The last decade saw the rise of both costlier natural disasters and more interactive web features. Therefore in my MSc dissertation this summer, I tried to look at how workers of humanitarian organizations involved in the Haiti earthquake response perceive the impact of web 2.0 (web tools that give users both consumer and producer roles, e.g. crowdsourcing like Ushahidi, social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc.) on their industry.  I did this through interviews and questionnaires with 26 of them.  This schema illustrates the interactions between the main stakeholders of emergency aid, each arrow and bubble representing an area that can be affected by 2.0 technologies.  I sought to uncover the areas where 2.0 is seen as useful, and where it is rather considered a promise that fails to deliver.

Theory: many promises

I wanted to investigate this since in theory, 2.0 offers features that are especially applicable to emergency responses. The 2.0 characteristics address key criticisms of humanitarianism:

• Centralization and bureaucratic approaches

Problem – They bring lacks of incentive mechanisms and responsiveness.  Adaptability is crucial in emergency response since those are characterised by complexity or chaos.

2.0 remedy – 2.0 relies on decentralization strategies, and those have found applications for humanitarianism, like Ushahidi crowdsourcing effort.

• Humanitarian Expertise

Problem – Such expertise is increasingly accused of continuing neo-colonial subordination, artificially sustaining humanitarian elite, and creating a false impression of political neutrality.

2.0 remedy – With 2.0, more than ever before, the amateur voices and contents compete with those of experts.  On Youtube for instance, a Haitian citizen video is not classified differently from a Red Cross report.

• Accountability

Problem – Unlike firms and governments characterized by systems of purchase and vote, aid lacks mechanisms ensuring that beneficiaries can make donors and humanitarians accountable.

2.0 remedy – Social media, project 4636 and crowdsourced translation are all examples of 2.0 tools that give more voice to the victims. In the same way, organizations can use new media to improve their reporting to civil society.

This sounds all very promising, but on the ground, how do humanitarians feel Web 2.0 really impact their industry?

Reality: a mitigated picture

On Complexity and Centralization

• Instead of helping the coordination of complexity, the abundance and unvalidated nature of 2.0 tools, as well as 2.0 data, added another complexity dimension to the emergency management.  Innovations need to be screened and implemented before the emergency.
• Tools offering flexibility management do not in themselves address the issue of organizational rigidity and risk aversion.
• The extent to which methods like Mission 4636 are inducing a biased response towards citizens already at advantage (because of their ICT access) has yet to be addressed.
• The news production is altered and more decentralised as NGO increasingly use of social media to become media producers themselves. They believe they create more detailed, frequent, persistent, and interactive information with 2.0.
• However, most organizations fail to monitor those web interactions’ reception, understanding, and scale amongst their constituencies. This matters since in social media, popularity is not synonymous of influence.
• Over-decentralization of the response can result in a silo-effect of remoteness and overlap.
• Humanitarians underlined the expanded amount of available information, the fact that it is more detailed, and the speed brought to information management, all 1.0 rather than 2.0 features. Respondents reported nearly no effect on resilience, accuracy and flexibility.

On Expertise

• The 2.0 shift from expertise to trust mechanisms needs to be nurtured. Otherwise, humanitarians will primarily rely on long-established sources of information like the UN.
• There are doubts on the reliability of the crowd on future less-popular and mediated emergencies, as well as on the reliability of the validation process’ speed.
• It seems that workers would be more receptive to collaborative problem-solving done amongst specialists (bounded crowdsourcing).

On Accountability

• Aside from a small proportion of the Diaspora, 2.0 interactions with Haitians have carried a very small, if not anecdotal, weight.
• Local voice is however indirectly augmented via improved NGO media coverage, though the extent to which such coverage corresponds to mere self-marketing is debatable.
• A majority of organizations seem unconcerned with new media ethics.
• There is potential for 2.0 data to construct a picture of the aid effort that will allow donors and taxpayers to bypass the current traditional biased reporting methods of accountability.

On organizational practices

• Reasons to implement social media within humanitarian organizations include herd effects, keeping a competitive edge, savings, and promotional self-interests.
• Social media have a significant role in networking, partnerships creation, and forum interaction. However, the participants also stressed the crucial importance of human networks built before disasters.
• Social media are especially valued for visibility, constituencies’ feedback and fundraising, and accountability to donors and members.

In brief, humanitarian organizations mainly use 1.0 features as well as communicational aspects of the 2.0 generation, rather than problem-solving ones.  The case study finds little empowerment or direct influence of 2.0 on the victims. But web 2.0 can be said to be indirectly impacting the field positively by its resonance within humanitarian organizations themselves and in their relation with civil society.  Unfortunately, this implies that the matter is again situated in Western hands.

However, despite their shy reliance on 2.0, what is striking is the number of respondents who nevertheless expressed their faith in the potential of 2.0 innovations for the future. Let’s hope that the work of Ushahidi and others can live up to their expectations.

–

* Note:  “Change before you have to” is a quote from Jack Welch. CEO General Electric, 1981-2001.

[Cross-posted from Konpa Group Blog, written by Sabina Carlson]

I have read a number of the stories written about the Ushahidi Haiti Deployment, some of which said that it served as a lifeline for many Haitians affected by the earthquake of January 12^th. And as the rescue phase transitioned into the recovery phase, as disaster slowly transitioned into development, and as incidents gave way to indicators, our team decided that our platform  had served its purpose and that it was time to close Haiti.ushahidi.com. Our site would always be kept up to serve as a snapshot of the crisis phase.

But, back in March, I deployed to the ground to serve as the Ushahidi Haiti Project’s (UHP) field representative for local outreach, and spent a month explaining the Ushahidi and 4636 system to a wide cross-section of Haitian civil society: in the middle of IDP camps, in destroyed churches, in local meeting halls, I explained Ushahidi in Creole and listened to what the affected communities had to say. And I made the interesting discovery that, during the recovery phase, Haitians saw Ushahidi not just as a life line, but a communication line – in fact, the only open communication line that seemed to exist between them and the humanitarian community.

And so, it is hard to convey how inspired, relieved, and motivated I was to hear about the Noula platform: motivated by the same drive to broadcast the voices of the affected population, a Haitian ICT company called Solutions had pooled its resources to create an interactive crisis and needs-mapping platform called “Noula” or “we’re here” in Creole. The concept is simple: based on the shortcode 177, Haitians can call into a call center for free that is staffed by trained operators, and communicate critical pieces of information on their situation or request information.  The information is then sorted, categorized, geolocated, and put onto the online platform Noula.ht, where responders can access the information directly or through subscribing to receive alerts.

Although UHP was born in Patrick Meier’s living room and Noula was born in a tent outside of the Solutions’ office, the platforms shared a common core function: to broadcast the voices of disaster affected populations onto a map that the world can see and respond to.

As a team, we saw Noula as having the potential to be that lifeline, that communication line, not just for the current crisis but for the long-term – and so we decided to take our experience, our resources, our networks, and our lessons learned to partner with Solutions to support Noula.

The Solutions team has an incredible wealth of technical experience, and the talent to create an incredibly responsive tool that is tailored to the current crisis and mitigation efforts in Haiti.  And while Solutions has all the networks and knowledge to build a tool for the public authorities in Haiti, they requested extra support in reaching out to the humanitarian community to understand how the tool could be best used by them as well.

This is where I have come back into the complex crisis communications world in Haiti: to act as a liaison between the Noula team and the humanitarian community. I have been here to find out about how information could best flow between the Haitians calling into the call center every day to the cluster leads and logisticians and information management officers that direct the humanitarian effort every day.

It has been an incredible opportunity to work with a dedicated piece of Haitian civil society to build from the ground up a crisis communications platform that is not only specifically tailored to Haiti, but to the complex post-earthquake, pre-hurricane reconstruction and risk reduction environment the country finds itself in.

And I am also grateful that our networks, experiences, and lessons learned from the Ushahidi Haiti Deployment can play a modest but consistent role in supporting what is now, and will continue to be, that channel of communication I found to be so vital back in March.

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.

I am a crisis mapper. I have been mapping need in Haiti. That means that I take a message (from Twitter, Facebook, SMS), and based on information contained within the message, I place it on a map. Primarily, I have been working with the Ushahidi Haiti Project and the Mission 4636 group of organizations. Through the short-code 4636 we created a picture of the evolving crisis in Haiti that was unprecedented in both its scope and timing. However, I live in Boston. I am from Atlanta. Honestly, it makes no sense for me to be the one mapping locations in Haiti when there are Haitians ready and willing to interact in the discussions of their own reconstruction.

So, I travel to Haiti. As a part of the Ushahidi Haiti project run by the Fletcher Team, one of our primary goals is to transfer skills and knowledge to the affected populations so that they can use everything we’ve learned through the 4 months we’ve spent working on this project. This means that the purpose of my trip was two-fold: 1 – assess the potential to transfer our knowledge to a single Haitian organization in Haiti and 2 – begin to transfer knowledge to any existing organizations that could use it.

Naturally, I went to Mirebalais. One of the key members of the Mission4636 group is Samasource – an organization bringing computer-based jobs to disadvantaged communities around the world. In a partnership with 1,000 Jobs they set up a computer center in Mirebalais, Haiti to translate messages coming into 4636 from Creole into English. I went to this computer center ready and willing to transfer my knowledge about crisis mapping, technology, and the Ushahidi platform.

What I have loved about my work in Haiti is that oftentimes when I feel like I have something to say or give, Haitians give it back to me ten fold. In my trip to Mirelabais I know I taught the workers how to find coordinates using OpenStreetMap, but I can definitely say that they taught me so much more–they taught me about Haiti.

The first day of my trip, the directors of the 1,000 Jobs site bring me to the center. Before my training, we sat in the office and talked about Haiti. We talked about their lives and ideas for the country, and how hard they’ve worked to get to where they are. I was afraid that my trip would be considered another burden or task they need to supervise. Instead, I received the resounding feedback, “No, this is the idea, we need to bring more skills to Haiti. Thank you.”

Later, I sat down with six intelligent, young Haitians eager to learn this new skill. I show them the Haiti Crisis Map and walk them through the training documents. Then, I show them the satellite imagery feature and how there is an image of this exact computer center building from the sky on the Internet. I teach them how to find their houses. They picked it up immediately and started laughing to each other, finding their parents’ or aunts’ houses once they mastered the current location. They loved it, and they turned to me and said, “I didn’t know this could exist for Haiti.”

The next day I taught them Ushahidi, which again they understood immediately. I sat back and watched the morning shift train the night shift on creating a report, and then suddenly I felt useless – I had trained an amazing group in the morning and they understood the idea of crisis mapping so well that I could sit back and just listen. Occasionally, they would ask me a question but really I remained a quiet bystander watching Haitian crisis mapping happen the way it was suppose to happen – with Haitians.

Later that day, some of the 1,000 Jobs workers took me around Mirebalais. We had lunch at a small restaurant, where the typical Haitian spaghetti breakfast was served. They showed me the rest of town and talked about their lives at university before the earthquake. They asked me about Facebook and wanted to know my opinions about music. They talked about their families and their friends. They just talked about life.

Now that I am back in the US I realize the unbelievable importance of this trip, and I realize that these workers actually trained me. They showed me Haiti as not just a crisis and not just a map. They reminded me there is a country underneath all the rubble and in fact, there is a country despite the rubble. They showed me Haiti.

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.

I landed on the tarmac in Port au Prince a week ago today. It is not my first time in Haiti: I founded a community health initiative in northern Haiti 3 years ago, where I learned basic creole and learned to respect the resilience of Haitian civil society. I had been called on the ground to lend some support to my colleague Jaroslav Valuch, who has been building an impressive network of contacts in the humanitarian sector.

I landed in Port au Prince to compliment what Jaro is building in the humanitarian community with connections, partnerships, and data from the local Haitian communities, and to diversify the methods we use to collect local information. In just under a week, I have begun connecting with a diverse set of Haitian actors who can see the current value and long-term potential of Ushahidi, from local radio stations to community leaders – and I will expand upon the most promising partnership in my first blog post from Port au Prince.

“The questions need to be asked by the people who have lived the disaster.” Agathe Etienne

In the middle of a long, warm morning in an IDP camp on an old golf course in Petionville, Agathe Etienne and I stood having a long, heated conversation in Creole as people walked by with wheelbarrows of assorted distribution items. If anyone knows the true meaning of this quote I referenced above, it is Agathe: during the first days after the earthquake, frustrated at the lack of attention her community was getting, she mobilized members of her community to conduct a cross between a census and needs assessment, and walked it straight to the humanitarian organizations operating in her area.

Agathe called her initiative Quartier par Quarter, “block by block”, and the project replicated itself across Carrefour Feuilles, Fontamara and Tabarre. In Fontamara, the project was taken up by a local Azek, a bit like a mayor, and no fewer than 26,000 people were surveyed. Hundreds of miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, the Haitian Alliance, a Diaspora development group, discovered the project and were inspired to support it.

When Jean-Claude Bourget of the Haitian Alliance, and Shadrock Roberts of the University of Georgia Athens, discovered Ushahidi, they reached out to our team to ask how we could display this dynamic community-generated data that was coming from the ground.

Instantly, the potential was clear: if Ushahidi is a platform for broadcasting and aggregating the thoughts and priorities of Haitians, here was a true grassroots initiative to begin to collect those thoughts. And if Quartier par Quartier is an initiative to collect the thoughts and priorities of people on the ground and broadcast them to the humanitarian community, here was a platform built that could be instrumental for that purpose.

I arrived in Port au Prince almost two weeks ago, and just a day later found myself on the back of a pick-up truck with the lead volunteers for QpQ. All of them are the same age as the Ushahidi crew back in the Situation Room in Boston: university students, the greatest difference being their universities had all collapsed. Over the noise of traffic, MINUSTAH fuel trucks, and occasional helicopters I explained Ushahidi in Creole. “Oh, ou se pwoje Open Source?” one asked back. “You’re an Open Source project?” I nodded, and he said, “Cool.” No joke.

In a half an hour I had my computer open, and showed them the front and back ends of the Ushahidi site, OpenStreetMap and Hypercube. Immediately, the QpQ team simply got it.

In the eyes of the QpQ team, local use of Ushahidi could become an exercise in local crowdsourcing: they and other small initiatives are collecting information about their own communities, capacities, priorities, and problems, but understood they had no standard way to collect and display the data. Here is an opportunity to sort, streamline, and standardize this flow of information, and give them a common language that is actionable.

In looking at the categories on Ushahidi, the QpQ leaders immediately saw a broader potential in the data they were gathering: being able to map problems in the community like broken bridges or highlighting problems like manipulation of aid. If a new category was put on the table, these intelligent university students spent 10 minutes discussing the implications in their communities. In the final minutes of our 4^th conversation, someone got up and said, “We are the eyes and ears of our communities. If we collect this information and make it public, it is up to the organizations, local and international, to act”.

And, the international community is willing and able to act. I spent the morning in a white tent in the UN Logisitcs Base by the Port au Prince airport, sitting down to present, discuss, and coordinate assessments with OCHA’s assessment working group. Impressive and professional teams are currently deploying large surveys with contractors and electronic handheld PDAs, but as important as they are, as Agathe said, these surveys are not being designed by people who lived the disaster. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized how interested the international community is in the kind of community-generated conversations that initiatives like QpQ and Ushahidi can provide.  It is the human layer underneath the statistics, excel spreadsheets, and GPS coordinates.

This human layer is resilient and dynamic. As I said goodnight and shook hands with 8 of my Haitian peers, including a computer science student and coder named Douglas who is excited about building a PhP platform to streamline data flow, I understood the capacity on the ground in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

The Ushahidi team in Boston have been discussing how to put this tool into the hands of the Haitian community, and now I have seen with my own eyes how those capable, confident, and ready those hands are – and how the hands of the international community are also open to receive it.

What if we could communicate with disaster affected communities in real-time just days after a major disaster like the quake in Haiti? That is exactly what happened thanks to a partnership between the Emergency Information Service (EIS), InSTEDD, Ushahidi, Haitian Telcos and the US State Department. Just 4 days after the earthquake, Haitians could text their location and urgent needs to “4636” for free.

I will focus primarily on the way that Ushahidi used 4636. Since the majority of incoming text messages were in Creole, we needed a translation service. My colleague Brian Herbert from Ushahidi and Robert Munro of Energy for Opportunity thus built a dedicated interface for crowdsourcing this step and reached out to dozens of Haitian communities groups to aid in the translation, categorization and geo-location of every message, quickly mobilizing 100s of motivated and dedicated volunteers. So not only was Ushahidi crowdsourcing crisis information in near real-time but also crowdsourcing translation in near real-time.So not only was Ushahidi crowdsourcing crisis information in near real-time but also crowdsourcing translation in near real-time.

Text messages are translated into English just minutes after they leave a mobile phone in Haiti. The translated messages then appear directly on the Ushahidi platform. The screenshots below (click on graphics to enlarge) illustrates how the process works. The original SMS in Creole (or French) is displayed in the header. In order to view the translation, one simply clicks on “Read More”.

-

-

If further information is required, then one can reply to the sender of the text message directly from the Ushahidi platform. This is an important feature for several reasons. First, this allows for two-way communication with disaster affected communities. Second, an important number of messages we received were not actionable because of insufficient location information. The reply feature allowed us to get more precise information.

The screenshots below show how the “Send Reply” feature works. We weren’t sure if Universite Wayal was the same as Royal University. So we replied and asked for more location information. Note the preset replies in both English and Creole. The presets include thanks & requests for more location information, for example. Of course, one is not limited to these presets. Any text can be typed in and sent back to the sender of the original SMS. This feature has been part of the Ushahidi for almost two years now. We send off the request for more information and receive the following reply within minutes.

-

When we receive an urgent and actionable SMS like this one, we can immediately create a report. By actionable, we mean there is sufficient location information and the description of the need is specific enough to respond to, just like the example above.

First, the GPS coordinates for the location is identified. This can be done directly from the Ushahidi platform by entering the street address or town name. Sometimes a bit of detective work is needed to pinpoint the exact coordinates. Next, a title and description for the report is included–the latter usually comprising the text of the SMS. This is what we mean by structured information. The report is then tagged based on the category framework. Pictures can be uploaded with the report, and links to videos can also be included. Finally the report is saved and then approved for publication.

This is how the Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts team mapped 1,500+ text messages on the Ushahidi platform. We are now working with Samasource and Crowdflower to have the translation work serve as a source of income for Haitians inside Haiti. But how does all this connect to response?

Ushahidi’s “Get Alerts” feature is one of my favorite because it allows responders themselves to customize the specific type of actionable information that is important to them; i.e., demand driven situational awareness in near real-time. Not only can responders elect to receive automated alerts via email, but they can also do so via SMS. Responders can also specify their geographic area of interest.

For example, if a relief worker from the Red Cross has a field office in neighborhood of Delmas, they can subscribe to Ushahidi to receive information on all reports originating from their immediate vicinity by specifying a radius, as shown below.

The above Alerts feature is now being upgraded to the one depicted below, which was designed by my colleague Caleb Bell from Ushahidi. Not only are responders able to specify their geographic area of interest, but they can also select the type of alert (e.g., collapsed building, food shortage, looting, etc.) they want to receive. They can even add key words of interest to them, such as “water”, “violence” or “UN”. The goal is to provide responders with an unprecedented degree of customization to ensure they receive exactly the kind of alerts that they can respond to.

On a more “macro” level, I recently reached out to colleagues at the EC’s Joint Research Center (JRC) to leverage their automated sentiment (“mood”) analysis platform. Sentiment Analysis is a branch of natural language processing (NLP) that seeks to quantify positive vs negative perceptions; akin to “tone” analysis. I suggested that we use their platform on the incoming text messages from Haiti to get a general sense of changing mood on an hourly basis. I’ll blog about the results shortly. In the meantime, here’s a previous blog post on the use of Sentiment Analysis for early warning.

Patrick Philippe Meier

We often get the question: why Tufts? The short answer is that I happen to be completing my PhD at The Fletcher School. So when the earthquake struck Haiti, I was able to reach out to friends and colleagues on campus for their help. But little did I know just how much of an incredible movement was about to be launched. Our fellow volunteers at Tufts and at other Situation Rooms around the world have consistently gone above and beyond.

This is why Ushahidi is now formally partnering with Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts who will take the lead on Ushahidi-Haiti from here-on. I will of course remain directly connected to the team as Ushahidi’s Advisor to Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts. In addition, we have a full-time Ushahidi Field Representative in Haiti, my colleague Jaroslav Valuch, to directly support the team at Tufts University. The Situation Rooms in Geneva and London will also remain active.

The purpose of the Tufts initiative is to work closely with the Haitian Diaspora, local civil society groups and the Government of Haiti. Why? Because the latter have expressed a strong interest in using Ushahidi-Haiti to help them inform the post-disaster reconstruction and development process. They want to give Haitians the ability to hold the development community accountable for the way their country is rebuilt. The Tufts team will work directly with and for these stakeholders so that Ushahidi-Haiti can become a fully Haitian owned and managed project.

This model is one that we at Ushahidi are very interested in replicating in the future. The largest concentration of Ushahidi-trained volunteers in the world are now in Boston. They have the ability to lead future deployments and train volunteers in many other universities to do the same. They are also taking the lead in partnering with a Diaspora, and this too could be an ideal model for future deployments. In short, the team at Tufts is continuing to break new ground for Ushahidi every day.

Ushahidi Tip of the Day: Follow the Ushahidi-Haiti @ Tufts team closely as they take the field of Crisis Mapping to a whole new level.

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.