Protecting coastal areas Next generation crisis mapping

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Ushahidi, which means

“testimony” in Swahili, began as a one-off deployment for mapping reports of post-election violence after the December 2007 Kenyan elections. Ory Okolloh, co-founder of Ushahidi, initially shared reports she received about the violence through her blog. She soon became overwhelmed by the amount of crisis data she was receiving and asked if it was possible to create a website

that would allow anyone to publicly report crisis information and “put” it on a map so that everybody could see where the information was coming from. This resulted in a group of volunteer developers and designers in Africa and the U.S. creating a website enabling public collection of near real-time crisis information via mobile phones, e-mail, and the web submission page.

The hope behind creating the Ushahidi map mashup was that this

crowdsourced information would mobilize people to assist other members of the public in a crisis and mobilize governments to react.

A number of humanitarian organiza-tions have argued that information during a crisis is as important as food and water. Ushahidi does not treat information in a vacuum but, rather, treats it as part of a crisis “ecosys-tem” informed by two-way commu-nication.

Ushahidi Haiti and Chile: Next Generation Crisis Mapping—by Sophia B. Liu, Anahi Ayala Iacucci, and Patrick Meier

Ushahidi-Haiti [http://haiti.ushahidi.com/]

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As such, Ushahidi does not just facilitate crowdsourcing of crisis information from the public but it also facilitates crowdfeeding of crisis information via the web or by subscribing to location-specific SMS (short message service) alerts.

In May 2009, Ushahidi launched a free and open source software (FOSS) called the Ushahidi Engine, a crisis mapping platform allowing anyone to adapt this mashup as a live mapping tool for any local situation.

The potential of this tool to “rally the public” may have contributed to the definition of Ushahidi in Wikipedia as “an initial model for what has been coined as “activist mapping”—the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information … while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.”

Ushahidi’s use during the 2010 Haiti and Chile earthquakes as a web platform for aggregating, monitoring, and mapping real-time crisis reports from different media sources improved trans-parency, accountability, and coordination of relief efforts, thereby legitimizing map mashups produced and used by members of the public.

ushahidi haitiWithin two hours of the 7.0 magni-tude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, Patrick Meier and David Kobia along with colleagues from the International Network of Crisis Mappers had created an Ushahidi-Haiti instance (http://haiti.ushahidi.com) and interactively customized it.1

Four days later, Ushahidi partners launched the 4636 SMS short code in Haiti, thereby enabling free mobile reporting of emergency needs and offers of help with location informa-tion via texting.

To help with the near real-time crisis mapping efforts, Meier facili-tated crisis mapping training events at the Fletcher Ushahidi Situation Room and ultimately mobilized over 300 student volunteers from Tufts University and beyond to comb the web for Haiti-related crisis informa-tion and map it on the Ushahidi Haiti page. More than 3,500 reports had been manually mapped by the time this article was written in late July.

The Ushahidi partners also worked with several thousand Haitian volun-teers to crowdsource the translation of SMS messages and other crisis reports from Creole to English as well as determine specific location information in Haiti.

Because of this tremendous crisis mapping effort, Ushahidi Haiti became an important source of near real-time, geo-tagged crisis informa-tion for the U.S. Coast Guard, the Joint Task Force Command Center, the U.S. State Department, the Red Cross, the UN Foundation, the International Medical Corps, the Clinton Foundation, and other first responder organizations.

ushahidi chileDevelopers Patrick Meier and David Kobia also launched a copy of the Ushahidi-Haiti map for Chile immediately after that country was struck by a powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake on February 27, 2010. That same afternoon, Meier invited students from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to collaborate. Just 48 hours after that, the Ushahidi-Chile instance (http://chile.ushahidi.com) was launched, and a group of 60 SIPA volunteers trained by Digital Democracy (http://digital-democracy.org) began monitoring social and tra-

ditional media reports from Chile. On the first day, the volunteers manually mapped over 100 incidents. In two days, Ushahidi-Chile had over 150 volunteers who had mapped, in three days, over 700 reports. By late July, Ushahidi-Chile volunteers have manu-ally mapped nearly 1,200 reports.

crowdsourcing and social netsourcing Ushahidi Chile was implemented using Ushahidi-Haiti as a template; in addition, it also utilized the social ties that bound the trusted network of volunteer mappers mobilized during the Haiti crisis. Meier calls this type of crowdsourcing “netsourcing.” After the information had been gath-ered, free cloud computing tools (i.e., Google Groups, Google Docs, Skype Public Chat) and social media sites (i.e. Facebook Groups, Events) were used to coordinate the distributed mapping efforts. For example, multiple Google Groups were set up to broadcast instruction information to the volunteers and to coordinate mapping contributions using the Ushahidi platform. Multiple Google Documents and Spreadsheets were also set up to serve as public sign-up sheets for netsourcing as well as to facilitate media monitoring and crisis mapping activities in an efficient way through self-organization. A Media Monitoring List Google Spreadsheet for Ushahidi-Haiti con-tained over 350 individual source links to online Haitian radio stations, news sites, Twitter users, Facebook groups, and blogs that carried breaking news about the Haiti earthquake. The Media Monitoring List for Ushahidi-Chile contained over 250 links to official governmental Twitter feeds from Chile, Twitter users, Twitter lists, Twitter Spanish speaking experts, Spanish and English news sites,

Crisis management with GIS

1 Google Maps was first used as the basemap for the Ushahidi deployment in Haiti, but then the OpenStreetMap (http://www.open-streetmap.org) for Haiti quickly became far more detailed than any other street map available for that country.

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blogs, Facebook groups, and other relevant links. Google Docs was invaluable in facilitating real-time editing among multiple users and live, ad hoc updates of the Ushahidi maps.

Instant communication within the distributed Ushahidi volunteer net-work and with the partner organiza-tions on the ground was implemented via Skype Public Chats. All Skype Chat communications were automati-cally transcribed and the digital trace was used as a record to keep organi-zations up to speed.

Facebook Groups and Events were used to recruit additional volunteers,

inform them about training events, and provide updates on other Usha-hidi-related activities.

ushahidi vs classical gis mapsWhat makes the Ushahidi maps different from classical GIS maps is its ability to visualize interactions. The Ushahidi map is a living map of crowdsourced crisis data visualized

“on top” of the static GIS map, the base layer. The Ushahidi map makes it possible to follow the situation developing on the ground because of its ability to show the interactions between the event and the place where this event has occurred and

the reaction of the people living at the location impacted by the event. In addition, the Ushahidi map is also a witness to the interactions between the people managing the platform and the people reporting to the platform, and the interaction between the people in need and the responders.

Tools like Google Groups, Skype Chat, Twitter and Facebook, which are fundamental in bridging the map-ping and response efforts, are the living parts of the map. The mashup itself is the structure that allows those interactions to be represented as well as to take place. The result is a multi-dimensional geospatial

Google Docs: Getting started

Crisis management with GIS

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representation which brings to life the communities living in the visualized space and their responses to crisis events.

GIS mapping is still a fundamental part of the Ushahidi system, but the social network that lies behind the static map is now an integral part of this system. The availability of free and open source software has made it possible for volunteers to create a comprehensive map without training or prior knowledge of cartographic principles.2

The innovation we thus see emerg-ing from distributed crisis mapping is the dynamic creation of Ushahidi maps: Ushahidi Haiti and Chile were not mere representations of space, but rather living records of the situa-tions reported by the people inhabit-ing that space, and of the social activism that elicited responses to the events represented. Another inno-

vation is geo-tagging of crisis reports, i.e., providing their GPS coordinates to responders on the ground.

The Ushahidi map mashups are now viewed as an effective crisis response resource largely because of the comprehensive, geo-tagged, up-to-date crisis maps created, by volunteers, for use by the humanitar-ian community responding to the 2010 Haiti and Chile earthquakes.

Geo-tagged, networked crisis map-ping during the Haiti and Chile crises has proved extremely effective in rescuing earthquake victims, locating the nearest hospitals, and administer-ing aid supplies. The social benefit of networked crisis mapping is that it offers an opportunity for anybody who wants to volunteer their time to contribute to a disaster relief effort in a tangible manner.

In a networked world, we all now have the ability and the opportunity to participate in crisis management through activities such as crisis mapping.

About the authorsSophia B. Liu (Sophia.Liu@colorado.edu) is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Technology, Media and Society PhD Candidate in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Anahi Ayala Iacucci (anahi@crisismappers.net) is the Director of Ushahidi-Chile at SIPA. She currently advises Internews Network and Freedom House on their Ushahidi plat-form projects in Kenya and Egypt.

Patrick Meier (patrick@ushahidi.com) is director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and a PhD Candidate at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. He is also a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers.

Crisis management with GIS

2 It would have been difficult for volunteers to create a typical GIS map since such maps are often produced using proprietary software that is often expensive to get and requires formal training to use.