Fletcher Situation Report, Jan 18, 3AM -…

Fletcher Situation Report, Jan 18, 3AM – Boston

Wow. This has probably been the most incredible day thus far thanks to Brian, David, Josh & co: the SMS feature is up and running. Team, this is completely unprecedented in the history of humanitarian response. We’re getting 100’s of text messages into Ushahidi, translated into English thanks to Brian’s 10,000 Haitian volunteers. We can then map this, or ask for more information (with pre-arranged text in English or Creole, eg, please send more location info). This SMS from Ushahidi then goes back to the original sender of the original SMS, who can then reply with the more precise location info (say in Creole). This goes back to the 10,000 Haitian translators who translate into English and then this goes back to us at Ushahidi in the appropriate SMS thread for us to map. Honestly, the word that comes to mind to describe this is “absurd”, in the best possible, most positive sense of the word. This, Team, is what I am fond of calling an iRevolution.

Also an amazing live Skype chat between Anna here in the Sit Room and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD and former Chief Medical Officer of the US Navy). Eric skyping from tarmac of PoP airport asking for GPS coordinates of the most obscure addresses, sites, locations and Anna providing these in record time. She has wowed the entire team in PaP including military, UN, etc. Incredible to witness all this real time networking and collaboration. Mark my words, the response to Haiti is a turning point in the history of disaster response. All of this is completely unprecedented. I could go on and on with more of these “absurd” anecdotes, but this is supposed to be Situation Update ;)

Dev Items

* Layer IDP Staging area doesn’t work

* Time line slider: the Play feature is quite jumpy. Could we make it move forward more slowly and smoothly at all? Hour by hour intervals?

* Visualization: can we get Soyapi to try out & add some of the new visualization features we discussed in December?

* Add download data link (already touched base with Ken, he’s got the details)

* The number of total reports on the right of this screen in the situation room does not match the number on the backend. Which one is correct?

Design items

* Main page: we have a banner with the SMS info and then a box just above the map. I think that’s too much. Could we please remove

* We’ll likely be adding more layers, could we make that a box a drop down menu of layers in which you can choose multiple layers if interested? That way we also deal with all that extra white space below the time line slider.

Non-dev items

* Important note on SMS: we are NOT to publish any reports including names of individuals or numbers. Humanitarian organizations will get all the info (names, numbers) but for privacy reasons, we cannot make this public. Had long discussion on this with our partners.

* We sent out email to contacts at Fletcher, Harvard and MIT for a training at Fletcher on Tuesday evening that will allow us to transition and remain sustainable on the Haiti project.

* Fletcher Situation Room is putting together a guide to map incoming SMS, please hold off on creating reports from incoming SMS until then. Guide should be available by 4am Boston time.

* There’s probably more but this situation report is way over due. Will add items in the reply section as they come to mind.