Crowdsourcing the Impossible: Ushahidi-Haiti

How did hundreds of student volunteers around the world use Ushahidi to save hundreds of lives in Haiti? How did these volunteers, most of whom spent weeks on end on their laptops in a dimly-lit school basement in snowy Boston, revolutionize humanitarian response and receive an Award for Excellence by the 2nd in command of NORTHCOM? How did they process and map thousands of urgent life-and-death text messages from Haiti in near real-time? And how did the volunteers come to Skype live with the Search and Rescue (SAR) teams in Port-au-Prince to directly support urgent relief efforts? Why did they get emails from the World Food Program and the USS Aircraft Carrier Vinson in the middle of the night? How did they get direct access to Digital Globe’s very high resolution imagery and to SOUTHCOM’s video footage from military drones? Indeed, how did they crowdsource the impossible?

Patrick Meier’s Ignite Talk will answer these questions in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.