S. to access any of the plugins mentioned here, follow these links:

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/endtime/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/findlocation/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/locationhighlight/

• http://apps.ushahidi.com/p/simplegroups/

The Ushahidi platform was deployed during the first round of the presidential elections in Côte d’Ivoire which happened on 31 October 2010. Implemented under the name of Wonzomai (Sentry in Bété, Ivory Coast Local language), the project gathers teams from Ivorian NGO Akendewa and from the French NGO Internet Without Borders

The purpose of the project was to give a space of expression to Ivory Coast citizens where they could give a glimpse of the general atmosphere surrounding the vote, and help prevent sensitive situations: in fact this presidential election is considered crucial for a country that faced 10 years of a war which ended officially with the Treaty of Ouagadougou (4th March 2007) that prepared the ground for the electoral process.

Technically, the platform was deployed using the mashup google maps and Frontline SMS. For reasons related to local network, we had 3 SMS Numbers functioning and encountered a few difficulties to gather information received by SMS on the platform.  But this was tackled.

As a first experiment in Ivory Coast of a citizen based reporting of elections, the result is interesting and highlights the importance of developping presence of francophone African citizens in the cyber world.

One of the most interesting contribution of the platform is that the latter has been since its launching a real catalyst of twitter conversations surrounding Wonzomai itself, and the elections in general through #wonzomai #peacevote and #civ2010. These hashtags were created by different members of the project team. On 3rd November 2010, #wonzomai already Counted 514 Tweets. The same day, our main hashtag counted more thant 1000 tweets according with this tool

The real challenge during the second round of the presidential election, which will be held on 28th November 2010, will consist in the coordination of the different international institutions and national public services involved in the election : for instance Electoral monitoring mission.

Another lesson for the second round, and probably for further elections in the region, was learned through this first use of Ushahidi; in fact, in addition to political tension, there is a culture of defragmentation and dissemination of rumors via SMS. The challenge will be to transform this participation through the SMS channel in a positive piece of information. A beginning of response was given thanks to the platform as citizens could send Messages fostering a peaceful vote and those were received on Wonzomai and re-disseminated.

But finally beyond technical aspects of the deployment, what is interesting is that  the community of Ivorian Twitter Users in the screening of the information. This consciousness created an emulation of projects around the question of presidential elections : For instance the
Peace Vote Project which is a website where peace messages can be sent to Ivory Coast citizens ; Or this website where an attempt to present histograms of the results of the first round.

All this shows in conclusion the necessity to adapt the Political Science, studies trends and results, to tools which aim at a better understanding and apprehension of these results. To be more accurate, sometimes an ethnic vote would be interpreted through the results of a ballot; a mapping of results would corroborate or invalidate such an assertion.

Julie Owono
Internet Without Borders
http:www.internetsansfrontieres.com
Africa Desk

To many outside the core team of volunteers working day and night for weeks out of a basement at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in Boston, the logistics of the Ushahidi-Haiti were a mystery.  How did they get such detailed maps?  Who is translating and mapping each SMS?  How are people using the information on the ground?

My co-author, Carol Waters, and I are excited to share the recent report published by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster-Affected Haiti.” It provides an overview of the project from platform launch to hand-off.  The mystery is revealed!

Full version of the report available on the USIP website

Many thanks to all the people involved with the project who graciously agreed to interviews and replied to our emails and to USIP for not only publishing the report, but giving $20,000 to the Ushahidi-Haiti effort during the crisis.

Summary of the Report:

• On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. More than 230,000 people died, and some of Haiti’s most populous areas suffered mass destruction. The international community responded immediately to launch extensive search and rescue missions and provide emergency assistance.

• The traditional disaster-response system employed by relief actors in Haiti concentrated on enabling information-sharing among teams of responders from the international community. This system lacked the ability to aggregate and prioritize data that came from outside sources, making it difficult to benefit from valuable information coming from the Haitian community.

• Ushahidi, an open-source crisis-mapping software first developed and used in Kenya, provided a way to capture, organize, and share critical information coming directly from Haitians. Information was gathered through social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter, and Facebook) and text messages sent via mobile phones.

• Reports about trapped persons, medical emergencies, and specific needs, such as food, water, and shelter, were received and plotted on maps that were updated in real time by an international group of volunteers.

• These reports, and associated geographic information, were available to anyone with an Internet connection. Responders on the ground soon began to use them in determining how, when, and where to direct resources.

• The most significant challenges arose in verifying and triaging the large volume of reports received. Ad hoc but sufficient solutions were found that involved the manual monitoring and sorting of information.

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/09/29/united-states-institute-of-peace-report-on-ushahidi-haiti/feed/ 2 http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/08/27/mapping-the-future-of-cities-education/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/08/27/mapping-the-future-of-cities-education/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:01:54 +0000 Mark Belinsky http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=2665 What does real-time mapping with New York City public school kids look like? Recently, Digital Democracy was invited to work with 120 young people from all 5 boroughs as part of the Department of Education’s “Future Now” program. Having gone through the NY Public School system myself, I jumped at the opportunity to help them innovate. My task was to engage the kids in a conversation about what they’d like to see in the year 2020. Future Now is creating NYC’s Digital Storybook – a citywide youth project about school, community, and dreams. What better way to explore these themes than a mapping exercise to literally add and remove items in their communities and on their streets?

Solar Flashlight & Kazoo created by the students

To give the kids a real-life example of the changes that are happening in their community, we built a modified Ushahidi map with data overlays from the NYC Data Mine and Recovery.gov. I explained that these are the government’s official data related to spending and therefore allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse, but also for innovative new solutions by identifying the gaps. To make it personal, I asked them what they would do if they knew how much money their school was getting compared to the neighboring school. Not only did that set off a flurry of ideas from the students, but the teachers got pretty excited as well. This already started to show that opening government data can impact the lives of everyday New Yorkers and lead to a smarter city by getting citizens young and old involved in urban planning.

Another exercise that I had the kids run through was stating a mock vision: of the year 2020, gasoline would be expensive, the environment polluted, cars more scarce, and so encouraging the city to place a bike rack in front of my office would enable people to bike to work, making the city more peaceful, healthier and cleaner. Plus, if the government thought a bike rack existed where one didn’t, I could let them know about their error. In this case, I overlayed “Bike Racks”, as a set made available in the Geo Data Catalog. I then asked the students to brainstorm their own scenarios for the year 2020. The kids had a field day dreaming up solutions and adding them to the map. You can visit the website or see it embedded below to see their ideas. When working with young people, it’s important to keep in mind their protection and security, and so of course viewers of the site will notice that their personal information remains private.

Our Ushahidi lesson plan builds off of our participatory collaborative learning curriculum from around the world, Project Einstein. In this case, it was exciting to see the successes of incorporating a tool that integrates lessons from across different discipline: geography, computer science, economics, math, art, social studies, etc. But each local context reveals new insights for our culturally-specific programming and this case was no different.

The biggest problem I ran into was spell-check. I noticed that the students were taking an unusually long time to fill in their reports and after looking into it, found that when students were entering in their main body of information, a line would show up automatically under misspelled words. Every time this happened, students would backtrack and try to figure out the right spelling. This happened so often that I estimate it took about twice the time to create each entry as it otherwise would have. In the places where there was no spell-check, like in the titles, the entries are littered with bad spelling, but they were entered quickly. Our work confronts language problems head on, mainly working with visual media such as maps, photos, videos, etc that can allow people to connect beyond these barriers. It’s important to consider language barriers even with native English speakers as well. And in NYC, it’s even more complicated, with our students coming from places as varied as Tibet, Thailand, Congo, Madagascar and Brooklyn.

“OMG kids are on Facebook!” is one of my favorite challenges that also arose quickly. Two skateboarders had finished mapping their vision for perfect place for a skatepark in their community ahead of the other students and got distracted, finding themselves wandering the internet and logging into Facebook. Instead of scolding them and demanding that they go back to our site, I told them that no other students had added a photo to their posting so could they find the best photo to go along with their post, to make it easier for a politician to see exactly what they had in mind. The hunt was on, and they indeed found a great photo, without another distraction. To me, this is a key aspect to the model of 21st century education – information management. Can students find information that is going to add value to their post. Do they know whether it’s creative commons and how publicly it can be used. There are still many steps before getting to that point, but this is a start. Ushahidi serves as a strong tool because the barrier to entry is low, but the opportunity to dig deeper continues. Thanks to the new plug-in architecture, they can even proudly display that skate park on their Facebook wall.

While technology access is growing in our schools, so is censorship. These kids were astonished to see their work up and live on a website that is free and accessible to anyone. Increasingly, there is a limit to what they can access due to filters and firewalls, and what they can publish because the media that they’re producing has work that can’t be licensed, such as the videos they had made about New York that features the song “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z & Alicia Keys. Due to alleged copyright violations, their work can’t be screened to other kids. School banned website lists resemble the ones in Tunisia, a notoriously closed society.

To ensure the continuation of the open web and that students are given increasing access to powerful and empowering tools like Ushahidi, Digital Democracy used this instance in our lobbying efforts, testifying to the New York City Council Technology Committee on Open Data. Our testimony, available here, details how free and open source technologies, coupled with open data and progressive 21st century schools can foster positive engagement between students, their government and their community.

Whether working with kids or lobbying to government, I’m thankful to be able to use such a flexible and interesting tool to convey the message that technology can be used for civic engagement. And as a native New Yorker, the diversity of ideas, skills, backgrounds and approaches in this project reminds me how much I love this city. I just hope that we stop censoring it and start supporting more of these kinds of initiatives in the future and by 2020.

Future Now Ushahidi Map

[iframe http://handheldhumanrights.org/nyc/external 600px 475px]

We’re midway through the main day for Uchaguzi, and all is going well. The tech team is working hard on fixing a couple bugs (we had issues with the Twitter feed and email reports earlier), but we’re now moving on that. We’ve got hundreds of incoming SMS messages and the election monitoring group we’re partnered with (CRECO) is doing a fantastic job of getting those incoming reports verified.

There are 50+ volunteers in the iHub right now. They’re being masterfully organized by Ushahidi Jessica Heinzelman, doing all sorts of things from verifying and approving incoming reports to scanning different media sources for information.

• Total Reports: 577, Verified: 80.07% at 1:38pm Kenya time.
• If you’re interested in technicalities, you can check out our Situation Room.
• If you want to find pictures, there’s a new Uchaguzi Flickr group. Anyone can add their referendum pictures to it as well.

How to Report:

1. By sending a message to 3018
2. By sending an email to reports.uchaguzi@gmail.com
3. By sending a tweet with the hashtag/s #uchaguzi
4. By filling this form

@zombiemap on twitter
+447624802534 on your Mobile Phone

http://swift.ushahidi.com/zombie/
http://www.zombiereports.com/
follow #zombiereports or #operationz

Please share this message before it’s too late.

[Edit: Update 08:50 Kenya time, April 1, 2010]

Apparently there is a group running an instance of Ushahidi to track Zombie Reports… There have been a few strange requests for the platform in the past, but this one blows them all away. We wouldn’t have even paid attention to this, except that we can’t seem reach any of the Ushahidi Swift River devs like Jon, Matt, Ivan or Victor who live in Kampala.

We’ve found this one post that gives some background on what might have actually happened, but it’s just a blog, and we don’t know the source:

“At midnight tonight doctors at Mulago hospital in Kampala, Uganda brought in a seriously injured patient who was suffering from a heavy loss of blood. The patient was left in the waiting room unattended, as is often the case. Several hours later a number of staff and patients were reported missing. A friend at a local media outlet sent out the following email, which leaked from, the Ugandan U.S. Embassy:

“Strange things are occurring. Overnight, over 100 people have disappeared. Doctors are reporting similarly strange symptoms across seemingly un-related patients. A type of brain disease that affects ”

We at Ushahidi are supporting them to the deploying team of ZombieReports.com to the best of our ability, especially as the number of reports continues to increase. We’ve also stood up the newest Swift River code in order to sweep and score news coming in from all over the world as this spread.

Do your part and report the Zombie attacks, sitings, safe zones and weapon caches in your area. Help us track and contain the Zombie horde!

(12:52:55) (Dalila): I need Thomassin Apo please
(12:53:02) (Apo): wait
(12:54:53) (Apo): Kenscoff Route: Lat: 18.495746829274168,
Long:-72.31849193572998
(12:57:25) (Apo): This Area after Petion-Ville and Pelerin 5 is not on
Google Map. We have no streets name
(12:58:05) (Dalila): @Apo I thank you for ur help
(12:58:24) (Apo): you are welcome
(12:58:53) (Apo): I know this place like my pocket
(12:59:08) (Dalila):
(12:59:14) (Dalila): thank God u was here

The work that Ushahidi, InSTEDD and Reuters are doing in the digital space can seem a little distant from what’s happening in Haiti. However, we’re working closely with response organizations in Haiti to make sure that there is action being taken on the emergencies/needs that are reported into the system. Groups like FEMA, the US Coast Guard task force, the ICRC and Plan Int’l (amongst others) are all using it.

Here are some of the success stories from 4636 so far, thanks to Rob Munro, who has been coordinating most of the volunteer activities around the 4636 project. Also a big thank you to individuals like Rachelle Houde who are combing twitter reports, blogs, organization websites for updates and coming back to leave comments.

1) People being able to get through to relatives overseas and let them know they are ok for the first time:

“peter mwen pale avek minouche yo bien 1 317xxxxxxx”
(Peter, I am talking with Minouche. All are well. 1 317xxxxxx)

2) Reports of emergencies are going straight back to the orgs on the ground, translated and with geocoords where possible – people in Haiti were responding to this one this morning (19 jan) within 10 minutes of us receiving it:

“Men se Jean Wani�re m,ap travay lan Unic�f mwen abite kafouf�y ri bredi nimero 11 alentery� mwe gen 2 moun ki anba kay la toujou ?”
(My name is Jean Wani my brother is working in Unicef and I live in Carfour 11 Alentyerye I have 2 people that is still alive under the building still ! Send Help!)

3) From people in Haiti volunteering to help (they have been put in touch with local aid efforts)

“Please, call or write us if you need more information or if you need our help like beeing translators, food distributors or any services else from us.”

“le 3xxx.xxxx.xx nou se yon group j�n ki rete zon nan nou pre pou nou bay s�vis men nou pa gen nan men nou”
(3xxx.xxx.x.xx We are a group of young people who live in the area and we are ready to help, but we have nothing)

4) People sharing local information about aid centers:

“Rue Casseus no 9 gen yon sant kap bay swen ak moun ki blese e moun ki brile”
(Street Casseus no 9, there is a center that helps people that are wounded or burnt)

5) From across the world volunteers are helping to translate the messages (including all the ones above – mostly the Haitian diaspora):

“I am holding up better nowadays because I am able to talk to most of my relatives, and also because I feel like I’m really helping.”

“No matter what it is so much better than sitting here feeling helpless.”

There are more, many more, but we’re not able to track them all as we’re in the midst of this. Thanks to those who have helped track these for us.

From http://haiti.ushahidi.com

People looking for success stories on http://haiti.ushahidi.com can find them here:

http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/761
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/58
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/606
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/642
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/580
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/389
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/1070
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/view/474

The Translators

There have been a lot of heroic efforts over the last week by everyone involved with the Haiti response. One of these groups is the translators who are doing near real-time translation of incoming SMS messages into 4636.

Here’s one example taken from the translation chat room (Jennifer is one of the people translating 4636 messages – has great local knowledge):

(18:27:24) (Jennifer): This is from the clinic that my friend is operating in on the ground: just received an email to put the diesel need on a map at http://haiti.ushahidi.com/main Then I got a call from Hal Newman to see if the need was legit. He is an emergency manager supporting the Haiti response. He just sent the deisel request to Marcie Roth, the senior FEMA advisor, who will contact the State Department. They will contact the military and the diesel should be on its way.

(18:27:41) (Jennifer): They were desperate for fuel yesterday.

(18:28:16) (Jennifer): and very grateful for the fast response they got back once entering their clinic location and need on the map.