When was the last time you thought about the 2005 Tsunami in South East Asia? Thousands of people died, the GDP of many coastal economies in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives will not recover for another 10 years, but when did you last think about it?

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t thought about it in a few years, I saw the devastation with my own eyes and I hardly think about it. We are not meant to. Our minds are just not built that way.

We can’t keep everything in the front of our brain, it’s just not possible. As humans we are wired to confront the fires the are right in front of us. It’s impossible to keep conceptual ideas like disasters in countries we’ve never been to–or have not been to in a long time–in the front of our mind.

In my opinion, this is the biggest obstacle to disaster recovery: endurance to see completion. Other people might call it “sustainability”.  As an outsider, I offer very little in the way of sustainability. Sustainability and real resolution most often comes from people that live with these problems in front of them every day.

Passing the work on to the Haitian People from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

When Ushahidi put up the Haiti instance of their system to monitor the events and needs of the country after the earthquake, it was understood from day one that they were not going to be the ones who would sustain the effort into the long term future. Those responsibilities had to go to people for whom the January earthquake was a part of their daily reality on some level, either because they were in Haiti or because they were emotionally tied to the the people that they would be motivated to carry on the responsibility even years from now.

When I started helping Ushahidi tell their story, I was impressed that only weeks after the quake someone who had context and ties in the Haitian diaspora had been brought into the ranks and empowered to lead the charge of handing over ownership of the project to the Haitian community and diaspora.

This video documents part of the transition over to the Haitian community: shifting the majority of the translation and mapping tasks into the hands of Haitians. The microwork initiative is creating jobs, stimulating local infrastructure development and empowering Haitians to contribute to the rebuilding process.

In the long term, Haitians will do more with the information coming through the 4636 service and will have more effective uses for the service than the staff and volunteers of Ushahidi could imagine. This is their fire, not ours. It is, in fact, their right to own the solutions that change their countries trajectory.  It is our honor to walk beside them.

As the days and weeks passed, the Ushahidi-Haiti deployment garnered lots of media attention, and we started to consider the possibility of documenting our impact in Haiti on video. In particular, we saw an opportunity to capture the remarkable story about the launch of the 4636 mobile short code. When I learned that several Mission 4636 team members were traveling to Haiti as part of a US State Department delegation, I reached out to documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends about shooting some video for us. I knew he had been working in Haiti and luckily he was available!

Andrew teamed up with Jaroslav Valůch who is Ushahidi’s field representative in Haiti and in two days of shooting they captured interviews and b-roll in Port-au-Prince and traveled to the town of Mirebalais to visit the micro-work center where local Haitians are paid to complete tasks as part of Mission 4636. With multi-media journalist Jon Shuler working as editor, we have crafted two videos from the footage. Along with our prior video that focused on the work of the Ushahidi developers and the crisis-mapping team at the Fletcher school, these videos form a trilogy about Ushahidi-Haiti.

The story of the Mission 4636 partnership (below) is the second piece in the trilogy, and it highlights the incredible collaboration among many different partners that made Mission 4636 a success. The final video is still in the works and will describe how Ushahidi-Haiti and Mission 4636 are being transitioned to Haitians both locally and in the diaspora.

Haiti 4636 Project from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Shortly after we posted the original Project 4636 info graphic, a few folks involved in the project got in touch to see if we could clarify the process. There are a lot of moving parts,  many of which are constantly changing, and so the original graphic didn’t quite reflect the exact process as well as it could have. With that in mind, we worked with Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic and Nicolás di Tada of InSTEDD to make sure the graphic reflected the process as accurately as possible. The biggest update that we made is that InSTEDD’s Nuntium SMS Gateway and the Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information System are now the first entities that receive and process incoming SMS’s.  Everything else is pretty much the same.

The Updated Overview

The Updated Graphic

Click the image to view the high res version.

Thanks again to Josh, Nicolás and all the Crisis Mappers for the great feedback!

A Quick Recap of Project 4636

And here’s the full graphic:

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:

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.

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.

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.

We’re trying to make sure that the Haiti effort is effective, and are at the same time putting in new structures to manage things we’ve never had to do before. Large groups of volunteers, and the organizational structures that are needed to make that work effectively, are new to us and we’ve learned a great deal from the Fletcher Situation Room in Boston.

Organizing Volunteers

It took A LOT of work to get the Haiti crowdsourcing situation room together. It metamorphosed over the first couple days as there was a growing need for organization and compartmentalization needed for efficiency. The team at the Fletcher Situation Room were the first, and they quickly organized around roles and chose leaders for each area.

Below is their org chart for the 70+ person strong situation room:

Ushahidi - Fletcher situation room volunteer structure

I asked Vanessa Corlazzoli who is the overall Volunteer Coordinator to put it in her own words:

The Ushahidi volunteers are dedicated and extremely capable individuals that continue to pick up new skills every day. They are able to adapt to new circumstances and learn about new technologies quickly. But perhaps most importantly, they are passionate about helping people on the ground and using their talents and time to alleviate crisis.

In just few days, Ushahidi has been able to set up new offices in London, Geneva, New Haven, and Boston. At the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tuft’s University, over 230 volunteers have been trained.

I have learned a lot in the last few days about how to scale up an organization and how to best provide support to a growing number of volunteers. In an environment, where one is constantly making decisions I have learned the importance of communication and working together to achieve our main goals: help Haitians and relief efforts. Another inspiring part of my task is to help integrate the Haitian Diaspora into Ushahidi. These particular volunteers have been crucial in translating SMS messages and are currently working to fill in outstanding street names in Open Street Map. It is a pleasure to work with each and every single volunteer! Without them, Ushahidi would not exist.

List of Fletcher Volunteers as of January 20, 2009*

• Adam Berkowitz
• Althea Middleton-Detzner
• Amy Margolies
• Amy Patanasinth
• Amy Truong
• Anna Schultz
• Annette Grinager
• Barbara Martin
• Beka Feathers
• Carol Waters
• Caroline Andresen
• Caroline Meeks
• Claudia Bucco
• Dan Brutlag
• Dana Binnendijk
• Denise Roz Sewell
• Elsa Palanza
• Engelmann Gregor
• Erin Linsky
• Hana Cervenka
• Helen Ho
• Hilde Berg-Hansen
• Ida Norheim Hagtun
• Jacqui Deelstra
• Jaroslav Valuch
• Jen Ziemke
• Jennifer Catalano
• Jesse Smith
• John Floretta
• Kelsi Stine
• Laura Gordon
• Laura Zusman
• Liz Sullivan
• Luis Marquez
• Marcia Kammitsi
• Maren Christensen
• Minta Madeley
• Nona Lambert
• Ola Ulmo
• Patrick Elliot
• Rebecca Perlmutter
• Sophia Dawkins
• Suzanne Andrews
• Vanessa Corlazzoli
• Yanina Seltzer

* Please note that this list does not include: DC Volunteers, Geneva Volunteers, or Creole/French translators , and overall supporters.

The 4636 Process

1. People in Haiti text location, name and requests for aid / reports etc. to 4636.
2. The data is streamed from different celtels to a server hosted by Ushahidi.
3. 100s of Kreyol-speaking volunteers translate, categorize and plot the geocoords of the location if possible.
4. The structured data is streamed to different orgs on the ground like Red Cross and InSTEDD, who act on it / pass it to appropriate people there.
5. It is also streamed to the main Ushahidi database (the publicly viewable one) where it is combined with other data, further annotated etc. and made available to other orgs.

I am making sure that #3 happens, coordinating volunteer efforts. I have only worked a little on the software – this was put together primarily by Brian Herbert of Ushahidi who has been an *angel* in getting everything together so fast. A small number of the volunteers I work with coordinate directly with people on the ground to get improved data (this also happens further down the chain).

I am also coordinating the volunteers for migrating Missing Person records to the main PeopleFinder databaase – many 4636 volunteers do this in downtime when volunteers exceed the texts coming in, but I’ve got other groups involved too (Tim Schwartz adapted Brian’s code for this in lightening speed).

The Volunteers

Of all the incredible efforts in crowdsourcing right now, I think that the work of the 4636 volunteers are the most amazing. They are using a simple form to enter data from the text messages, have parallel screens open with different maps and collaborate with each other on a chat-space dedicated to their work, esp for confirming locations.

Some positive results are attached, and here are a few lines from the

4636 chat-space:

(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

In brief, Dalila asked to know an address written in one of the texts she was translating and 2 minutes later she had the latitude and longitude, even though no map showed it, thanks to the local knowledge of Apo. This has been *typical*. Almost noone is physically together (after a week I met Josh Nesbit, the other main coordinator for 4636, face-to-face briefly last night, and that’s been all)

Here are the screen names people have used in the 4636 chat – most of them will prob never know each other:

Admiral, Apo_Montreal, Barb, Brian, Carline, Caroline, Christina_Xu, Claire, Dalila, Gina, Guerda, J-R, Jenn, Jennifer, M300_Ministrie, Mel, Montreal, Nan, RAM, Rebecca, Regine, Robens, Robert_Montgom, Robert_Munro, Robs, Sebastien, UNIONHAITI, Union_Haiti, Victoria, aline, brianherbert, csik, downeym, duygu, gerhard, gina, guerda, marc, maribux, mik, myrka, nick, pouchon, rebecca, regine, rescuemehaiti, ronny, sandra, stephan

These are from the ~1000 people who have stepped in so far (my guess from IPs). It would be great if this list could be publicized – their efforts need to be recognized however pseudo-anonymous they are!

They are often using their own local resources (texting to Haiti) to better translate / clarify the messages:

(11:56:55) (marc): i will pass it on that is my cousins hospital.

Text volumes vary from one every 5 seconds in the day to every 5 minutes overnight. The average turn-around for us receiving a text and having it translated, categorized and back on the ground with coordinates, message and return # is about 10 minutes.

Here are the most common categories:

4636 SMS messaging category distribution chart

Food distribution 23.27%
Missing Persons 11.06%
Asking to forward a message 10.94%
Response 9.79%
Water shortage 9.33%
Health services 5.65%
Medical Emergency 4.38%
People trapped 4.38%
Shelter 3.46%
Earthquake and aftershocks 3.23%
Emergency 3.00%
Persons News 2.19%
Collapsed structure 1.73%
Non-food items 1.73%
Vital Lines 1.04%

Except for ‘Asking to forward a message’, these all correspond to WHO categories of the same name (I hope the WHO add this as a result of this effort).

About Robert Munro

Rob Munro of the 4636 Haiti project

We want to make sure all Haitians outside Haiti know that they can look for lost friends/family on PersonFinder and report incidents on 4636/Ushahidi. We are learning many Haitians still do not know about these resources.

Please share on this Google doc any places to publicize to Haitians outside Haiti:

• Churches
• Newspapers
• Radio stations
• Facebook groups
• Online communities
• Etc…

After we have this list together, a volunteer will outreach to these groups or we may contact you again for some help.

Thank you!

(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