Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi, posted a detailed account today of a year full of projects on his blog iRevolution. These crisis mapping efforts included the game-changing Haiti earthquake response, the subsequent earthquakes in Chile and Pakistan, monitoring in Southern Sudan, and the social unrest in Libya. The crisis-by-crisis account details different elements of these efforts, the evolution of the software platform, training efforts, and the creation of a Standby Volunteer Task Force for future disasters.
The Ushahidi mapping effort is certainly an amazing story about the power of geospatial technology, and it’s incredible how quickly these tools have gained acceptance with governments and aid organizations given their impact. Social media alone would not have had such an impact, but the ability for this crowd-sourced intelligence to land on a map, and be aggregated, has had a revolutionary effect on how we respond to a humanitarian crisis.
