19 February 2010
By Christopher Connell
Special Correspondent
Washington - Within hours of the earthquake that crushed Port-au-Prince January 12, Haitians in peril could send text messages for help over cell phones to a newly created emergency response number, 4636. It was the rough equivalent of the 911 emergency response number in the United States - and literally was set up overnight.
Utilizing Ushahidi - a Web portal born in 2008 to help citizen activists track post-election violence in Kenya - volunteers around the world who speak French and Creole translated thousands of messages, mapped where the calls came from and directed the most urgent pleas to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Red Cross and other relief and rescue agencies.
Against the enormous scale of suffering and loss in Haiti, and the bottlenecks in delivering food and medicine to survivors, this seems like a modest triumph. It could become the model for tapping digital technology - from mobile phones to creative software and social networking applications - to speed help in future catastrophes.
A social media innovator at the State Department, a Swiss graduate student in Boston, a recent Stanford University graduate who devised a low-cost way for hospitals in Africa to text message HIV patients in remote villages, and an engineer for Haiti's biggest wireless company each played a role in the rapid rollout of the rescue channel for Haiti. Others contributed ideas in chats on Skype, which allows phone calls and conferences anywhere in the world over the Internet.
It was a marriage of public- and private-sector workers, of social activists and computer experts who know how to get things done without delay. It helped that the core group has friends in high places. Five nights before the earthquake, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had brought technology leaders to the State Department for a dinner discussion of how best to use the Internet, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, text messaging and other tools to advance democracy and development around the world.
MAPPING CALLS FOR HELP
Patrick Meier, an international consultant and doctoral degree candidate at Tufts University, learned of the quake when he turned on the evening news January 12. Meier is part of the core team of Ushahidi. Meier, who is Swiss, called David Kobia, Ushahidi's director of technology development. Within an hour or so, Kobia had built a basic version of the Help for Haiti platform on the Web.
In Washington, Josh Nesbit, who helped build a text-messaging service for a hospital in Malawi while an undergraduate at Stanford University, began looking for ways to do the same in Port-au-Prince. Nesbit knew that several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Haiti had downloaded the open source software called FrontlineSMS:Medic. He sent out a "tweet" - a message on Twitter - on January 13 hoping to find Frontline users who could establish a hub for Short Message Service (SMS) communications.
Someone in Cameroon replied that he should get in touch with Jean-Marc Castera, an engineer for Digicel, the largest wireless company in Haiti, who was en route to the company's command center in Port-au-Prince. "By the time he got there, we were Skyping," said Nesbit.
A screenshot shows locations of Haitian Creole volunteers who have translated 40,000 messages.Nesbit also exchanged e-mails with Alec Ross, the State Department's senior adviser for innovation. "I told him I was working on setting up an SMS channel, and he said, 'Well, you should be talking to Katie Stanton. She's heading that up at the State Department.'"
Stanton is a former Google executive who left to join the Obama administration. Working with James Eberhard, the founder of Mobile Accord, which allows charities to collect donations by text messages, she got the "Text Haiti to 90999" fundraising campaign rolling on the night of the earthquake. Over the next three weeks, text messages raised an unprecedented $37 million for the Red Cross for Haitian relief.
Now, Skyping with Nesbit and others, Stanton threw the State Department's support behind the effort to create a 911 rescue number for Haiti.
Rather than build a communications hub allowing NGOs to text each other, they set up a "short code" - a four- or five-digit number - that anyone in Haiti could text for free. Castera found an existing short code - 4636 - for gathering weather reports in Haiti. It was little-used, and the company that owned it "decided it was just fine that we use it," said Nesbit. Now they needed to build the capacity to respond to the cries for help.
"We created a logistics group on Skype Chat, pulling together people from four or five organizations to think through how to turn this into a useful channel," said Nesbit.
They linked the messages to Ushahidi. In Boston, Meier enlisted help from Tufts students and from the Haitian diaspora community to translate messages from French and Creole and direct them to rescue workers in Haiti. Volunteers in Boston and in other cities created maps, first using Google Maps and later OpenStreetMap, a crowd-sourcing tool that operates like Wikipedia, to pinpoint exactly where help was needed.
Open source software developed by the nonprofit organization inSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters) was used to smooth the flow of information pouring in to relief agencies, not just from text messages but from news reports, Twitter and other information channels.
The U.S. Coast Guard deployed its own social media team to deal with this flood of information. "It's like taking a sip from a fire hose," said Ryan Bank, a Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteer from Chicago who devised a system for finding those in the most dire circumstances. The Coast Guard brought Bank, who consults with video companies, to Miami to work full-time with its social media team.
Meier is headed soon to Geneva to talk with International Red Cross officials about how to prepare "a Ushahidi-type deployment" for the next catastrophe.
Likely, he'll have help. "We have 4.6 billion mobile phones on the planet. We need to use them for good," Stanton said.