Technology Saves Lives In Haiti

Geeks and technologists around the world are creating tools to help earthquake victims in Haiti. These tools are focused around gathering and mapping the data, and broadcasting it to the relief workers on the ground.

When the news of the earthquake broke, several groups and companies sprang into action very quickly. Ushahidi, a portal originally built to track election violence in Kenya, created Haiti.Ushahidi.com. The site, developed by Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi, tracks incidents, search and rescue operations and people in Haiti.

A team of volunteers in Boston keep Haiti.Ushahidi running. The volunteers monitor text messages from people in Haiti who are stranded and need food or aid. Some messages also report news. Almost anyone in Haiti can send a text to the system, a joint effort from Thomson Reuters and Google ( GOOG - news - people )-funded InSTEDD. Text messages come in from Digicell and CellTell, the biggest Haitian carriers (impressively, Digicell's system was up within a day after the quake).

So far more than 19,000 messages in English and Creole have been sent through the system, and the number of messages is increasing by 10% daily. The goal is to place all information reports on a map for immediate dissemination and future analysis of trends. About half the messages are useful and can be mapped (a smaller number of messages carry urgent information and are routed to the proper agency). Oftentimes, volunteers have to get clarification and more location information from the sender. Government agencies and NGOs are tracking Ushahidi's data.

The maps created for Haiti.Ushahidi rely on the Open Street Map (OSM) project. Prior to the earthquake the OSM map of Haiti only contained major arterials. A day after the quake, Port-au-Prince was almost completely mapped and the new maps were powering Ushahidi. Normally, this would have been very expensive and taken a lot of time to do. Instead, volunteers made huge progress on the maps within a day.

OSM volunteers used satellite imagery to create streets and buildings for use in disaster relief efforts across Haiti. These crowdsourced maps are improved constantly and the Ushahidi portal can pick up new versions every five minutes if necessary. The volunteers are often brought together via Crisis Camps to brainstorm and work.