Haiti Quake Updates

(AFP) – 13 hours ago

NEW YORK — A Haitian radio host who used Twitter to inform the world about the earthquake which ravaged his country was among the users of the micro-blogging service honored at a ceremony.

"I dedicate this to my country Haiti," said Carel Pedre after receiving a special "humanitarian" award at the second annual "Shorty Awards" in New York on Wednesday, an event which recognize excellence on Twitter.

"May we continue to use Twitter to save lives and change the world," said Pedre, who "tweets" as @carelpedre.

Winners at the awards ceremony hosted by CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who "tweets" as @RickSanchezCNN, were under orders to restrict their acceptance speeches to the 140-character limit of Twitter.

Not everyone managed although the Reduced Shakespeare Company did.

"Brevity is the soul of twit," said a company member accepting the award in the art category for @reduced.

Winners were selected by a popular vote on Twitter and by members of the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts and Sciences, a body whose purpose appears to be limited to choosing winners of the Shorty Awards.

Its members include actress Alyssa Milano, rapper MC Hammer, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, all of whom are Twitter users.

The winner in the government category was Cory Booker, the mayor of the struggling city of Newark, New Jersey, whose Twitter handle is @CoryBooker.

"Newark is rising thanks to the power of people working together," Booker said. "Thank you Twitterverse."

@WholeFoods and @SesameStreet were jointly honored in the brand category.

Sesame Street puppet Grover accepted the award and began reeling off the names of 140 characters -- Hamlet, Tarzan, Superman -- before being cut off.

Australian cell biologist Rachael Dunlop was the winner in the health category for her twitter feed @drrachie while the humor award was shared by David Thorne of @27bslash6 and the creator of @MrsStephenFry.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was a joint winner in the journalist category for @maddow, declaring in an acceptance speech delivered by video that the award had "renewed my faith in the future of the ampersand."

Brazilian journalist William Bonner, who "tweets" as @realwbonner, was the other winner in the journalist category while another Brazilian, Ivete Sangalo of @ivetesangalo, shared the award in the music category.

Another winner was Janis Krum, the ferry passenger who uploaded a picture on Twitter of a US Airways flight after it landed in the Hudson River in January of last year.

The Shorty Awards, which do not have any official link to Twitter, were produced by Sawhorse Media and sponsored by the Knight Foundation and several corporations.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

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Monday, February 22, 2010

If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.

Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFP's monthly donation program.

Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.

Posted by @Biz at 9:47 AM

By: Larisa Epatko

Kate Starbird, a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studies the use of Twitter during crises. When she and the other UC researchers heard about the massive earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12, all they could do for the first two days was what everyone else was doing: watch the horrible images in the news and read about it as a devastating event rather than as a research subject.

"We were just so overwhelmed," she said. "We didn't know what to do."

But by the third day, they decided to go ahead and launch a Twitter initiative several months in the making, called "Tweak the Tweet". The objective is to repurpose tweets with a syntax, or language structure, in order to streamline the process of connecting people with specific needs in emergency situations with those who can provide it.

"We hadn't really fleshed it all out, but we just want to help out. And so we kind of jumped outside of our research boots on this one and we're just actively trying to help in any way we can," she said.

The idea -- Starbird's brainchild -- was developed with the help of her mentor Leysia Palen, an assistant professor of computer science at UC, as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project called Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis, or EPIC, awarded in September.

Reformatting the tweets with hash tags, (e.g. #Haiti), imposes a structure on the language that can be more easily read by computers and organized in databases to better understand people's needs, where they are, how much of those supplies are needed, and what people are offering in disaster events, Palen said.

"It tries to make those Twitter communications a little bit more systematic and data extractable," she said. (View examples of tweaked tweets.)

During the earthquake, the project got an enthusiastic response with dozens of volunteers monitoring tweets and rewriting them in the correct syntax, both in English and French, one of Haiti's main languages, said Palen. The Sahana disaster Web portal imported the repurposed tweets. Another disaster relief Web site, Ushahidi, used the tweets to map aid requests for non-governmental organizations and allowed others to see requests and track the needs answered.

"There are messages that we have passed on or created, and those needs have been met," Starbird said. But "there's no way for us to say that it was our message; it was the collective action of all those people in the network to get the information up."

Starbird explains Tweak the Tweet in this video posted by the Boulder Daily Camera:

Andy Carvin, senior strategist at NPR who runs the social media desk, said Haiti posed some challenges for a Twitter-based initiative like Tweak the Tweet, including low Internet usage in the population before the earthquake, and the interruption of telecommunications services immediately after the quake.

"Compared with a hurricane happening in the U.S., for example, or a protest even in Iran, you didn't see the outpouring of tweets in Haiti as you would in those other instances," Carvin said. But Twitter was still useful, he said. "There were a few dozen people who were in Haiti who turned their Twitter accounts essentially into news wire services and were passing along information as they found it. And we actually used a number of these individuals in our news stories in the first few days after the earthquake."

Starbird acknowledged that even if people on the ground used Twitter and knew the emergency syntax, in a disaster situation they might not have the wherewithal to use it. That's where the volunteers come in, she said. "People on the outside want to help, and this sort of crowd-sourcing thing that goes on in the social media comes out full force during events like this."

Other online disaster response tools evolved during the Haiti earthquake, including "People Finder" and "Open Street Map", some of the projects featured on Crisiscommons.org.

Open Street Map plots the locations of cities, hospitals, damaged buildings, etc., making everything downloadable to GPS maps for use by crisis-response teams. (View the map for Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince.)

And Google's People Finder, which became even more automated during the Haiti quake, said Carvin, was aimed at providing a centralized location for sites scattered across the Web that posted information about lost loved ones.

"For really the first time in social media's history of online disaster response, I think we can claim quite legitimately this time that these social media volunteer activities have saved lives," he said.

On Tuesday January 12th, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake devastated the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The earthquake has destroyed the nations capital of Port-au-Prince including the Parliament building, the United Nations national headquarters, the hospital, the prison and many homes and businesses. Tens of thousands are dead and millions displaced in an event that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has described as the worst humanitarian crisis in decades.

Photo by IFRC.

The United Nations, who lost 46 staff members in the earthquake and have hundreds more still missing, are coordinating emergency relief efforts in Haiti. Due to proximity, the United States have been able to offer immediate assistance on the ground in Haiti, having taken charge of the Port-au-Prince airport where a large proportion of foreign aid is currently being received.

Representatives from many non-government organisations are also in the country assisting with distribution of water and food to displaced Haitians and with hospitals overwhelmed, Medecins Sans Frontieres are assisting with medical care in makeshift hospitals run out of tents.

Role of Social Media
The use of social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake has meant that an increasing level of coverage has reached more people in less time than that achieved through traditional media outlets. Social media has proved its value as a tool that can not only be used to communicate information but also to increase awareness and instigate a global call to action.

Photo by treslola.

Less than a week after the catastrophic event, donations of $US22mn had been pledged through the Red Cross text message campaign. Text message campaigns enable individuals to easily and impulsively donate while Twitter allows for promotion of the campaign to spread and reach a large global audience. Spokesperson for the American Red Cross, Gloria Huang, has said "...twitter has played an extremely significant part".

Social media platforms such as a Twitter have been able to bridge the geographical and even causal distance that individuals may once have felt from such disasters. The response to the social media promoted campaigns for relief for Haiti have proven that solidarity with those in the midst of tragedy can be achieved, all that is needed is a simple method by which to become aware of unfolding devastation and similarly simple way to act on that awareness.

Photo by IFRC.

What You Can Do
There is much to be done in the rebuilding of the nations capital and supporting its displaced population in the interim. Out of this crisis comes the opportunity to not only restore but improve infrastructure in Haiti. A conference, to be held in Montreal on January 25, has been called to discuss the long-term plan for rebuilding Haiti.

While millions of dollars have been donated, continuing support will be needed over the upcoming months and years. You can assist by pledging a donation to any of the following campaigns:

• United Kingdom: Donate 5 pounds by texting 70077 or donate online (via Disasters Emergency Committee)

• United States: Donate $10 by texting "Haiti" to 90999 (via Red Cross)

• Donate 1 Days Wage to Haiti Relief Rebuild Fund.

• Donate to Wyclef Jean's Yele or donate $5 by texting "YELE" to 501501.

• Donate to Oxfam. Oxfam have around 200 staff in Haiti and are currently distributing water and sanitation supplies.

• Call for Haiti's foreign debt to be cancelled.

Labels: earthquake, haiti, social media, twitter, united kingdom

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In the aftermath of natural disasters, first responders are partnering with software developers and other tech experts to help in humanitarian efforts. Guest host Audie Cornish speaks to NPR's social media manager Andy Carvin about hacking events called "Crisis Camps," taking place in Washington, D.C., and other cities Saturday.

The Guardian Tech Weekly podcast team, discusses how the digitalworld has responded to the Haiti Earthquake. Five Minute spot, begins at 15:19 mins in.

Type "Haiti" into Twitter, Facebook or Youtube and you soon encounter a message from @redcross sent at 05:38 GMT on Jan 13.

In less than 48 hours, the American Red Cross had received more than $35m in donations - including $8m directly from texts.

"This breaks all world records for a mobile giving campaign," says their spokeswoman, Gloria Huang.

"It's been incredible. People have donated more to Haiti than to Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in Asia.

"And Twitter has played an extremely significant part."

Charities such as Oxfam have been quick to harness the power of social networking. Sarah Brown of Oxfam said that the response through Oxfam's Twitter feed had been remarkable. "Social networking sites such as Twitter allow us to get the news out there as fast as possible, and the response in terms of re-tweeting from our 8,000 followers has been amazing," she said.

In its latest news release, sent out via Twitter, Oxfam notes: “More than 85 per cent of people in Haiti already live in poverty. With major buildings destroyed it is likely that less well-constructed homes will be even more seriously affected. This earthquake is grim news for the poor people of Haiti. We are calling for the generous support of the UK public to help us save lives.”

Oxfam is also using the audio blogging site ipadio to deliver radio-style reports from its correspondent Louis Belanger, who is en route to Haiti to help assess the damage caused by the earthquake, which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale.