You’re in a disaster area and you want to get information urgently to the right people. But you only speak your own language. That’s what’s happening in Haiti. So, a simple solution – text your message through to an emergency number. On receipt, there’s crowd-sourcing: “100s of Kreyol-speaking volunteers translate, categorize and plot the geocoords of the location if possible” and then channel it through to the immediately relevant aid organisation, and also to a central database accessible by other organisations.
Average time from receipt to having it “translated, categorized and back on the ground with coordinates, message and return #”? 10 minutes.
Brilliant. Read the report on it by a linguist, Rob Munro, who’s been coordinating the volunteer efforts. Praise be to the good, clever and imaginative people who make this possible.
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Wow, that’s really impressive. I’m particularly amazed by the volunteers’ collective ability to coordinate so well in a chatroom in order to collate and distribute correct information – often using their local knowledge of the area. If a government were in charge of this, it wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly.