Assigned Blog #4

In this week’s blog I am going to cover two topics that we covered in the class discussion and that were in this week’s class readings. One is the Ushahidi project that helped responders and victims after Haiti’s earthquake. I’ll also cover media technologies and how they help share information during disasters and responses; however, I’ll mostly focus on Wikis.

(Ushahidi Logo)

First I would like to talk about the Role of the SMS short code Ushahidi set up in the disaster response after the earthquake destroyed much of Haiti. It is crazy that a lot of the SMS data that was produced through the 4636 short code was processed by people and not computers. The information wasn’t fed into computers; it was translated by humans who volunteered their time to help. There were so many volunteers helping translate the messages, that the turn-around time for a message to be translated was as short as ten minutes at times. There were two organizations or groups that helped translate the information, they were referred to as translation platforms in the readings. One group was the volunteers (or professionals) and the others were NGOs. Both did a great job for the most part; however, the NGO’s had minor errors that cause delays in their responses. My point is I think the SMS technology and how it played a role in the Haiti disaster response was great, but I think the amount of volunteers to process the SMS information was incredible. Its great people will sacrifice their own time and skills to help other who are in need. If a disaster such as the earthquake that destroyed Haiti were to hit State College, would you volunteer your time and skills to help the response efforts, much like the Ushahidi volunteers did?

Next I’ll talk about emergency knowledge management and social media technologies. The class is on a need to know basis or sensitive, it should be shared via Wikis. For one, because it’s hard to secure the information on the Wikis, and two, there is tons - sometimes hundreds of thousands of people able to view the Wikis. So basically I think Wikis can be used in certain emergency situation to share information as long as the information isn’t sensitive. What do you think, can social media help respond to disasters or by sharing information? discussion and the reading basically focused on the ability to share information. There were several methods of sharing information between government, organizations, or people. Social media and Wikis were the big ones. The Wikis were great because a lot of people could be researching information and share it via Wikis. Rather than researching and then going to showing the information to people everybody could view the Wiki at the same time. There was one problem with the Wiki, there was an instance where too much information was loaded into the Wiki, which cause problems and errors in viewing the information. The question, whether or not Wikis could be used during disasters to help the response efforts. I would say yes, because all the responders or governments could use Wikis to share information with each other to respond more efficiently. But after the class discussion I decided they should only be used to share information as long as the information isn’t sensitive. If for any reason during a disaster and emergency response