The second workshop I attended at the open word forum was about the involvement of the free and open source community in natural disasters. Quite frankly I didn’t know anything about these efforts and I was amazed by the level of commitment of this community.
The first speaker introduced sahana that is a FOSS disaster management system. The Wikipedia has a page about its story and development. Mark Prutsalis introduced the role of free software and crowd-sourcing in recent years highlighting its strengths and flexibility compared to government agencies. In particular sahana and the people from crisis common played a big role in the first days of the relief efforts during the Haiti earthquake early this year.
Another important player is the ushahidi community. The build a number of tools that are increasingly used to connect poeple during natural disasters, monitor political elections, diseases, fires, etc. It’s clear that build awareness among people and empower them with these kind of tools can really give back to the community a voice that was long lost in the global village. And there are many projects that go in this direction.
On really important components of these technologies is openstreetmap. Differently from other commercial map providers, and thanks to free licenses and open standards, openstreetmap allowed to visualize and organize the over-growing information that can be collected through crowd sourcing. In this context open standard plays a really important role giving the possibility to exchange information and to easily mashup new different sources in some useful way.
Another nice effort is the to build tools is lead by the Crisis Common community. Last week they organized a Crisis Camp in Paris. Unfortunately I could not attend, but I really applause the effort and the spirit of such gatherings.
Last link I want to give is about NGO in a Box. Despite not directly related to crisis management and crowd sourcing, this kind of tools are certainly a terrific help to the humanitarian aid community and it definitely worth mention them.