Hundreds of volunteers technology driven to act by the killer earthquake Haiti add a new dimension to disaster assistance, to develop tools and services for the first penanggap new community in the effort and unprecedented."It was so amazing how a change in response to the crisis can be done now," said Noel Dickover, Washington, DC-based maintenance technology CrisisCamp Volunteer movement, which is the center of efforts to Haiti. "Developers, crisis Mapper and even Internet-smart people who can really make a difference."
Volunteers have built and improve the software to detect the loss, the mapping of disaster areas and allows urgent phone text messages. Organizations including the International Red Cross, United Nations, World Bank and U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has put the system to use.
Tim Schwartz, 28 years old artist and programer in San Diego, fear on learning of the disaster, with an array of social network sites are active, important information about the earthquake Haiti will "go to any of the Internet and that will be very difficult to really find people - and return to their loved ones, "he said. Schwartz Be quick e-mail "all the developers who have worked with."
In a few hours, he and 10 others have been built http://www.haitianquake.com, online lost-and-find to help in Haiti and abroad searching for lost relatives.
Database, which anyone can update, only lines of less than 24 hours after the earthquake, with more than 6000 entered as Schwartz and koleganya write a "dredging" that collects data from the Red Cross.
The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and others launched similar efforts. And two days later, Google has a similar device running, PersonFinder, that the Department of Foreign Affairs was appointed in your own website and squeak. PersonFinder grow from those lost-technology developed after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.
Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, organizing to consolidate all the online tools such as the version of Google that information will not be trapped in the projects compete.
He considers PersonFinder, which can be embedded in each web page and Saturdays are more than 32,000 records, a victory because it is "greatly increase the chance that in Haiti Haiti and abroad will be able to find one another."
Schwartz agreed and folding basisdata PersonFinder, which he thought would be "the application to the disaster and lost all disasters in the future."
Site has received several hundred thousand requests, "said Google spokesperson Elaine Filadelfo. He did not have data on how many people have found loved ones using the device.
Other volunteer projects wrought by the earthquake is in the mobile phone text message system that has helped the UN, Red Cross and other aid groups sending rescuers, food and water. Haiti needs help can send free text messages from mobile phone networks in the country Comcel and Digicel to the number 4636.
"At least 20 people so far have been able to use this program to inform their families in the U.S. that they were doing fine," said Katie Stanton, a former Google employee working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Office of Innovation.
Enter the text translated, and classified "Geotag" by volunteers, including members of Haitian-Americans in New York City-based Service Employees International Union. This service is being promoted on the radio station Haiti and the service had handled more than 1000 messages since the start Saturday, Josh said Nesbit, a co-inventor. He put the same system for a hospital in Malawi, Africa, while at Stanford University.
Chief executive Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD, humanitarian non-profit that helps small to develop, said by telephone from the airport runway Haiti on Tuesday that the UN search and rescue dispatcher who at the time of mobilization is to find a woman eight months pregnant and suffering from infections that have been sent SOS messages using the system.
In other collaborative efforts, the OpenStreetMap "crisis mapping" project, volunteers lining up-to-the-minute data (such as the hospital courts a new location and spent the bridge) to post-earthquake that citra satellite companies GeoEye and DigitalGlobe are already made available free of charge. Digital Cartography - information from all of the Twitter feed to report eye witnesses - aid workers have helped speed food, water and medicines to places that most needed.
One of the rescue team leader of Colombia upload maps to portable GPS units before the crew team arrived at the scene last week, said the developer. Other volunteers, Talbot Brooks of Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss., to change the city in a letter seukuran document has been printed before aid workers traveling to the quake zone.
"We have been using their data in our initial post-disaster needs assessment," said Stuart Gill from the World Bank.
Internet social network has been organizing volunteers to help expose the work session.
