Crisis Mapping - the power to help

The most inspiring stories of human fortitude and courage have been trickling out of the aftermath of Haiti's devastation, and I can't help the welling sense in my heart that I need to do something to help.I could give my money, but this just feels so pitiful. I know the DEC (Disasters Emergence Committee), and other groups like it, are undoubtedly the best-placed when it comes to the logistical nightmare of accumulating donations, and airlifting essential supplies to those in most desperate need of the most basic care. £50 could pay for a kit to help treat the wounds of 25 people. But it just seems like so little, when compared to wanting to save everyone, and restore their lives to how they were before this cataclysm.

So it is with great hope that I read about the efforts being put in by groups like the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to provide communications equipment that can be deployed in a disaster to restore the essential links necessary to share information between agencies on the ground. I was also relieved to hear of the quirk of Haitian ISPs (Internet Service Providers), which sees the vast majority of them routing their internet service over robust - but slower - satellite links, rather than over the single - damaged - under-sea fibre optic cable that the country installed in the 90s.

As such, the little known activity - not quite discipline - of crisis mapping has been able to flourish, allowing for the visibility of many pieces of vital information related to everything from infrastructural damage, to the whereabouts of people - to be shared. When combined with the powerful routing capabilities of online mapping systems, great things start to happen. An agency can see where roads are impassible and route their convoys around those obstacles. They can query live information about hospital capacities in outlying cities, and find routes for ambulances to take the injured for treatment. A map of damaged buildings can help target temporary shelters at a particularly ruined area.

With this information being input by volunteers on the ground, the visibility of so many important parameters in the chaos of disaster relief increases in proportion to the number of volunteers there are to maintain that information. And so it shall be that I plan to "bone-up" on crisis mapping as a way to possibly help in future disasters. There's a great little site here about it.

in essence there are two types of information that maps (and other related information systems) will carry - static data, and dynamic data.

The static data relates to the status of infrastructural elements, such as the impassible roads. Once a road becomes impassible, it will remain that way until someone sorts out a clearance operation. It then enters the realm of dynamic information later on, for the recording of the atomic change in state from impassible to open, but then it settles back as static information.

The dynamic information is harder to track, and involves the semi-liquid movement of supplies, people  and relief workers. It involves the tracking of empty beds in hospitals, the location of vital assets such as earth moving equipment, and the list of living (and dead) residents of a particular encampment. Such systems are less accurate, and the ephemeral nature of their data often means these systems are under-developed, and are sometimes bespoke for that particular disaster. They tend to address local needs, and are often based on the pre-existing systems of the local infrastructure, and of the relief agencies themselves. A lot of the effort here is dedicated to integrating the various systems together, and providing shared portals to aggregate information from different sources.

This blog is about novel uses for technology. Although mapping is not that novel, the technology that can show where would be a good place to eat out is also the best at showing usthe way through the most destructive of crises.