How a Tweet Saved Hundreds of Lives

We have all heard about the disaster in Haiti, but did you know that as well as donating money (and I saw an estimate that half the UK population has donated!) people outside of Haiti have been able to participate through crowdsourcing. So what is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is about using technology to take advantage of joint efforts by people around the world. In Haiti, this all started with a tweet...

Hours after the earthquake hit the capital, Port-au-Prince, 23 year old Josh Nesbitt, thought that they should set up a text emergency number and sent out a tweet about it. Within 3 days they had created a text no. for emergencies and had several partners involved like Ushahidi They started publicising it on the ground in Haiti through radio stations. Haitians could text the number with messages about injuries, people trapped under the rubble or reports of missing people.

Volunteers around the world then translated and categorised the messages, creating a GPS database showing where people were injured or trapped and dangerous buildings to help firefighters and rescuers to save more people. So far, they have dealt with over 20,000 texts and saved numerous lives of people living in Haiti.

When the earthquake happened, I watched the disaster unroll on the TV as thousands of homes collapsed and people were trapped and dying. As a teenager, I don't have much money to spare and I hadn't realised that there was a way I could help Haiti whilst sitting on the sofa with a laptop in hand. It might be too late now for me to get involved in helping out in Haiti, but next time there is a major disaster somewhere in the world, the first thing I'll do is get on the computer to the Ushahidi website and see how I can help. It's very exciting to see technology such as GPS tracking and google earth being used in this way.

I really felt that I needed to tell people about crowdsourcing through this blog as it's our opportunity to help out instead of just watching disasters unfold on TV. We can all make a difference and spending a few hours on the sofa is so much more rewarding when you're helping to save lives at the same time.