A- Ushahidi: Swahili for "testimony" or "witness"

In today’s class Patrick Meier, the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi, gave a presentation via remote presentation technology. Dr. Meier was a previous co-director at Harvard University’s Program of Crisis Mapping and Early Warning and is a co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. In this week’s presentation he started out discussing how communications were during World War 1 and comparing them to how communications were during the recent Hatian Earthquake.

In World War 1 how was information get communicated and shared? In real time? The answer is…. You needed to be in the military. It would often take weeks for news to reach home; but on the frontlines of World War 1 carriers on motorbikes, even mirrors were used to communicate messages. Radios were too large at the time to bring onto the frontlines, so those were not in use to stay connected and communicate messages in and around 1914.

Today, however, Facebook, twitter, myspace, tumblr, and other social media sites are used to instantaneously spread communication across international boundaries as well as SMS and MMSs. In 2010 this was especially true. When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on January 12^th; Dr. Meier and a few other good hearted people launched a live crisis map within a few hours of the earthquake striking. This live map was based off of the Usahidi website, and was started by a group of friends and colleagues of Dr. Meier in his living room in Massachusetts. An astounding accomplishment and help to humanitarian workers. This live crisis map became more valuable, even more valuable to the humanitarian aid workers than GoogleMaps, as time went on, because they had the most detailed mapping of the Port Au Prince area from OpenStreetMap. Thanks to the shortcode 4636, survivors were able to text Ushahidi with information about their most urgent needs and locations. This information was then crowdsourced and used to update the live crisis map; the map was changing every ten to fifteen minutes.

While Haiti was an example of the good uses of Ushahidi and modern communication technology. The riots in London recently are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Twitter, Facebook, and even Usahidi were used to coordinate, tell the rioters stories, and to map their riots as well. This exemplifies what Dr. Meier reluctantly admitted… Ushahidi is an open source software that anyone can use. By having Ushahidi be an open source software, anyone can add to it, edit it, make it better; but, they can also use it to the detriment of others. What would stop Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hammas, and other terroristic groups from using this kind of technology to their advantage? Nothing. It’s an open source software. So while Ushahidi has been most beneficial to humanitarian aid efforts, particularly in Haiti, in the words of Dr. Meier, “It only takes one jerk to mess it up.” 

More information about Ushahidi can be found at:

http://www.ushahidi.com/

A- Happ's Happy Presentation

Edward G. Happ, the Global CIO of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), and Chairman of NetHope, came to speak with us this week. He is one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT, and is also one of the Top 100 CIOs. The NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) presented Mr. Happ with a Lifetime Achievement Award for technology leadership in the nonprofit community in 2010.   Through his presentation he noted three take away points: Crisis, Connections & Collaboration.

Crisis- The world stage is becoming more challenging.

No matter how much training you’ve had in crisis response there will always be two steps; a disarray will occur and then your training will kick in. Catastrophic events have been on the rise in terms of both man-made disasters and natural catastrophes from less than 100 crises in 1970 to over 300 in 2010.  In crises there are generic needs that everyone wants met, especially when it involves information. Is my family okay? Can I get to food? Water? Shelter? Can we communicate via voice or data? These are often the most sought after tidbits of knowledge during a crisis. The new information crises that are starting to arise. An example of such a problem was the social response to the Virginia earthquake on August 23^rd at 1:51 p.m. of this year. Tweets were faster at reporting what was happening than the seismometers because the tweets were nearly instantaneous. “In the social media world, everyone is a sensor…data source…and in some cases that data is faster and better than the data we have typically relied on,” stated Mr.Happ. He started discussing eight information challenges in need of solution shortly there after.

Relevance- is it actionable?

Verification- It is true, or is it a hoax?

Duplication- Has this already been dealt with?

Access- Do the most vulnerable have the tools?

Privacy- Is confidentiality being respected? Are there security risks?

Expectations- Are we creating unrealistic expectations?
Impact- Are we converting data into aid delivery?

Proximity- Are we understanding new proximity dynamics?

Connections- Responding to crises with technology is becoming increasingly social

Cell-phones are becoming the dominant gateway to the internet in Kenya and other non-first world countries across the world. Smart phones are slowly replacing SMS-dumb phones. (BTW China is rumored to have a sub-$75 smart phone coming out soon.) In Haiti and the after effects of its devastating earthquake, a company named Trilogy used an app called TERA that allowed targeted SMS texts to be sent to survivors. Over six million texts were sent to survivors in seven days; 385k SMS per day were received; 1.1 million early warning SMS texts were sent out; and one million cholera health SMS texts were also sent out.

Collaboration- Working together isn’t an option; it is imperative.

That definition speaks for itself. However, if you’d like some more to read I’ll gladly reiterate the story that Mr. Happ shared with us in class.  He was in Zaire doing humanitarian relief work when they were driving on a road and came to a HUGE tree that fell across the road blocking their way. It was too large of a tree to cut through without taking an absurdly long time, it was too large to go around, and it was too large to try to simply go over it, or try to move it on their own. After a half an hour or so, some locals had heard of their troubles and had come to see if they could help. The local tribe shaman started to chant in a rhythm that went up and down, as the rhythm went up the local tribesmen lifted the tree and moved it about an inch until the rhythm went down and they put down the tree. This process lasted about an hour until the tree was moved, inch-by-inch, out of the way so Mr. Happ and his crew could pass. This story exemplifies the fact that working together to achieve a goal is not an option; it’s imperative.

Overall, I feel that this was by far the best presentation of the set so far. I truly learned from Mr. Happ’s presentation, and I implore you to view his personal youtube cannel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ehapp99

A- Alphabet Soup? UN-OCHA? What?

In yesterday’s class, Andrew Alspach came to speak to us directly. Mr. Alspach is currently a Programme Officer Information Management, since 2007. Formerly he was a Training Coordinator for the US Peace Corps from 2005-2011, an Iraq Programme Officer Information management from 2003-2005, and an UN OCHA Refugees Information Management Officer from 2000-2001 with UNHCR.  While he was speaking I noticed that he had somewhat of an accent from living and working in Geneva, although he grew up on an Ohio farm as a beekeeper, hmmm just an odd thought.  Some of the more striking things that I noticed during his presentation were the mention of a “check-in” app, Larry Prusak, and how everyone wants to know the number of something.

A “checking-in” app was previously developed for humanitarian aid in any given place, however the app failed for multiple reasons. First and foremost, the app was meant for information managers, for people who were used to querying and searching in deep crevices of a database for information that they wanted, but was later released to the public to be used. This created problems for people who didn’t know how to properly search a database for useful information, because even though the information that the users were seeking was in the database, the search processes for that information were absolutely not helpful. It was developed as a proprietorship, but marketed as an open source software, another flaw.

Larry Prusak was absolutely hysterical and completely right when he was shown via previously recorded video regarding knowledge management versus information management and developing knowledge. His personal website is in a link below:

http://www.laurenceprusak.com/

Another think I especially picked up on was when Mr. Alspach mentioned how when in a disaster relief situation everyone wants to know the number of something, but often times we do not really know the number they want. Ranges are possible, but hardly ever the real actual number. “The Number” includes two subsections: the affected population made up of displaced persons, refugees, asylum seekers, others and nondisplaced people, as well as casualties made of the dead and missing. (The injured are not included in the casualties as part of “The Number”.)  

Overall, I thought his presentation was very enlightening and very interesting. I do have to say that his presentation was the most interesting to date, and he did put on the best presentation.

A- A New Digital Evolution and Generation

In this week's class on Crisis Informatics we were lucky to be able to Skype with Mr. Gisli Olafsson, the Emergency Responce Director of NetHope. NetHope is an organization whose goal is "to be a catalyst for collaboration among international humanitarian organizations. By working together to solve problems and share knowledge...our members have access to the best information and communication technology and practices... We do this by working across our membership as a highly collaborative team, solving common technology problems, fostering strong relationships with private industry, and educating our members and the wider community of humanitarian organizations worldwide."  Mr. Gisli Olafsson, since 2010, has been the Emergency Response Director of NetHope where he has been responsible for emergency preparedness and emergency response activities within NetHope.
More information about NetHope can be found at their website:
www.nethope.org

Going into the discussion, about how digital age technologies are changing humanitarian responses, as well as the role of technology and information in humanitarian responses and how crowd sourcing, mass collaboration, information, and self-organization will affect approaches to disaster and crisis response methods, I had a few questions. How has technology advanced and impact the realm of disaster relief, and where is it headed, and where can it improve? What would be an ideal disaster relief technology, and what are the discrepencies between what that ideal technology is and the capabilities of today's technology/ society? Which area of disaster recovery is the most difficult to achieve in regards to communication efforts in disaster response, and how would the difficulty of accomplishing that be ideally resolved?

Throughout the Skype video chat, I found a few of the answers that I was looking for. Surprisingly, the first thing that I learned (but should've deduced for myself already) was that most of the institutions we rely on today for help in disaster situations were created in the Industrial Age. Now, more than ever, we are beginning to notice the difference in the way things were run back then, and how they should be run now; since communication costs are going down, institutions are no longer the go-to-fix anymore. We are beginning to see a convergence of a technical revolution and social revolution...a new digital evolution and generation. This was especially noticeable about seven years ago, in the South-East Asia tsunami; we began to see a humanitarian effort "reform". Changes that have occurred in the past five to ten years have been more drastic than decades prior.

Although, we have come a long way in a short amount of time, we're still not there yet. Technologies described by Mr. Olafsson which would be most beneficial to humanitarian aids and relief efforts were such things as a "check-in" for NGO's to see who is there, who is doing what, where they are, and how much they have accomplished so far; sharing data better at an international level, not a word document, excel table, or pdf file, actual data from which conclusions can be drawn independent from who collected the raw data; as well as capabilities to visualize data in certain ways to make it more appropriate to work with, such as geo-spatial-analysis of tweets done by Ushahidi during the Haiti Earthquake relief efforts.

Technology has come a long way, and it will continue to go further beyond our wildest expectations into the future. Perhaps, by then we will have the technological capabilities and social expectations to make some of the technologies described by Mr. Olafsson possible. Until then, we'll just have to keep inventing 'til something clicks!