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 12th; 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/
I like how Dr Meier started off his talk with a discussion about where communications was during WWI and how it has progressed up to the Jan 2010 Haitian Earthquake. Yes of course it is a drastic change but even if you look at the past 30, 20, 15, 10 years and the extreme difference in technology. Ten years ago we didn’t have smart phones with applications on them that can make maps and where you can input data and then view it on a map. That could be in one app. Impressive!
ReplyDeleteYou definitely covered a lot of today’s technology or social networking sites. The things that Dr Meier and his associates did during the aftermath of the Haitian Earthquake is remarkable, they helped save hundreds if not thousands of lives with a simple technology. Yes they had to now some people to help set up the 4636 short code that people could text SMS messages to, but it was simple. They did it in a living room too, they didn’t even have to be there for the technology aspect of locating people. They sent their data to everyone. But that leaves a problem; redundancy could have been a huge issue for the response effort. I believe that this could be a project idea for future classes, a way to check off people getting help and the help administered to those individuals.
I think Dr. Patrick Meier did bring up a lot of good points about the positive effects of open source software as it pertain to crisis relief. I believe you bring up an even better darker point where Dr. Meier did reluctantly bring up the fact that Ushaidi could be used for nefarious purposes such as the London Riots.
ReplyDeleteThis is something I feel we need to talk about more at times. I mean one of the sayings goes; "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Not to say we are going to hell but you have to understand that as Ushaidi evolves and becomes used for more and more purposes it will be easier for it to be misused.
For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. That is something I unfortunately think we will see shortly with the Ushaidi technology. I hope I am wrong. But being open source software leaves it susceptible to many different uses. I believe Dr. Meier would be heartbroken if this happened and he truly wanted his idea to be used for good but inevitably it may be used in the wrong hands.
Hopefully this is something we can prevent or make more difficult. If not we will figure out how to stop them. I do not want someones selfish reasons to stop progress and the good that can ultimately be done with this software and future software like this. Good post and very thought provoking.