Crowdsourcing for Crisis Mapping in Haiti

It was 7 p.m. on January 12, 2010, when Ushahidi's Patrick Meier saw the news on CNN that a devastating earthquake had struck Haiti. He immediately called David Kobia, Ushahidi's tech lead, to set up an Ushahidi platform for Haiti. 1 Patrick then emailed the International Network of Crisis Mappers to launch the group's response. 2 Several partners replied and provided immediate support to Ushahidi's deployment. By 10 p.m. that evening, Ushahidi's crisis map was being customized for Haiti and reports from Twitter and Facebook were being mapped on the platform. By January 14 th , however, Ushahidi and its partners could no longer keep up with mapping the massive amount of information coming out of both mainstream and social media.