NPR on CrisisCamp: Helping Haiti With Tech, Texts & Tweets

January 18, 2010 0 Comments

National Public Radio’s All Tech Considered radio segment and blog on Monday referenced our CrisisCamp/CrisisCommons community’s work in Washington, DC; Boulder, CO; Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles and Silicon Valley/San Francisco, CA for Haitian relief this past weekend. Some extraordinary, ready-to-use solutions for use in the current post-quake crisis in Haiti have been developed by CrisisCamp volunteer teams, including the world’s first XML-based English-to-Creole translation system and a new emergency syntax, called Tweak the Tweet (TtT), designed specifically for short, information-rich, emergency text messaging.

NPR’s own Social Media Director, Andy Carvin played a key role in helping to manage and coordinate some the the key volunteer project work, as well as outreach to critical NGOs (Non-Government Organizations.) NPR has also created a Crisis Wiki to share real time information in a collaborative space, much like a yellow pages for resources. The project created a structure that can also be used and adapted for future events.

By way of correction, on NPR’s own site, the CrisisCommons URL is inacurately listed as “crisiscommon.org,” however the underlying CrisisCommons.org HTML link to the site is correct.

By Omar L. Gallaga

In this week’s All Tech Considered segment, Robert Siegel and I discuss aid for Haiti’s earthquake victims — how technology has sped up donations for disaster relief and other ways social media and tech companies are helping people lend a hand.

Here are some of the Web sites, resources and news stories we discussed in the piece:

Google’s Crisis Response site at haiticrisis.appspot.com aggregates the lists of missing people, including the Red Cross Family Links site.
Donations-by-text reached $13 million as of Monday morning. You can send $10 at a time by texting “HAITI” to 90999.
Saturday’s multi-city Crisis Camp was an effort to bring tech experts together to find ways to use technology to aid recovery efforts. A Wiki of resources and projects can be found at crisiscommon.org crisiscommons.org
Several good lists are available on reputable organizations you can donate to, including NPR’s own list, a great early list I saw on PCWorld and nine ways to help from Mashable.
An early Twitter rumor about flights to Haiti proved untrue. The FBI has issued a warning about other scams and dangers to avoid in regards to donations.
Pop culture gets in on the act: Rallies in support of Conan O’ Brien will support Haiti relief as will the maker of the video game “Halo 3″ if players use a heart-shaped avatar in the game.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, whose founder and editor participated in this Washington Post chat last week, says $150 million has been raised from the U.S. so far, dwarfing early fundraising for the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina relief.
Wireless companies have sped payments to cut through the usual delay that follows donations.
Some tweets from the front lines.
Joshua Brockman’s All Tech Considered post about Internet service in Haiti, with links to some of the relief efforts. Includes a link to NPR’s Twitter list of first-person accounts from Haiti.
An All Tech segment we did in late 2008 about technology and philanthropy