- New Scientist covers WikiMapAid. Maybe March just puts me in a bad mood, but I am singularly unconvinced – it looks like somebody went “Hey, everybody loves wikis and everybody loves maps – surely double everybody will love a combination of wikis and maps?” Somebody enlighten me.
- Nature covers Instedd. This is more like it. After a fairly long incubation period, Instedd have finally announced the official set of tools that they’ve been developing, and it’s relatively light on hype, focusing more on facilitating existing processes than trying to launch entirely new ones.
- University of Boulder at Colorado on Twitter in disasters. As you will probably know if you turned up here in the last week or so, I am not convinced that this is going to go anywhere, but I’m starting to feel like a lone voice in the wilderness because apparently Twitter is Teh Future.
- Concern groks Cash Aid via Mobile Payment. Cash distributions have really started to take off in the last few years (and about time too), and mobile phone have already demonstrated their utility in facilitating those distributions. Cash distributions clearly work – the question is how to integrate this when telecoms and banking systems might also have been affected by disaster.
- More high-technology shenanigans at Texas A&M University, where a combination of UAVs and a new programme called RubbleViewer will build a 3D image of a disaster zone. It’s not fair, Search and Rescue always get the best toys – this looks interesting but seems a little bit to high on the tech side to be useful in developing countries.
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Paul, I agree with your comments on using twitter in emergency response. The concept could work in the first 24-48hrs to calm panic and direct rescue effort, but is exactly when mobile and internet networks will be cut off or overloaded. Then after that period the information needs are too complex to be adequately shared via 144 character “tweets”.
I don’t, however, share your view of WikiMapAid. While the concept is not useful in all disaster scenarios, I think such a tool could have helped agencies overcome confusions over overlapping place names in contexts such as the Pakistan Earthquake and its thousands of informal “mahallas” (neighborhoods) or even last years Bihar Flooding and its rapidly moving informal camps. There everyone is initially reporting information on village or neighborhood level, which often have names that are not officially recorded or agreed upon by local authorities. In that context, a wikimap could prove useful to spot overlapping interventions and gaps. Now this version lacks a lot of important facets, the first that jumps to mind is a lack of date information, but it could develop into something useful.
To some extent I agree about WikiMapAid. The problem is that it’s a tool without a process behind it. If OCHA were doing their job properly, then this information would be well-managed and widely-available. We’re back to the tension between formal GIS and informal neomapping approaches, and I’m not sure where WikiMapAid fits in. Open Street Map already exists, and would be a perfect fit for the baseline data that you refer to, and I’d be interested to know from WikiMapAid where there added value is on top of that.