Disaster Mapping 2.0 blog

By Julia Balzer

After the earthquake of Haiti in 2010, a Crisis Map of Haiti was launched within just a few hours. By adapting the application of Ushahidi, a website with a crowdsourced map which was set up after the Kenyan election in 2008, the Crisis Mappers could transfer information of satellite imagery and social media into an online live Crisis Map which was used by several humanitarian organizations for saving hundreds of lives. This is just one example of how volunteers had participated in creating a map in order to support and actually disaster risk management.

But what people are the providers of those maps? Who are “Crisis Mappers”? How can they manage to make a map within that little time? The answer is pretty simple: Because mapmaking has democratized (Meier 2012, S. 90) in the last few years, everyone with little knowledge can take part in editing on maps. Beyond, Crisis Mapping actually depends on volunteer work (Ziemke 2012, S. 9) of plenty of “ordinary” people. In case of the Haitian Earthquake, thousands of ordinary people all around the world helped via social media to “aggregate, translate and plot” (HHI 2011, S. 8) the crowd sourced information onto the map the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community provided. The work of these volunteers is based upon the work of GIS experts who provide the technology and analytics for creating a Crisis Map which is free available and open to all Volunteers.

These volunteers, both citizen and experts, constitute different communities and as the Digital Volunteers help from all around the world, the community has to be virtual and is mainly organized via social media and other live communication technologies, for which reason they are called Volunteer Technology Communities (VTC). Examples of those communities are the International Network of Crisis Mappers, The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and The Global Earth Observation-Catastrophe assessment Network (GEO-CAN), to mention just a few. In those communities, different kind of people come together, University staff from different disciplines, diverse activists, bloggers, students etc. which are all part of the Crowd which is characterized by flat and decentralized structures (GFDRR, S. 3). This is essential for understanding the phenomenon of Crisis Mapping because “without an underlying human network” (Meier 2012, S. 90) the crucial data wouldn’t be generated.

So what are the VTCs doing? There are several steps at making a map in which different parts of the community take part, from the beginning where data is collected, via analysis to the result:

• Data acquisition (by disaster-affected people, citizen volunteers and experts)
• Providing a platform (by experts)
• Geo-locate the data (by citizen volunteers and experts)
• Read/sort/translate/interpret the data (by citizen volunteers and experts)
• Aggregate the data (by citizen volunteers and experts)
• Visualization (by experts)

Above that, VTCs do much more in improving the quality and speed of the response, e.g. by training volunteers and disaster-affected people to do more advanced work or improving technical supports outside of crisis times.

What is conspicuous by reading texts about Crisis Mappers is the term network. Networking provides both communication and collaboration, essential parts of this new possibility of humanitarian aid. This is also the point we can tie in with because besides improving technology, the improve in networking, especially with other humanitarian organizations will be the crucial point in future to raise effectiveness of Disaster Mapping. But also the networking among the community itself need to be improved in order to share knowledge and learn collectively. Because the power of Crisis Mapping lies in the amount of people who are using it: the crowd.

GFDRR. (n.d.) Volunteer Technology Communities: Open Development (p. 20). Washington, D.C., USA. Online: http://www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr.org/files/documents/Volunteer%20Technology%20Communi ties%20-%20Open%20Development.pdf

Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. (2011). Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies (p. 72). Washington, D.C. , USA and Berkshire, UK. Online: http://www.unfoundation.org/assets/pdf/disaster-relief-20-report.pdf

Meier, P. (2012). Crisis Mapping in Action: How Open Source Software and Global Volunteer Networks Are Changing the World, One Map at a Time. Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, 8(2), 89-100.

Ziemke, J. (2012). Crisis Mapping: The Construction of a New Interdisciplinary Field? Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, 8(2), 101-117.