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Can Patrick Meier's New App MicroMappers Completely Change The Way We Think About Clicktivism?
Imagine 20, 30, or even 50 thousand volunteers helping a community, whether on the other side of the country or the other side of the world, in the aftermath of a disaster, and all with just a few swipes on a smartphone. Patrick Meier's new platform MicroMappers makes that possible, and anyone with an Internet connection and five minutes to spare can contribute to disaster relief.
Patrick Meier is the Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation's Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and before that he was Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi. He announced the launch of MicroMappers on his blog yesterday, and techPresident reached him by phone to learn a bit more about the soon-to-launch platform, which he says is ready to mobilize thousands of volunteers if disaster struck tomorrow.
“The genesis for the project was the typhoon in the Philippines, Typhoon Pablo, in which we only had 12 hours to collect [and process] all the tweets from the first 48 hours.” The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reached out to Meier and his team at the end of day two and asked if they would be able to collect the tweets, identify pictures and video, with their location.
What they needed was a rapid damage assessment carried out in record time—under normal circumstances, explained Meier, damage assessment takes up to a week. The U.N. knew that the data from Twitter would not be as thorough and perfect as a week-long assessment, but in that amount of time, good enough was good enough.
More than half the amount of the 12 hours was spent building the tools necessary to carry out the task, leaving them very little time to process information. In the end, they tagged nearly 100 pieces of multimedia content and geo-referenced each item so it could be placed on a map.
Read the rest of Jessica McKenzie's article on the TechPresident