Technology such as the Internet and iPhones allows people to assist in disaster relief in faraway places such as Florida or Haiti without leaving their home.
A doctoral student in Instructional Technology at USU, Tom Caswell has been involved in multiple relief efforts from his home and is helping raise awareness of this option of helping those in need. Caswell got involved in 2008 when hurricanes such as Gustav were hitting Florida and neighboring areas. Through Andy Carvin of National Public Radio he heard about how people were using social media such as the Internet to get information to those in need. Carvin had put together a Web site where people could search out information and add it to the site. It was all done through a program called Ning, a Web site that allows its users to put together their own Web pages that are ready to go and easy to use, Caswell said.
The sight included weather maps, links to pages about hurricane preparation, local emergency numbers and other information specific to the hurricane. The site was updated as each hurricane came nearer and the information would be specifically for the areas in need, Caswell said. Everything was added by volunteers who searched out the information on their own and then added it to the Web site, through what is called crowd sourcing, Caswell said. His part on this page was to use another program called Yahoo Pipes to pull together numerous Craigslists to allow people to search for places to stay out of danger for a while, Caswell said. People were offering their couches or guests rooms for a few nights, but those in need didn’t have a condensed way to find them, so that is what Caswell provided. Using Yahoo Pipes, he told the program which items to look for on certain Craigslists, then created a link to this information. He then placed the link on Carvin’s Web site. Sometimes this Web site is updated faster than the Red Cross, Caswell said.
“It was a lot of helpful people who wanted to do their little bit,” Caswell said. “I was amazed to see how many people get involved.”
While the Web site is still used for current hurricane warnings, when a sudden disaster such as an earthquake hits, Internet availability is gone. Caswell attended a conference and presented information about using technology to assist in crisis relief at Standford University in California two weeks ago. Caswell said he was surprised to learn that after the earthquake in Haiti, the cell phone lines still worked and people were able to use them to get help. A group called Mission 4636 (4636 is an emergency number in Haiti, like 911 in the U.S.) presented a session on how cell phones and the Internet were recently used in Haiti. People were able to call or send text messages to this number. The messages were then posted online and volunteers who know Creole were able to translate them and send the information back to aid workers in Haiti. The location of the text message could also be pinpointed, letting workers know where to go, Caswell said.
“Literally without leaving their couch and being anywhere in the world, people could translate for aid workers,” Caswell said.
iPhones were also used in the crisis relief effort, Caswell said. Hospitals overflow with injured people during disasters and written records are hard to keep, so an iPhone application was adapted to allow doctors to put it all into their phones, Caswell said. The doctors could take a picture of the person as a way to identify them — which can be hard if the victim is unconscious — and add what they had done and what needed to be done after being transferred, Caswell said. Another application was created to allow parents to identify their children thought to be orphans.
“They’ve had a lot of success reuniting children with their parents,” Caswell said.
Anyone can be involved in the relief efforts, even if they don’t know a lot about technology, Caswell said. He compared it to lots of little ants working together to achieve something big, and suggested the Web site www.crisiscommons.org as a good place for people to start. As people who use social media such as Facebook or Twitter look at the sites they will have “ah ha!” moments, Caswell said.
“Even though I thought I was doing this random thing,” Caswell said. “There was a whole group of people...using their expertise to make a little difference."
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