We just came across this video, posted by our ever-innovative colleagues at LIRNEAsia. In partnership with Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka's largest development organisation, LIRNEAsia recently conducted research on how to best use mobile technology in emergencies.
With ubiquitous and affordable mobile technology a reality not just in Asia but the world over, LIRNEAsia set out to ask a number of important questions: Can talking on the phone help those responding to emergencies to be better organized? How can voice services be used more efficiently in alerting and reporting about disasters than other channels? Where can computer technology make a difference in crisis management?
The video details how LIRNEAsia is experimenting with the open-source Sahana disaster management platform, and with Freedom Fone's interactive voice response system to investigate whether voice-based reporting can fit into globally accepted standards for sharing emergency data. LIRNEAsia found that while the technology isn't perfect, there is much potential for crisis and disaster management. Give it a look - well worth your while.
Txteagle is a data collection and engagement platform that leverages mobile airtime compensation for data collection and customer engagement. It is currently used by one nonprofit organization to survey constituents about disaster preparedness. We looked into the company and one of its customers.
Txteagle widely advertises its ability to reach 2.1 billion mobile subscribers currently. MobileActive.org spoke with Nathan Eagle, co-founder of the service, to learn more about how it works, how many active participants there are and where some of the large numbers come from. We also spoke with Terry Gibson, project manager for the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, who is currently using txteagle to collect mobile data on 40,000 respondents in 48 countries.
In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically.
It has been used in various scenarios ranging from reports from natural disasters to tracking violent crime, citizen reporting in elections.
Ushahidi, a platform for map and time-based visualizations of text reports, has been used most prominently in crisis mapping. The first instance of Ushahidi tracked the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, closely followed by an instance covering outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa in early 2008. Following the Haiti earthquake in early 2010, an Ushahidi deployment at Tufts University provided a platform for aggregating, translating and disseminating incident reports and requests for assistance. Ushahidi is an open-source PHP/Javascript platform.
