Micro Volunteering for the Haiti Earthquake

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When a disaster of this magnitude strikes, our impulse is to help in some way.  Like many people,  I donated both on the Web and for the first time via text to the Red Cross.  For a more details about the SMS fundraising results, see this this detailed report on the SMS fundraising campaign from MobileActive and yesterday's article in the New York Times from Stephanie Strom.

But beyond giving, many of us want to help, particularly techies.   As Michaela Hackner points out:

There is at least one good news story emerging around the world about this devastating crisis: technology is changing the playing field.

Sure, technology isn't necessarily air-dropping supplies and ferrying in doctors, but it's raising millions of dollars, helping the right people connect where they're needed, and making all of us distinctly aware that something horrible is happening and needs our attention. It's also helping all of us who feel helpless, nestled in our homes in the developed world, contribute to the cause and see immediate impact.

Geoff Livingston, my colleague at Zoetica, has a post in Mashable today on Five Social Media Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake Relief.    He describes how with the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector, people’s ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has only been increased. 

Here's some specific examples of how, if you're a techie, you can find ways to donate your technical expertise or time to Haiti or some of the many ways techies are helping out:

The Crisis Commons facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs in times of crisis.  People work on projects based on their skills and interests to create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world.  Here you will find opportunities to donate your tech skills to Haiti.

Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform, has been providing updates on its work crowdsourcing information on the ground. Erik Hersman shared a post this morning with some of the success stories from their "4636," an emergency short code.

The Extraordinaries have pioneered the concept of "micro volunteering" that allows people to complete micro-tasks for organizations or efforts passionate about, using a mobile phone or web browser, in a few minutes of spare time.  They have created a Haiti support page to harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time.  

There are two micro volunteering opportunities:

The Image Tagger — Sort through news photos coming out of Haiti and categorize (tag) them with keywords like “adult, child, alive, deceased.”  Never before has there been a system that can bring together thousands of photos from across the web and have them sorted by live human beings (no computer could ever know that there is a teenager in a photo).

The Matcher — We’ve engineered a system that matches faces of missing people to faces in photos coming from Haiti. The goal is to help desperate families find their loved ones. Volunteers use the matcher to look for a missing person in images that have been
tagged with the image tagger.

Ben Rigby, Co-Founder, recently left a comment on a post I wrote about nonprofit iPhone apps noting that he just launched a "Mission" at Extradinaries that asks their community to help find nonprofit iPhone apps.  It uses their new researcher tool

If you're interested in learning in more depth about mobile phones and social good, I recommend that you follow Extraordinaries, MobileActive, and Ushahidi.

Comments

[twitter.com/booksbelow]

Thanks for this post, besides donating money it's great that technology can actually allow us to do something helpful in these situations. Working on matching photos with my teenage daughter.

[Geoff Livingston]

This is some pretty cool stuff. Mobile and nonprofit activism = the future! It's cool to see the dawn of this portable era. Thanks for the mention and the great post, Beth.

[tresha thorsen]

awesome food for thought beth and great ways to help...this is exactly what i needed today. hugs for furthering this info along.

[Jsutandyo]

Great post and thanks for introducing me to MobileActive.org

I'm really glad that text-to-give was so useful. Even though it was a donation, I like to think that it was a great way for individuals to volunteer by texting their address books.

SMS is now seen as far more than a communication tool or sometimes a search tool.

One of the things I had the hardest time convincing nonprofits about text-to-give was of how simple it was. The challenge was that it was a new technology. Text-to-give has no reached a level of maturity, albeit there is still a good ways to go in various areas such as donation amount and payout turn around time.

[ben]

Thanks for posting about all the Haiti work Beth - it has been a sleepless whirlwind. Amazing to see all of the np-tech folks come together and to put actionable solutions in the hands of volunteers and rescue workers on the ground.

[Melinda Lewis]

This is awesome, Beth--to be able to do more than give money, even from here; thank you for these connections and for being such a generous voice and for helping us less technically-savvy folks navigate all of this!

[Hannah Tighe]

Hi Beth,
I just wrote a very simple blog post about utilizing social media for the greater good, including helping Haiti. I would like to include a link to your blog post in mine for more detailed info on how people can help. Would you be up for that?