Crowdsourcing the Impossible

by Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi

This month, Patrick Meier – Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and former co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning – will discuss “crowdsourcing the impossible”.

How did hundreds of student volunteers around the world use Ushahidi to save hundreds of lives in Haiti? How did these volunteers, most of whom spent weeks on end on their laptops in a dimly-lit school basement in snowy Boston, revolutionize humanitarian response and receive an Award for Excellence by the 2nd in command of NORTHCOM? How did they process and map thousands of urgent life-and-death text messages from Haiti in near real-time? And how did the volunteers come to Skype live with the Search and Rescue (SAR) teams in Port-au-Prince to directly support urgent relief efforts? Why did they get emails from the World Food Program and the USS Aircraft Carrier Vinson in the middle of the night? How did they get direct access to Digital Globe’s very high resolution imagery and to SOUTHCOM’s video footage from military drones? Indeed, how did they crowdsource the impossible?.

Speaker Bio:

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. At Ushahidi, Patrick recently launched and spearheaded the deployments in Haiti and Chile. He was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. Patrick has consulted for numerous international organizations including the UN, OSCE and OECD on crisis mapping and early warning projects in countries ranging from the Sudan and Thailand to East Timor and Colombia. Patrick is also a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School/Tufts where his dissertation focuses on the role of technology in civil resistance against repressive regimes. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School. Patrick blogs at iRevolution.net.

Additional Resources:

• “Wag the Dog, or How Falsifying Crowdsourced Data Can Be a Pain” – http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/wag-the-dog/
• “My TEDx Talk: From Photosynth to ALLsynth” – http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/photosynth-to-allsynth/
• TED blog: Ushahidi aggregates, disseminates Haiti crisis info: Q&A with Patrick Meier – http://blog.ted.com/2010/01/ushahidi_brings.php
• Speaker at Chirp: The Official Twitter Developer Conference – http://chirp.twitter.com/speakers.html
• Tufts Roundtable: The Future of News: Mobilizing the Masses to Write the First Draft of History – http://tuftsroundtable.org/irevolution/2909-the-future-of-news-mobilizing-the-masses-to-write-the-first-draft-of-history
• Speaker at Where 2.0 Conference 2010 – http://en.oreilly.com/where2010/public/schedule/speaker/82425

When:

Tuesday, May 18, 12:30 – 2:00 P.M.

Where:

Weil Town Hall, The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations (Belfer Building), Harvard Kennedy School: http://bit.ly/HauserCenter

We have public wireless internet access and will live-tweet at hashtag #HarvardSocial06

We hope to see you there!

Harvard University Social Media User Group

http://bit.ly/HarvardSocial

http://twitter.com/HarvardSocial