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.

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.

That last one, “handling the response”, has been a big deal for us as we’re trying to complete the feedback loop between people with needs who use the 4636 shortcode to text in needs and emergencies, and the organizations who can help them on the ground.

On Tuesday 1/19/10 we received a request for instructions on how to use Ushahidi’s feed from the US Coast Guard and Joint Task Force Command Center, and currently the following organizations are using Ushahidi to track incidents in Haiti:

• Red cross
• United Nations Foundation
• Plan International
• Charity Water
• Clinton Foundation
• US State Department
• International Medical Corps
• AIDG
• USAID
• FEMA
• US Coast Guard Task Force

Getting these organizations to let us know when they’ve taken action on a need is difficult since they’re still in full emergency response mode and don’t have much time to fill out completion surveys. In any case, we are trying to divide up this list of organizations between us and contact the liaison for each one twice a day for updates. This will soon become the Ushahidi Non-Tech team’s primary efforts.

We’re working very closely on the tech side with InSTEDD (Ed Jezierzki is sitting next to me in a coffeeshop in Nairobi hacking away right now, as he has been for the last 2 days), Sahana and EIS to ensure that messages coming into the system are being shuttled to people who are on the ground in Haiti and who can help meet the emergency needs as fast as they possibly can.

Technically, we’ve come up with a solution within the platform for administrators to annotate when action has been taken on an issue. The basic theory is that until this is marked, then the ticket is still open and it whatever item you’re looking at hasn’t been resolved.

Ushahidi's Action Taken area for items that have been resolved

As an aside, there have been a number of people helping us out with these code revisions, bug fixes and implementing new features. Amongst this group has been PHPDiva who has done 5 commits, 93 additions, 13 deletions to the core Ushahidi Haiti code, and freed up the core devs to finish other critical elements. To those like Anastasia, we want to give you a BIG thank you.

UPDATE (via Josh Nesbit):
Breakthrough from Nico of InSTEDD the ground; aid group clusters [such as: water, children and shelter] will now be receiving SMS updates. Meeting in the AM EST to work out details. Likely these will be processed through daily email or print-out reports given to team leaders.

This opens up the possibility of closing the feedback loop, asking receivers of information to mark which items where acted upon — that will not be critical for them, so the easier we can make it the better the chance it will happen.

You can see my notes from the talk here.

• First, we see an inordinate amount of traffic on the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc).
• Second, the aggregators step in to gather the data into one place.
• Third, we see visualizations (maps and graphs).

Social Network Chatter

When there is a “hot flash” emergency, the social media networks start to buzz – Twitter is the biggest and most open example of this. It’s also the place where a lot of misinformation starts to get amplified. It’s not just a place to air your own thoughts, but a place to get a bead on information as it is happening. You can get the information here faster than anywhere else, period.

Ever since the Mumbai terror attacks last year, the community behind Ushahidi has been interested in this. We think this should be done, understanding the probability of information being true by gathering streams of data and using both machine-based and human filtering to make sense of it. The Swift River project was born from this. It is currently being prototyped and iterated on within VoteReport.in project. Another interesting project in the same line is InSTEDD’s Evolve, which has a great amount of potential in just this scenario.

There is another issue at hand here though; the fact that many individuals who have information are not on Twitter, Facebook, or any other big social network. So, while there is a great deal that can be done with the open channels available in the developed world, most of the world is not on those channels when it matters most.

This is where tools like Ushahidi come in. It’s why it was developed, a way to get information from people who aren’t connected online and who might never be. A way for them to share information and receive alerts around emergency incidents.

Aggregating the News

As soon as a new emergency hits, the first thing we see is aggregation of news and data around it. This is good. In the Swine Flu case, I think the example set by Delicious creator Joshua Schachter is one of the best.

“my weekend evening project: RSS + Twitterfeed + Bit.ly + Delicious + Google News = @threatwatch“

People try to find the best places to get new news. People like Jimmy Wales will use his platform to create real-time wiki collaboration. Once in a while you’re fortunate to have institutions like the CDC give out good up-to-date information.

I’m intrigued by the aggregation of information, and it makes sense if you can actually get a handle on the different channels, not just mainstream news, wire services, images and video. It really has to be done on a large scale and it’s not an easy thing to manage in terms of both volume and veracity of information.

Visualizations and Maps

The last, and usually the most helpful to general news seekers, is the maps that have started to crop up. Google Maps Mania has an extensive list. Below is Google’s own aggregation and mapping of Swine Flu:

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Timothy O’Brien has some interesting graphs on the data as well, especially the information coming through from Twitter. As time goes on, if this follows the patterns we’ve seen before, we’ll see even better and more professionally designed informatics done by the NT Times and others.

In Summary

What we have is the beginnings of an ecosystem for emergency and disaster information. The projects are disjointed and unconnected, and there’s little hope of making them one cohesive unit (nor should the necessarily be).

What I do hope to see in the future is that the protocols, tools and processes for gathering, making sense of, and then disseminating crisis information becomes more open and standardized. There’s no reason that Ushahidi shouldn’t plug and play well with Evolve, which then feeds into Threatwatch on Twitter and is all part of a mapping and visualization scheme by larger publishers.

It would be very interesting to get some of the minds behind Twitter, Ushahidi, InSTEDD, Facebook, Wikia, Google and others together to better figure out how we can each continue to build independently, yet at the same time work towards a better ecosystem for emergency information.

It’s with that thought in mind that groups like InSTEDD, Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS (all of the OMC group actually) have continued to talk and figure out ways that we can truly layer our technology together in a user-friendly way that makes sense to non-technical people in the field. From the beginning, we baked in FrontlineSMS support to Ushahidi. We’re moving into a phase where we start to integrate in tools from InSTEDD as well, with hopes that we can make a connecting mechanism between instances that can sync over just SMS, not only the web.

The FrontlineSMS example

Last week a couple of us started playing with FrontlineSMS Forms, a new service on the FrontlineSMS platform, which allows for dynamic forms to be created on a FrontlineSMS hub and then sent to a Java app running on a phone in the field. Point your WAP enabled mobile phone at Forms.FrontlineSMS.com to get the mobile client.

Creating the dynamic forms on the computer:

Using the J2ME forms app on your phone:

This allows for a nice controlled data gathering environment. Nothing new there though, as we already have OpenRosa. Ken tells me that integration with the OpenRosa/xForms standards are in the cards for future iterations.

What’s exciting about seeing this development is not just that it works well, or that it’s completely customizable, but that it’s already being tied up in this modular fashion that I mentioned above. Just today FrontlineSMS:Medic was announced – which is being run by a bunch of university students like Josh Nesbit. (If this simple approach works, it could make a bunch of the smart adults selling multi-million dollar solutions look a little silly).

This new FrontlineSMS:Medic program is integrating with OpenMRS – where they will build an SMS bridge so medical records can be edited, updated and requested via SMS in the field. That’s exactly the type of cross-application functionality that we need to encourage and see put into use in this field!

Where is it all going?

What I’d like to be able to do is take the LEGO approach and grab FrontlineForms OR OpenRosa, layer on Ushahidi for visualization and maps, and then sync it all via Mesh4x using SMS.

Most of all, I hope we get beyond our own app-centric view. If we can just get to a point where we provide simple, modular solutions for real-world users then we’ll all be a lot further. Let the user decide what works, which tools fit best for their specific needs and how to integrate it. An ecosystem approach that encourages curiosity and customization, and one that doesn’t tie a user to one specific system forever.

What Google has done, instead of just building another social network, is use their existing “My Location” and other tools to enable people on Maps for Mobile to share their location with a selective group of contacts — those who opt-in to participate.

This is more innovative and will have a larger impact than most people understand just yet. It’s big, primarily because it’s not a “specialized for humanitarian efforts” application – it’s made for everyone, all the time, which means it is more likely to be used when an emergency strikes.

As Sanjana Hattotuwa says:

“Potential uses for this for real time election violence monitoring, IDPs and refugee movement tracking, Human Rights and Ceasefire monitoring, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and disaster management are impressive and beg to be explored.”

Just today, Google announced that they already have 1 million users in 27 countries. That’s fairly impressive, and it will grow as they have specific communities that adopt the service. It will also grow when an emergency strikes and people “turn it on” for their Google account. Basically, a million people have turned it on out of curiosity, what happens when you give the rest a real reason?

Make no mistake, this is Google’s quiet “Ace” and it’s a killer app. Nokia, Facebook, Twitter and the rest would do well not to ignore it.

My question: can outside services play with this? Is there going to be an API or web service?

I was part of a panel yesterday which focused on the use of mobile phones in disaster and crisis situations with Robert Kirkpatrick of InSTEDD and Christopher Fabian of UNICEF. Here is a video put together by the Rhodes University students for MobileActive.

You can view my more extensive post here.